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

A Masterpiece!

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

This movie begins with a young man named "Jerry" (Ray Dennis Steckler), his girlfriend "Angela" (Sharon Walsh) and his roommate "Harold" (Atlas King), deciding to go to the local carnival to have some fun. One thing leads to another and before long all of them decide to have their fortunes told by a Gypsy fortune-teller by the name of "Madame Estrella" (Brett O'Hara). Immediately after that Jerry decides to check out an exotic dancer named "Carmelita" (Erino Enyo) who just happens to be the sister of Madame Estrella. Needless to say, this doesn't please Angela very much and as a result Harold ends up driving her home. While all of this is going on a young dancer named "Marge Neilson" (Carolyn Brandt) who works at a nearby nightclub decides to visit Madame Estrella to have her future told. However, upon entering the tent she sees something that Madame Estrella doesn't want anybody to know about and in a complete state of panic drops her purse as she runs out as fast as she can. Needing to silence her, Madame Estrella has Carmelita bring Jerry back into the tent where the fortune teller then hypnotizes him and subsequently orders him to kill Marge. Unfortunately, it doesn't end there as all too soon Jerry becomes nothing more than a mind-numbed zombie forced to do whatever bidding Madame Estrella commands of him. Now rather than reveal any more I will just say that this film had a decent enough plot but there were simply too many scenes involving dancing and singing thrown in to apparently fill space and kill time. Naturally, if this film was a musical then I could understand it. But since that was not the case these scenes only caused the film to lose focus and seem incoherent. Likewise, the weak acting and extremely poor ending didn't help matters either. That being said, I have to give this film a below average rating.

There are so many terrible things about this movie that I might not get to them all but I will try.First of all, the title doesn't make any sense.They were normal humans who never stopped living, they just had acid thrown in their faces.But I've come to expect these old movies to lie in the title so I shouldn't be surprised.So it's about some "teens" and some dancers.Of course the teens are all well over forty.The main teen even sports a comb over that would embarrass a seventy year old.Even though he looks elderly, they try hard to make us believe he's a bad boy.He refuses to work or go to school but has no problem having a house and car.His best friend, and several others, have weird eastern European accents even though the movie clearly takes place in southern California.So old man teen becomes one of these zombies and stabs a bunch of dancers in the face while they were performing on stage.Then he just goes home and goes to bed and the cops have no leads.Weak.The worst part is that more than half of the movie is footage of empty carnival rides and people singing and dancing.They literally perform a dozen full songs that have absolutely nothing to do with the story.Did I mention they have some fool introducing all the acts and even when he holds his microphone at waist height, his voice is always the same volume?This could have been an OK thirty minute short but instead it's a terrible reminder of why people shouldn't try to make movies when they have no clue.Never see this.

I saw this movie after it featured on MST3K, and the "Mystery Science Theater 3000: 10 Worst Movies They Riffed" made it sound every bit as bad as it was made out to be on the show(the episode was entertaining of course but not one of their best for me). Actually, I have seen far worse movies than The Incredibly Strange Creatures..., it is a bad movie but one of the worst ever made? Not for me. I actually thought the photography and editing were quite good and the make-up likewise. The Incredibly Strange Creatures...is also unique for the longest movie title ever(though also giving an indication of what you're in for), that I know of anyhow, and I loved Angela's hair. There is not much else though that is good though. I found very little to remember about the music itself, other than that it sounded like bad scratchy saxophone playing. The choreography is clumsy and it looks awkward too, and the musical numbers go on for too long and with no momentum. The script has a very ramshackle structure, with confused and crass at best dialogue. The story, one that is so paper-thin you can do it in 20 minutes easily, is just weird(the weirdest movie I've seen possibly, though I knew even from the title it was going to be), goes along at a snail's pace and doesn't make any sense, concluding with an ending that is rather pointless and will make you go "what?" The last act is the most eventful it gets, but in a way that doesn't gel with the rest of the movie and it has no kind of tension and such whatsoever. The zombies don't even appear until only the last act, they're alright-looking enough but don't do anything of note and their screen-time is short-lived. The acting is enough to make anybody cringe, Brett O'Hara in particular chews the scenery to pieces in the worst of ways. The actresses for Carmelita and Madison suffer from the fact that their characters don't seem to have any point in the story. To conclude, bad and brings the word weird to a whole new level, but I've seen worse. 3/10 Bethany Cox

Like always, I'm willing to give a bad movie a chance and try not to be biased toward its, just because of its title and the poor rating it's receiving everywhere. However no, there really is no point in defending this movie or try to let it sound any good, since there are absolutely no redeeming qualities about this movie at all.It's being a very typically, bad looking and poorly sounding, '60's genre flick, made for 10 dollars and a bottle cap. The low budget can explain the movie its look and poor actors involved but it can't be an excuses for its lacking script.Stuff doesn't really ever make any sense and it's very hard to discover a main plot line in this mess of a movie. I really don't know what this movie was trying to tell, since its jumping all over the place and most stuff seems to happen very randomly, while some of the other stuff simple feels totally pointless and out of place, such as all of the dancing sequences.It's not focused on anything at all. Everything falls flat because of that. It's as if they had absolutely no idea what they were doing and purely based on its story alone already, there is no good reason why this movie exists. It should had never been made!Now, I'll give the movie that it clearly got putted together by a bunch of people who love classic horror. There clearly are some references to some of the '30's genre stuff and I also actually have no doubt about that some of Ray Dennis Steckler's other movies are far better ones, as long as they had a more decent enough script to work with but I'm probably being too kind and hopeful right now.The title of this movie might make you curious enough to watch it but trust me, you are far better off simply skipping it, even if you are into bad cinema.2/10 http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/