Unlimitedia Sick Product of a Sick System
SoTrumpBelieve Must See Movie...
Catangro After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.
Leofwine_draca TEENAGE ZOMBIES is a Z-grade B-movie from the notorious Jerry Warren. The "plot", loosely described as such, features some typically annoying and overaged teenagers who end up on a remote island resort run by a female mad scientist who has a passion for turning ordinary people into mindless zombies. There's just one sad-looking zombie hanging around for much of the running time and the bulk of the action exists in a mere five minute window. Elsewhere, there's a lot of 'groovy' dialogue and an equally sad-looking gorilla lurking about the scenery. This is bargain basement stuff, which looks and feels entirely low budget, silly, and unworthy of a viewer's attention - that is, unless you're a seasoned purveyor of cinematic badness.
wbswetnam I downloaded this black-and-white film for free (it's public domain) from the Archive.com website. It is about six teenagers (three boys / three girls) who stumble across a sinister Russian plot to zombify major American cities. The experiments for this plan are being carried out on an undiscovered island "thirty or forty miles out" on a lake (?!!). Four of the curious teenagers are taken captive by a creepy woman scientist and her hulking zombie man-servant, and the other two attempt to save them and thwart the Russian plot.Well folks, it's not quite as bad as Monster-A-Go-Go in my opinion but it's just about as bad. The teenage actors are total no-names who were probably paid 50 bucks each to appear in this waste of celluloid. Their acting is what I would expect of some high school sophomores who were looking for a way to get out of summer school that summer. As noted by other reviewers, the "cage" they were held in was a complete joke, the "night" sequences were bright as midday, and the bumbling Russian agents were equally as laughable. All in all, it's really a terrible film. I don't believe it was ever lampooned by the MST3K crew; too bad - Teenage Zombies was an oversight on their part.
Scarecrow-88 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!
Michael_Elliott Teenage Zombies (1959) BOMB (out of 4) Four stupid teenagers head to an island, which apparently no one knows about and once there they run into a female scientist who is trying to create zombies to use them as slaves so that she can take over the world or something to that effect. Whenever you see Jerry Warren's name pop up on screen then you know you're going to be in for something bad. I had forgotten how truly awful this film was but by the time I finished it there was no question that this is one of the biggest turkey's in the history of cinema. I'm really not sure where to start on this film because there really isn't a single scene or even second that's worth of any positive comments. One of the many annoying things is that Warren only uses a couple close ups throughout the movie and the rest are master shots. This makes the film seem like something from the early 1900s and I might even say those early days of film-making had more style than this. The acting is beyond bad and it doesn't help that these master shots lets the cast just run around the frame without knowing what they are suppose to do. A lot of the film appears to have been shot silent, which means we get a lot of annoying dubbing, which doesn't help matters. There's been some debate about whether or not zombies actually turn up and I think they do for two or three seconds but you have to wonder why you'd make a movie called Teenage Zombies and then not show them too often. Oh yeah, this is a Warren film.
