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

Starring: Ray Dennis Steckler, Carolyn Brandt, Brett O’Hara

Director: Ray Dennis Steckler

Running Time: 82 mins

The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? is an American film about a man who, after offending a gypsy fortune teller at a local carnival, has a spell cast on him which turns him into a mixed-up zombie, and he then goes on a completely random killing spree.

Well, does this film have a plot? No. Are the songs in ‘the world’s first monster musical’ any good? No. Is it a thrilling horror that will have you hiding behind the sofa? No. This film is so unbelievably dull, ridiculous, and disappointing that it is honestly a waste of an hour and a half.

That’s probably the only good thing about this film, that it’s under 90 minutes long, but that makes it even more underwhelming.

Along with all of the disappointments with the plot, the acting, the gore, the music and everything in between, there’s one technical aspect that really made me laugh. This film, in the age of moving from black-and-white to colour film, is not even filmed in Technicolor.

No, it’s in fact made in something called Eastman Color Negative, a short-lived rival to Technicolor, mostly because it was involved in making appalling films like this one, which shows you the damaging scale of the terribleness of this rubbish movie.

Now, onto the film itself. The plot. There was none. It’s a slightly racist, very unoriginal and extremely dull zombie thriller film, which basically consists of a guy, who rarely looks anything like a zombie, walking aimlessly around the town, and then occasionally killing some people.

Honestly, the main zombie in the film is only zombified for about 10 minutes collectively, and for the rest of the film, he looks like a Nicolas Cage doppelganger in a blue hoodie he found off the street looking for somewhere to spend the night after he got dumped by a stripper he met about 40 minutes ago that he was so madly in love with, and offended the gypsy sister of the stripper in her psychic place, which made him be a stupid zombie that goes crazy if he sees any spiral of such. (IT’S SO STUPID, INCOMPREHENSIBLE AND DULL!)

But surely, if the monsters in ‘the world’s first monster musical’ aren’t any good, the songs can save it. Wrong again. It takes at least 25 minutes for the first song to pop up, which is a slow moving cabaret act.

That’s pretty boring, and then for the next 15 minutes, you watch 2 more songs of about the same slow pace that leaves you almost falling asleep at the sound of them. 10 minutes after that, the next, and final song comes along, and then it’s back to watching Nicolas Cage ambling again.

Honestly, this film is so underwhelming, disappointing, dull, stupid, incomprehensible, badly acted, directed and sung, so that’s why it gets a 0.8.