Teenage Zombies (1959)

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Good concept, poorly executed.

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

1st watched 9/1/2014 -- 3 out of 10(Dir-Jerry Warren):70 minute version Boring and lame teenage zombie movie with some really wacky performances from some of the teens and very stoic performances from the adults. The movie starts as some kids from a local malt shop set out to do some water-skiing, and have a picnic at a nearby small island. As they investigate the area -- they come upon a strange group of men appearing "doped or dead" according to one of the kids. Their boat is stolen so they go to a lone house on the island to question the inhabitants about the disappearance and come across a stoic woman, played by Katherine Victor, who denied knowing about this, and then all the kids get captured to be used as experiments for her zombie-inducing gas that eventually will be used on all Americans. The pacing of this movie is what makes it boring with a soundtrack that doesn't match the movie's pace. The sound effects are very canned especially when the boat is searching for the kids(same sound no matter what the boat is doing---very funny stuff). This movie was obviously trying to capture on a trend(monsters with teens), but fails miserably, and there really is only one real monster, if you can call him one, Ivan -- the helper zombie and possibly a late appearance by a man in a gorilla suit. There is a sub-theme of foreigners(who don't sound foreign) trying to "control" all Americans with this gas(which was probably shocking at the time), but it's done so badly that it doesn't get noticed much. Pretty much this is a movie to avoid -- so do so.

Plot Synopsis: A group of teenagers travel to a mysterious island in order to explore it. They are then captured by a mad scientist who, in league with a terrorist faction, is working on a gas that will cause all those exposed to it to become zombie slaves. While the teenagers hatch an escape plan, their friends try to get the police to help them in locating the missing teens.Film Review: During the mid-to-late 1950s, there was a spate of genre films that catered to young audiences by featuring teenage monsters. Teenage Zombies was one such example, directed by Jerry Warren, a director who comes from a small mindset of directors who follow an almost unique approach to filmmaking.Warren's approach is of a simplistic nature that resembles more of a stage play than an actual motion picture. The camera stays locked in one place, almost never moving; the actors stand rooted to one spot while reading their lines off an unseen cue card; the sets consist of a couple of walls only (which would save the producers a lot of money in set design). Whatever other faults the film has, the style alone condemns it to mediocrity (thing is, the style would reappear in the late 1980s, with Tim Kincaid modifying the style to make his own films – see my review on BREEDERS (1986) for more information).Style aside, the film's main problem is that it suffers from a real bomb of a script. Jaques Lecotier is perhaps one of the worst scribes in the whole of 1950s genre cinema. His script for Teenage Zombies is so bad that it would rival Ed Wood's works for sheer ineptitude - & Wood's films had the benefit of unintentional hilarity. The script is a mix of clichés & the sort of brainwashing that John Carpenter would later expose in the 80's nutty conspiracy classic THEY LIVE. There is a mad scientist (a staple cliché in most 50's B-films), who is working with (possibly Communist) terrorists in order to turn the USA into a nation of zombie slaves by using a special gas. This idea alone is so improbable that it causes the viewer to either groan in disbelief or laugh – the very idea of releasing a gas to turn a country into zombie slaves is really stupid considering the size of the target country, in this case the USA (although Lecotier seems to be aware of this, adding some dialogue that suggest the gas is not effective enough to take over the entire country, as well as having some side-effects). Not just that, the teenagers shown here suffer from some real bad one-dimensional stereotypes – the males are brave & daring while the females simply stand around waiting to be rescued. The young hero of the piece has an unhealthy obsession with his speedboat & his friends respect adults, even when it becomes painfully obvious that the adults in question are clearly up to no good (one thing that stood out in my mind was that the fact that the young characters were probably the victims of some kind of 1950's government conspiracy to keep young audiences from rising above their stations – something that would collapse with the coming of the 1960s). To Lecotier's credit, he does manage to throw in a sense of irony which almost salvages the film – the only way to restore their zombified friends is for them to expose the scientist to the gas & order her to give them the antidote!

this was pretty stooooopid. the only thing missing were those cute little Bots or Abbot and Costello.usually i give movies that are so bad they are good ten star ratings because they actually do constitute good entertainment and are often footnotes in cinema and Hollywood history. i only gave this film one star because i wanted to make a point that not every retro bad flick is always that noteworthy. there wasn't anything particularly noteworthy or exceptional about this. don't get me wrong. it was really, really bad and embarrassingly cheap, but it was pretty typical of the rip off crap they usually tried to take drive-in audiences for a lot around this time period. i'm surprised half the drive-in didn't honk their horns, demand their money back, and make a hasty exit for their home TV sets when seeing stuff like this. i mean like whatta rip.it was pretty funny though. but this lacked the silly imagination of a Eddie Wood or the inane craziness of a 'Skydivers' or Arch Hall movie. the filmmakers arrived at their knuckleheaded conclusions out of a sort of mundane, pedestrian lack of imagination that was sort of a turn off. the monkey suit was tardo but not nearly as over the top as Ro-man. the teen-agers didn't really interest me except for hoping that someone might kill them. the so-called scientist looked liked Gloria Vanderbilt or something. Ivan was kinda scary though.the only redeeming thing of interest here was the premise of the "zombification". the reason for it was to turn the entire population of Amerika into a bunch of "easily controlled slave workers". Hmmmmmm. seems eerily familiar to the mindless protestant work ethic practiced in the work force of today. maybe this movie is relevant after all.

A South American scientist, experimenting on a gas capsule which will turn Americans into mindless zombies to control, has an island laboratory with test subjects. Four teenagers find the island while on a boating trip, stumbling upon zombies and the scientist, with a hulking slave named Ivan who obeys her every command and subdues the kids, imprisoning them. The teenagers' friends and their local law enforcement will conduct a search for them. Producer/director Jerry Warren probably gathered together some actors and friends from the local Playhouse theater to star in this corny, no-budget horror/sci-fi schlock using mad science, mind-controlled human zombies, and the commie threat as themes for his movie. The "golly, gee whiz!" acting style, with all the heightened melodramatics, from the "teenagers" (they all look like they are in their twenties) can become tiresome, unless you get a kick out of these sorts of performances—instead of talking to each other, we get a lot of "loud" conversations where the cast attempt to put emphasis on the dialogue. The sets are as cheap as you can expect from a Warren production. There are sidesplitting scenes where the adults talk down to the teenagers, like when the sheriff scolds two kids who come to him believing the scientist on the island is holding their buddies hostage, as if they were uneducated children. There is a nice twist involving the sheriff and his association with the scientist which comments on what Hitchcock presented in the film SABOTEUR, that there are those hidden within our country who are secretly plotting against us. There is also an amusing scene where the teens duke it out with the scientist and two of her "clients" working for a hostile country who wants to use America as slave labour, permanently controlled with the capsule once it is perfected. TEENAGE ZOMBIES is the kind of movie shown at the drive-in playing while the teenagers were more concerned with making out than the plot or characters; the movie was basically just background noise. Ivan reminded me of Torgo from MANOS:THE HANDS OF FATE, except he never talks or trembles/fidgets. You even have a guy in a gorilla costume (you know, it's a gorilla used in the dangerous scientist's research who is turned loose to subdue the evil agents) and cheesy dialogue such as "Hey, anybody for horseback riding?!?!" Fans of such cinematic sludge, rejoice!