Astro-Zombies, The |
  • USA • 1968 • 92m •    • Directed by: Ted V. Mikels. • Starring: Wendell Corey, John Carradine, Tom Pace, Joan Patrick, Tura Satana, Rafael Campos, Joseph Hoover, Victor Izay, William Bagdad, Vincent Barbi, Egon Sirany, Jean Pirie, John Hopkins. • Music by: Nicholas Carras.      This laughably-bad mess stars ubiquitous "Z"-movie journeyman John Carradine as Dr. DeMarco, a loony scientist whose original concept to build a humanoid robot for space missions is fouled somewhat by his choice of a psycho-killer's brain for his first subject. Instead of doing the sensible thing and retiring from the mad-doc profession, DeMarco chooses instead to build another robot to hunt down the last one. His efforts are only slightly hindered by a moronic CIA investigation and the meddling of a cabal of communist spies under the direction of slinky dragon-lady Tura Satana.
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Review:
The perpetrator of this crime, that being The Astro Zombies of course, is Ted V. Mikles. And speaking on the matter of untalented movie director's of past or present, I thought only -Jerry Warren- could put together a movie this boring, but now the lame and lifeless movies of Ted V. Mikels has come to light. Mikles is yet another name whose been added to the ever growing list of woeful director's (that have no business being behind a camera), who are guilty of polluting the world with "their brand" of insufferably lame, boring and pointless so-called entertainment. Pure dreck Ted, pure dreck.
1967's The Astro Zombies is the subject of review here and as I delicately mentioned, it's an astonishingly boring movie - which drains it's viewers energy with each passing minute. The plot (too deep a word), the "jist" of this film is a mash-up of ideas, that clumsily revolves around some pseudo-science about bringing human corpses back to life, with a certain radio frequency and creating thus "zombies". Mutiple parties are interested in capitalizing on: The Idea of the Century and for the next 90 minutes you're treated to a horrendously lame and vapidly paced movie, comprised primarily of a mishmash of scenes involving: people casually driving around in cars (always a show-stopper!), turgid disinteresting discussions inside police stations (though Wendel Correy's boozey voice is mildly amusing), pointless laboratory scenes that are absolutely and completely static (see the most boring of the movie about an hour in), a bar scene with some colorful nude dancing (this provides the movies ONLY real sign of life) a couple of stock shoot em' up scenes between cops and crooks and if you haven't yet reached your quota for pointless and underwhelming scenes of pure drudgery on cheap and dated-looking laboratory sets JUST WAIT - because this movie really packs them in, each more tedious then the last. Astro Zombies provides yet another truly embarrassing role for an aging John Carradine (the movies only big name), he plays something of a mad-scientist character and he's joined by an diminutive actor (who sports an epically greasy head of black hair) who plays the role of "lab-assistant", essentially just another stock-Igor character who adds little to the proceedings - pure formula, you could say. I mentioned Carradine being a mad scientist, however, he's not very mad, in fact he's not mad in the slightest, here, sadly and all to obviously, John's just an old man who's totally bored and indifferent with his role, in a yet another crappy and entirely forgettable B-movie. "Entirely forgettable" that phrase handily sums up this movie as a whole. Udderly amateurish would also be accurate.
Another angle of The Astro Zombies, is this movies attempts to show off the "current hi-tech" which was, not surprisingly, abysmally lame; my favorite example of this, was the zombie detecting radio receiver, that was rigged together from old radio parts. LAME! Though, sadly, I've seen lamer yet (see my review for "The Dead Talk Back"). Though that is to be expected, as low-budget movies (especially in the days of yore) never have good-looking or expensive high-tech sets - never.
On the positive side, I can say that the formally lovely Tura Satana (busty Sexploitation queen of the 60's and 70's) is quite an eyeful and looks striking in the assortment of dresses she goes through throughout the movie (you can tell that was one of the main draws in the directors mind, dressing up his leading lady in as many sexy dresses as possible) but that's hardly reason enough to sit and suffer through this woeful bore of a movie.
"One of the most boring movies ever" - that only begins to sum it up. It should literally be illegal and considered a crime to produce and release movies that are as boring as The Astro Zombies and in a decent world, such films would result in permanent Hollywood blacklisting, in conjunction with a series of steep fines piled on top for good measure.
Judging from what I've seen, I'd say Astro Zombies indeed "out-bores" these other notoriously boring flicks (The List, is as follows): The Wild, Wild World of Bat-Woman - The Curse of Bigfoot - The Incerdible Petrified World - Night Fright - Frankenstein Island - The Beast of the Yucca Flats and Manos: The Hands of Fate. And to out-bore THOSE titles is a very tall order indeed. (Note Jerry Warren was the director responsible for three of the titles on that list).
To put it another way, someone who's in a terminal-coma would probably find this movie SO BORING, that it would drain them of life even further.... so that not a single spark of life remains.
Review by Idiot-Deluxe from the Internet Movie Database.
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