The next movie on our list is the ludicrously titled ‘The
Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up
Zombies’. This movie is unique in that
no-one ever saw it at the cinema as when you asked for ‘2 tickets for ‘The
Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, 2
choc ices and a coke please’, the Movie Theatre had actually closed.
Indeed, the movie title is probably going to be longer than
my review.
Incredibly Strange is directed by and also stars Ray Dennis
Steckler and he proves that he excels at 2 things: acting badly and producing
crap movies.
The plotline can be summed up in a tweet, (and is thinner
than a Toby Carvery slice of meat) and essentially involves a fairground,
dancing, a fortune teller, dancing, hypnotising, dancing, dancing, a murder of
a dancer and some more dancing.
Alice The Goon lookalike Jerry, (Steckler), takes his
girlfriend Anglea, (Sharon Walsh) and her unfeasibly tall beehive hairdo to the
local fair. Best friend and mumbler,
Harold, (Atlas King), tags along too and they are having a simply spiffing time
until Jerry decides he would like to see stripper Carmelita, (Erina Enyo).
Angela refuses to go because she would have to pay for her
and her beehive and Harold mumbles something incoherent and disappears. This leaves Jerry all alone to watch
Carmelita do her strip act which is about as erotic as cheese on toast.
After the strip tease, Jerry is invited to meet up with
Carmelita and goes behind stage to find her.
Instead of Carmelita though, her sister and fortune-teller, Estrella,
(Brett O’Hara), is waiting. She
hypnotises Jerry which turns him into a killer.
He promptly kills chief dancer Marge, (Carolyn Brandt), and the
following day attempts to kill Angela.
Jerry is not the only person Estrella has turned into cold
blooded killer and actually has a small army of people already ‘converted’. At the end of the movie she lets them loose
and they go on a mini killing spree within the carnival. The police arrive and kill the hypnotised
killers, but Jerry manages to escape.
His freedom is short-lived however and as he makes his way onto
a pile of rocks in the sea, the police kill him. The End.
The first thing you may have noticed is that despite the
title of the movie, there are NO ZOMBIES!
This is a bit disappointing to say the least as to pad out this movie to
90+ minutes, you are subjected to 80+ minutes of poorly choreographed dancing
and a comedian who is about as funny as Michael McIntyre. The only thing that kept me going was the
promise of flesh eating creatures who would surely devour the worst cabaret
acts I have ever seen and bring about some partial satisfaction. However, the ‘zombies’ are actually
hypnotised very alive humans with ill-fitting rubber masks who are about as scary
as a puppy sleeping on a warm sunny day.
In fact the whole movie is crammed with bad actors. Steckler should have stayed behind the lens, (about
100 miles behind the lens would have sufficed).
Walsh’s whiney tones throughout the movie, have me cheering Jerry and hoping
he puts an end to her, (and indeed our), misery. And Atlas King, (whose best contribution to
this movie is his name), has a thick East European accent
and constantly sounds like he is gargling a chainsaw. He may have the best lines in the whole
movie, but I would not know as I could not make out a single word.
He is not helped by the sound quality of the movie which appears
to have been recorded onto a wax cylinder which was then thrown into a wood
chipper. Fortunately the sound goes well
with the picture, which is equally shonky and appears to have been filmed in
glorious Techniduller.
And dull is the word
I would use to sum up this movie, which is really disappointing because on
paper I should absolutely love it.
Incredibly Strange is a movie in the same vein as Plan 9,
Robot Monster or The Horror of Party Beach and is one those B movies that is so
bad, it should become good. But for me,
it doesn’t and that is due to the large amount of dancing and singing
throughout the movie which does nothing for the plot and frankly, is poor at
best.
The dancers are a bunch of amateurs who appear to have tried
their routines for the first time on the day of shooting. If you watch them carefully you can see them
tripping over each other and looking behind the camera for direction. They are out of time and out of place in this
movie and the scenes just seem to go on forever. I found myself quickly losing interest and
struggling to keep myself motivated to watch the entire movie.
I did want to like the movie, but in the end I really did
not enjoy it. There is one saving grace,
however, the MST3K version is brilliant and makes this boring film
watchable. For you MSTies out there who
have not seen it, it’s on YouTube and it’s very very funny.
For you non-MSTies, please save yourself the torture and
don’t bother watching this. The movie is
not nearly as interesting as the title would suggest and in truth the movie
should have been called ‘The Incredibly Boring Humans Who Were Hypnotised and
Are In No Way, Shape or Form Zombies Interjected With Dance Routines So Boring,
You’ll Want To Chew Your Hand Off’
But I guess that title was less catchy……
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