I Was a Zombie for the F.B.I.

USA • 1982 • 105m •

• Directed by: Marius Penczner. • Starring: Larry Raspberry, John Gillick, James Raspberry, Richard Clodfelter, D.M. Coger, Richard Crowe, Allen French, Laurence Hall, David Hyde, Tony Isbell, Lisa Dean Jones, Greg LeMay, Glenda Mace..

A pair of criminal brothers survive an airplane crash and discover a plot by aliens from outer space to conquer Earth by turning human beings in zombies. The FBI gets involved and wants the brothers to infiltrate the alien force.

Review:

Image from: I Was a Zombie for the F.B.I. (1982)

I am probably like most everyone else who will buy the DVD version of this movie. We all saw it broadcast several times on USA Network's Night Flight program back in the mid-eighties. It was a wonderful low-budget homage to 50's style monster movies with a bunch of no name actors who I haven't seen since. The only person of note was Larry Raspberry who played the second lead. He was from what I can gather something of a sensation in the music industry for a short time in the mid-sixties. I have a taped copy of the movie that I have had for more than twenty years now and still pull it out periodically.

I started out by watching the extra features that spoke about the making of the film, the stop action procedures used in the film and so forth. I was pretty excited about watching a crisp new DVD copy of this wonderful memory of mine.

Unfortunately, whom ever decided to get this released on DVD decided it needed a complete makeover. The most obvious and most annoying part of the makeover is the inclusion of a complete new soundtrack that not only adds more sound effects but also a brain pounding musical score that will drive you nuts. In the audio setup you have the choice between a version 2.0 or 5.1 soundtrack. I thought the 2.0 might be the original but no such luck. In the small documentary a sound engineer was commenting that he knows he did a good job on sound and music when the audience doesn't know he's there. He failed miserably this time.

I was seeing a whole lot of extra stock footage that I didn't remember from the eighties version. At first I thought maybe this may have just been trimmed out to reduce the film to a better time format for TV. That is until we got to the airplane crash scene. When the two agents pulled up a piece of the damaged aircraft, what should have been the dismembered hand was a new shot of a full corpse either burnt or eaten to the bone. It was obvious this is a recently shot piece and added in. There were also added cloud and fog effects that were not in the original. And I thought the view of the UFO was more of a ball of light effect instead of an obvious flying saucer. Then there were added scene cards detailing each chapter of the film.

I was very dis-satisfied with how this DVD turned out. So much so that I have decided to keep my twenty year old recorded copy of this film. I think this company should re-release the original film on DVD and send me a free copy for having wasted my money on this one. I still love this film, but not the DVD version.

Review by jeffreywj from the Internet Movie Database.

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