The Astro-Zombies (1968)

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Nutty, ridiculous late 60's sci-fi / horror film. Any film with credits that have toy robots, toy tanks, and the sound effect of heavy artillery you can't expect much from. John Carradine plays a mad scientist for the umpteenth time. He's creating zombiefied human robots from criminals with ultra creepy mask faces. The mad doctor's assistant is a leering sub-mental that Carradine treats to long-winded monologues of the science behind what he's doing. Meanwhile a sinister foreign government has sent their crack agent to steal Carradine's work. Said agent is a modern-day Asian dragon lady type with a somewhat sleazy co-hort. An American agency is out to stop the enemy government and the mad doc. The best part of this whole mish-mash is when one of the zombs, in the middle of an attack on a scantily clad girl, loses his energy oomph and has to hold a flashlight to a hole in his head until he gets back to the lab and gets re-energized. Wacky fun. The RiffTrax version could have been improved. The Rifftrax soundtrack can be heard, but you can barely hear the film's dialogue, which takes away from the RiffTrax humor. As for the film only version itself the sound is just fine, the picture and color quality is sharp and clear. I have to add though that as far as I could make out the Kino Lorber DVD quality is equal to the Image Entertainment DVD. The Kino version has some extras though. Recommended for fans of bad movies.

Astro-Zombies, The (1968) 1/2 (out of 4) When people discuss some of the worst movies ever made, this one here usually gets a vote or two. While this film is certainly bad it at least has a few decent things going for it. The movie tells the story of a scientist (John Carradine) who wants to create some "astro-zombies" so that he can control their mind and have them doing all of his dirty work. Of course, along the way several people are killed so that this experiment can move forward but a CIA man (Wendell Corey) is on the case. There was a time when this here was one of my most sought after film simply because I had read so much about it but as a kid every Mom and Pop store either didn't have a copy or if they did someone had rented it and their VCR ate the tape. When I finally got around to seeing it on DVD the thing certainly lived up to its bad reputation but I would stop short of calling it one of the worst films ever made. I think the film has a couple things going for it and one is of course Carradine. It's amazing to think that at one time he was one of the most respected character actors around and yet he ended his career appearing in one bad movie after another. The movies themselves might be bad but it's always fun seeing Carradine do his thing and I must admit that I found most of his scenes here to be mildly entertaining. The stuff with his hunchback assistant runs on way too long but there's some sort of weird atmosphere going on. Corey, who died shortly after this film, appears drunk in most of his scenes and doesn't have too much to do. Another plus are the Halloween masks that our astro-zombies use. Yes, they look fake but they at least are fun. The biggest problem with this turkey is that it's deadly boring. There's not an ounce of energy, life or even a light pulse to be found. The pacing is just deadly because it takes way too long for this so-called "story" to actually be told. This problem is made worst by the fact that a little editing probably would help things. The majority of the scenes run on and on for no apparent reason other than to push up the running time so if they would have cut some of this added time we'd probably be talking about this thing as something "so bad it's good." I can't help but imagine a drive-in back in 1968 where a guy took his virgin date to see this thing knowing he wasn't getting any but by the thirty-minute mark the woman had decided to give herself up just so she could take her eyes away from this thing. The badness is all over this movie and there's no question this thing is a disaster but at the same time there's just a weird vibe going on that makes this thing worth viewing if you enjoy bad "Z" movies.

The plot of The Astro-Zombies is so convoluted that I'm not sure I can sum it up in just a few short sentences - but I'll give it a try. It seems that a series of gristly murders is being blamed on a Dr. DeMarco (John Carradine). Until recently, Dr. DeMarco worked for the government on a top secret project where he was attempting to develop a synthetic man. The synthetic or astro-man was thought to be ideal for long range space flight. The CIA theorizes that Dr. DeMarco has succeeded in creating an astro-man and that it may be responsible for the murders. In addition, a group of spies, headed by a woman named Satana (Tura Satana), is also looking for Dr. DeMarco. They represent a foreign party interested in Dr. DeMarco's discoveries.You know, I could sit here and go through a litany of weaknesses found in The Astro-Zombies. But I'll be honest, that's too easy and, ultimately, too time consuming. It's like shooting fish in a barrel. So I'll stick to the biggest problem I had with The Astro-Zombies and that's how deadly dull much of the movie is. There are great big chunks of the movie where nothing happens. I don't mean it's just slow - I mean there's absolutely nothing going on. For example, there are a series of scenes with Dr. DeMarco preparing his lab for an experiment that seem to go on FOREVER! Vials are filled, switches are thrown, microscopes are peered through, and on and on it goes. No dialogue – just mundane, routine scenes of people trying to look busy. I swear that at one point it looked like Carradine was working on a thermostat. And who wouldn't want to see John Carradine do a little home repair project? But as bad as The Astro-Zombies is, the movie's not a total loss. There's enough bizarreness here that someone with a little talent might have gotten something interesting out of it. I'll go so far to argue that a good editor might be able to shave a half-hour off the thing and come up with an interesting, surreal movie. The ingredients are here – CIA operatives, John Carradine, mutant creatures, a secret lab, Tura Satana (who's pretty surreal in her own right), a hunchbacked lab assistant, violent attack scenes, an unknown woman in a bikini strapped to a table, and enough scientific hokum for two movies. But until someone takes the time to put this movie together, the best I can give The Astro-Zombies is a 3/10.

Word on the street has it that "The Astro-Zombies" is one of the worst films of all time, right down there with "Plan 9...," "Robot Monster" and "The Beast of Yucca Flats," and for once, the word on the street is right. This movie really IS an incredible stinker in every conceivable department, and is a fairly bewildering experience to sit through. I for one could not figure out what was going on throughout much of the film, despite the inanity of the proceedings. Tura Satana, so bodaciously kickass in the late Russ Meyers' "Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!," does add some sodden spark to the proceedings, but John Carradine is reduced to mumbling techno gibberish in his zombie lab, and Wendell Corey, in his last film role, probably wished that he was dead (he died right after filming was completed!). It's hard to believe that Wayne Rogers was involved as a producer and co-writer of this mess. Oh, Trapper, what were you thinking?!?! Horrendous acting, crappy editing and amateurish directing, combined with a mishmash of a plot involving skull-faced, radio-controlled, synthetic cadavers (or something like that...I'm really not too clear on this point), Mexican secret agents, the CIA and mutilation murders, all combine for 90 minutes of semipainful head shaking. The film is an absolute must for all connoisseurs of bad cinema, but all others really should be warned away. This movie really is BAAAAAAAAD!