#the incredibly strange creatures who stopped living and became mixed up zombies!!?

[marypickfords]

The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? (Ray Dennis Steckler, 1964)

[sesiondemadrugada]

The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? (Ray Dennis Steckler, 1964).

[doubtfultaste]

The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? (1964)

[whtaever]

[watching-pictures-move]

Movie Review | The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? (Steckler, 1964)

Probably the most remarkable thing about this movie is that it was shot by Joseph V. Mascelli, Laszlo Kovacs and Vilmos Zsigmond. Now, I suspect this won’t rank near the top of the filmographies of the latter two gents, who are considered some of the greatest cinematographers ever, but I do think the movie is pretty nicely shot. When I was binging Ray Dennis Steckler’s work last year, I ended up holding off on this one as I couldn’t find a good looking copy. Now, I just had my Severin Steckler box set come in the mail, with the magnets, the stickers (why does Severin keep sending me stickers? not complaining, just asking), the one-sheet signed by Carolyn Brandt, but not the Steckler mask (I was very tempted, but couldn’t find a good justification for getting the mask, especially as that set was significantly more expensive; yes, I decided to be financially responsible just this once), and I decided to pop this in. I’m glad I waited. The transfer looks beautiful, and the darker colours have an inky richness to them, and the brighter ones really pop. But in this nicer copy, it’s probably easier to appreciate some of the compositions here, like the framing of the actors’ silhouettes on the beach, and the shadows during the horror scenes, and the dazzling musical numbers.

This is a horror movie directed by Ray Dennis Steckler, meaning that it’s not too heavy on the horror. What we get here instead is lots and lots of carnival footage in lieu of the thrills and chills one might expect in a horror movie. But unlike his later slashers where the relentless padding reeks of a certain desperation to get his movie up to feature length, the footage here has a certain joy of discovery and an appealing time capsule quality. (I know I just complained about carnival footage padding in The Funhouse, but maybe I’m warming up to that one too. Anyway, consistency is for suckers.) We don’t just see characters walking by the roller coaster, we actually get on it ourselves. There are also a ton of song and dance numbers, which feel like Steckler doing MGM on a budget. Probably not the best musical numbers you’ve ever seen, but they’re executed with a surprising level of commitment, and are distinct and fun enough that I had a good time. The most fun one is “A-Shook Out of Shape”, a jaunty rock’n’roll song about...let’s see, being beaten by your mother for staying out late. And there’s a number with a gladiator costume where the dancers get attacked by the mixed-up zombies of the film’s title, and it takes the audience a second to realize that it ain’t part of the act.

Steckler himself plays a character who can be described as “willfully unemployed”. Actually, that’s probably inaccurate, as unemployment numbers only include those who consider themselves part of the labour force and Steckler here very much does not. (Glad I could finally use that bit of knowledge for something. Who says higher education doesn’t have its merits?) Steckler goes with his buddy and girlfriend (who clearly use different hair products than he does, consider his hair has no volume and theirs seem to stand up several stories high) to the carnival, gets hypnotized and starts killing people whenever he sees a spiral (one of his victims foolishly twirls an umbrella before her demise). These murder scenes are executed with lots of handheld camerawork and draped in shadows, which was likely to suggest more explicit violence than could be shown, but helps give them a certain charge, as they break from the bright candy-coated aesthetic of the surrounding film. Of course, one of his victims is an alcoholic dancer played by his wife at the time Carolyn Brandt, who is always a delight to hang out with. I understand Steckler was an admirer of Jean-Luc Godard, and I wonder if he ever compared his movies with Brandt to Godard’s with Anna Karina. Would this be his A Woman is a Woman? Is Blood Shack his Pierrot Le Fou? Is The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher his Made in USA? Or maybe it’s Body Fever and you shuffle the timeline around? Steckler and Brandt continued working together after their divorce, which you gotta respect.

So no, this isn’t a great horror movie, but it’s always (okay, not always, have you seen his pornos? yeesh) fun to spend time with Uncle Ray and friends.

[weirdlookindog]

The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? (1964)

[therobotmonster]

In honor of he who died and rose after three days in the grave and now grants life ever lasting to his followers I thought it only right I got into the spirit once. So Dracula, this one's for you:

Just look at it.

You have what appears to be (and is) an accountant being menaced by boobalicious vampire women twice his size, so he's got Ethan Winters beaten to the punch by 34 years. But don't be fooled. One glance into his 30-yard stare and its obvious why only Mr. Weems can stop these sinister She-Vampires:

Weems is dead on the inside yet still living, where the she-vampires are animated from within with life, while dead.

He is their antithesis.

So yeah, a pile of jank with a fun name crossed my path, and now you all have to hear about it. If you're not hitting 'J', you have no one to blame but yourself.

Released on a scad of systems, but mostly the ZX Spectrum and the C64, The Astonishing Adventures of Mr. Weems & the She-Vampires is a sort of 'Gauntroidvania'. It's also trying to push the limits of how titillating a pre-NES era game could be, though the C64 port's interface missed that memo.

The hacked c64 version was the one I played, but giantbomb had a lot of gifs from the ZX verison that I've upscaled for demonstration purposes.

The only bit of story is from the back package. Weems wants to feel something, so he's decided to take on the Great She-Vampire or die in her buxom grasp. Fair.

This game is not recommended for people with epilepsy, dignity, or in general.

Mr. Weems has a garlic gun to defend his ever-dropping blood supply (vampire hunter is an odd professon with anemia) and destroy the baddies...

All three of them, which are all introduced on the first screen!

You've got bats, they pop out of pots and attack you.

The manual says these guys are Frankenstein's' monsters, but they're clearly the giant from Twin Peaks trying to warn you that you've bought a dud.

On the C64, the lesser she-vampires are clearly based on Dracula's brides, whereas on the ZX, they're more like ghosts with big naturals.

Which means that to get both kinds of vampire babe from the secondary cover, you'd have to buy a cassette for your c64, and and for your ZX. And I don't mean a cartridge, I mean a, Cassette tape.

If you manage to stalk your way all the way to the end and find the gear you need to destroy her, the Great She-Vampire awaits:

There's no boss fight, but there is a 1 pixel nip, at least on the ZX spectrum.

From there you book it back the way you came, only every screen now has a she-vampire chasing you in a murderous rage. Make it out, and you win. Or maybe you didn't, because just like the Dungeon of Fear and Hunger, you can never really escape Mr. Weems & the She-Vampires.

Only Weems increases the immersion by truamatizing you, the player. Mr. Weems is fine. You don't have to worry about the Weems.

So...

Is it a good game?

Not remotely, but that isn't the point in the slightest.

It's temping to say this is the Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies of video games, but that's not quite right. Weems has promise and ISCWSLaBMUZ doesn't make promises. It issues threats.

Mr. Weems has the charm of a concept that's all potential and zero execution. A dead-eyed accountant gunning his way in a Gauntlet-esq blitz through a vampire-babe infested castle is a fun idea, more-so with all the secret passages and 'gather items and backtrack to the boss' aspect. It's just everything else that goes wrong.

I mean, who doesn't want to hunt the Great She-Vampire to her penthouse for a good staking, I ask you?

[ronmerchant]

the INCREDIBLY STRANGE CREATURES WHO STOPPED LIVING AND BECAME MIXED UP ZOMBIES (1964)

[ronnymerchant]

the INCREDIBLY STRANGE CREATURES WHO STOPPED LIVING AND BECAME MIXED UP ZOMBIES (1964)

[marypickfords]

The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? (Ray Dennis Steckler, 1964)

[forthegothicheroine]

I would like to urge all MST3K fans to seek out and read Lester Bangs’ essay on The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies (I’m reading it in the collection Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung.) He reacts with pure amazement that is a wonder to read.

[doubtfultaste]

The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? (1964)

[zippocreed501]

...images from the lost continent of cult films, b-movies and celluloid dreamscapes

Dancers in horror films

Carnival of Souls (1962) The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies (1964) The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967) The Return of the Living Dead (1985) From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) Black Swan (2010) Abigail (2024)

[mywifeleftme]

240: Various Artists // The Golden Turkey Album: The Best Songs from the Worst Movies

The Golden Turkey Album: The Best Songs from the Worst Movies Various Artists 1985, Rhino

Early Rhino Records was a grand old place for musical perverts thanks to its steady stream of novelty compilations like the Dr. Demento albums and Teenage Tragedy, which collected ‘50s and ‘60s songs about kids dying in automobile accidents (there were a lot of those, it turns out). The Golden Turkey Album: The Best Songs from the Worst Movies is from square in the label’s whacko prime and it’s exactly what it says on the label. These 16 tracks culled from trashy exploitation films like Eegah! (1962), Rat Pfink a Boo Boo (1964), and Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964) range from Confederate bluegrass to saloon music performed by a group of little people, though the majority are cornball rock ‘n’ roll numbers. On balance, it’s a highly listenable record, full of amateurish, nakedly trend-chasing but ultimately charming recordings that spark the same bewildered laughter as the films from which they derive.

As we march through the tracklist, remember at all times that I am sitting alone on the couch in my apartment wearing a frayed housecoat. Okay, let’s go.

Side One

Trevor Duncan — “Grip of the Law”

Side one opens, as indeed it must, with the blaring opening title theme from Ed Wood’s deathless groaner Plan Nine From Outer Space (1959). Duncan, an Englishman, was a prolific composer for film and television, but “Grip of the Law” wasn’t written for Wood’s opus, which lacked the budget to commission an original score. Duncan’s piece rather was cribbed for the film by one of Wood’s collaborators—which explains why in contrast to everything else about the film, it’s a perfectly competent piece of bombastic orchestral horror/thriller music

The Five Blobs — “Beware of the Blob”

1958’s Steve McQueen vehicle The Blob tracks the very, very slow slugtrail of destruction wrought by a ball of alien red Jell-O, and it’s probably fair to say it peaks with its opening credits and this incongruous “Tequila”/cocktail music-esque number penned by a young Burt Bacharach and Mack David (the elder brother of Burt's future writing partner Hal David). It doesn’t rise to the level of a good Esquivel! track, let alone Bacharach’s own later work, but it’s very dumb and goes on my Halloween playlist every year.

Arch Hall Jr. — “Valerie”

The first of three Arch Hall Jr. tracks on the compilation, which tells you the Rhino guys figured they had a little find on their hands. Hall Jr. was a genuinely talented singer and guitarist with an enormous dome who resembled Jesse Plemons (Todd Alquist from Breaking Bad) or perhaps a wax museum James Cagney. His father, filmmaker Arch Hall Sr., clearly hoped to turn the 16-year-old into an Elvis Presley-esque acting and singing double threat, and featured him in a series of screamingly bad early ‘60s B-movies. “Valerie” is a twinkling, whistling ballad drawn from 1962’s Eegah!, a film which sees the 7’2 Richard Kiel (later Jaws in the James Bond series) as a horny caveman who wants to rail a teenage girl named Roxie whom Hall Jr.’s character is dating. As someone who loves sock-hop dream music and throwing metaphors in a blender (“vitamins are good they say / and so’s a calorie / but I feel like a tiger / on one kiss from Valerie”), I think this one’s pretty great!

Carol Kay & the Stone Tones — “Shook Out of Shape”

Coming in hot from The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies (1964), billed as “The First Horror Movie Musical,” “Shook Out of Shape” puts me in my mind of a Wanda Jackson or a Patsy Cline in a rock mood. Perfectly acceptable beach party music, though it has less of that wonderful offness about it than most anything else here.

Bobby and Benny Belew — “Lonesome”

This is more like it. 12-year-old Texan twins sing close harmony rockabilly from 1957’s Rock, Baby—Rock It! one of a million chintzy attempts to cash in on the rock ‘n’ roll craze that looks like it was shot for $10 (in today’s money). The performances (which some kind soul has cut free of the film’s narrative) by a string of never-were stars generally rip (check out Johnny Carroll, and also whoever’s playing guitar for Preacher Smith & the Deacons, goddamn!), but the Belew Twins were definitely the right choice for this comp. Kids singing adult music basically always comes with the scent of some sweating, overambitious father clenching his fists in the wings. Delish.

The Pleasant Valley Boys — “Robert E. Lee Broke His Musket on His Knee”

From the seminal hicksploitation film Two Thousand Maniacs (1964), we have straight up and down rural car chase bluegrass concerning the eventual return of the South; the horrible shrieking of a crazed Robert E. Lee; and the sucking chest wounds of Stonewall Jackson. The slapping sound? Oh, don’t mind me, I’m just tapping away on the big vein in my arm.

Some adults and some kids — “We’re the Lemon Grove Kids”

Described in the liner notes as a “grating jingle,” this minute-or-so number served as the theme song for a series of Bowery Boys knock-off short films directed by Ray Dennis Steckler, who also gave us The Incredibly Strange Creatures and Rat Pfink a Boo Boo (see side 2 of this LP). Both grating and a jingle.

Arch Hall Jr. — “Vickie”

More Hall Jr., hailing like “Valerie” from Eegah!, also like “Valerie” sung to his character’s girlfriend whose name is Roxie. The songs are similar, but this one is dweebier.

Side Two

Milton Delugg & the Little Eskimos — “Hooray for Santa Claus”

This review didn't need to be this long, but with band names like this, and movies like Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964) I don’t see how I can stop. A thoroughly unbearable twist-style song sung by a chorus of children who pronounce it out S-A-N-T-A but say it “Santy.”

Arch Hill Jr. — “Yes, I Will”

Yet another one from Arch, this time from 1962’s Wild Guitar. “Yes, I Will” is kind of pubby rock, and it’s perfectly fine, but there are much better numbers from this one—chalk me up as a “Twist Fever” guy personally. Wild Guitar is very in the Elvis teen idol-movie mode—ironically though the best performance of Hall Jr.’s short career would come the following year in Jamis Landis’s brutish The Sadist, in which Hall plays a psychopathic killer based on Charles Starkweather!

Johnnie Fern — “Hey, Look Out! (I Want to Make Love to You)”

1938’s The Terror of Tiny Town is a Western with a cast entirely composed of little people. It will not shock you to learn the movie did not originate from an urge to improve representation of little people in film, but rather from a joke producer Jed Buell overheard. According to the liners the song is sung by someone named Johnnie Fern, but in the film it’s presented as the voice of Nita Krebs, a dancehall girl doing a kind of Marlene Dietrich femme fatale shtick. It’s a treacly Vaudeville-ish ballad sung in a very, very high pitch, and I love it. Sending this one out to my girlfriend, to whom I am hornily disposed and who also is quite short.

Dr. Frederick Kopp — “The Dance Hall Twist”

Yet another twist number (from 1964’s monster flick The Creeping Terror). Not much to say about it, likely included here because it immediately precedes this unforgettable sequence:

Dr. Frederick Kopp — “She Left Me Lonely”

A vaguely Latin-flavoured country ballad from the same film featuring the indelible chorus, “she left me lonely / she left me sad / but still I am happy / in fact I am glad,” the liner notes quote the classically trained Dr. "Not a" Kopp as “feeling dirty” to have written the song, which apparently took him 15 minutes or so.

Harold "Duke" Lloyd with Page Cavanaugh and His Trio — “Special Date”

Before kicking off this number from 1958’s Frankenstein’s Daughter, the Duke sends “Special Date” out to anyone in the audience on a special date, which is like dedicating a song called “Having Sex” to anyone currently having sex or “Eating Food” to anyone actively eating food.

Ron Haydock & the Boppers — “Rat Pfink”

Ray Dennis Steckler’s Rat Pfink a Boo Boo (1966) is a straight crime movie for the first 40 minutes before abruptly becoming a parody of the Batman television series and ending with a rockabilly barbecue party. Sung by Ron Haydock, who plays the titular Batman knockoff, the Gene Vincent-y “Rat Pfink” is damned solid stuff.

Ron Haydock & the Boppers — “Big Boss A-Go-Go Party”

Same artist, same movie, same scene, not quite as vigorous as “Rat Pfink” but you gotta think Lux Interior of the Cramps must’ve loved this shit.

That’s it? That’s all the turkey? Thank you Rhino, thank you directors of trash movies and performers of trash music, thank you dear reader for sticking around.

240/365

[lastchancevillagegreen]

The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies (1964) d. Ray Dennis Steckler (poster from US)

The original title, The Incredibly Strange Creature or Why I Stopped Living and Became A Mixed-Up Zombie, had to be changed when Columbia Pictures sued Steckler for $5 million dollars because they thought the title was too similar to Dr Strangelove or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Learned To Love The Bomb (both were released in the same year)!  Stanley Kubrick actually called Steckler and Steckler, always gracious, suggested changing the title from “or Why I” to “Who” and Kubrick said “fine” and hung up.   Imagine Columbia Pictures suing a film whose budget was all of $38,000 (Steckler’s biggest ever budget) for five million dollars.  As Joe Bob Briggs said, both films had a lot in common: “they were both shot on film stock.”