Thanks for the memories!

From my favorite movies..

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

I saw this film thanks to the riffing show, Mystery Science Theater 3000. Not sure if I would have ever come across without them, but who knows? Perhaps, I would have eventually come across it in one of those huge packs of public domain horror films. I may have given this one a shot too, though this film predates the George Romero zombies so there is a chance I would have taken a pass on it even if it was in one of those packs and I had bought it. Sure enough, this film features the typical zombie that was in films before we got Romero's totally awesome flesh eating walking corpses. This one features the zombie that is not dead in a true sense, more in the fact that someone has control over said person and has their soul and is able to get said person to do their bidding. Best example of this is the horror film, White Zombie starring Bela Lugosi. The fact that the zombies are going to be of this variety and not the flesh rotting on the bone type can be forgiven as that type of zombie was still three or so years off. However, what makes this film so bad is the fact that over 50 percent of the film is just watching people sing, dance and tell awful joke. Heck, it may comprise 60 percent! In between these truly horrific shows we get a bit of plot about evil fortune tellers and a hopeless slacker who gets mixed up in her plans for revenge! The story as a guy refusing to have sex with a fortune teller which angers her. She calls in her very deformed assistant, throw acid on the guy refusing sex and the credits role. We then watch two people dance before being introduced to the stars of the film, a hopeless loser and his foreign friend. They pick up a girl and enjoy a day frolicking at the fair while we see more dancing and soon the loser ends up falling for the fortune teller's sister and ends up getting mixed up in the teller's plans for murder! Which seems kind of unnecessary as I am doubting anyone was going to be telling the cops what they had saw at the teller's place. Meanwhile, we watch three or four dance numbers, three or so singers and a very bad comedian as Jerry (the loser) tries to find a way to get not mixed up before he is turned into a zombie! This made for a rather good episode of MST3K as they were really able to tear into the whole stage show aspect of the movie. This film would have been a complete bore without them as most of the film was just long shots of nothing when it was not very mildly risqué women dancing and singing. Apparently, the director of this film made other movies that were also pretty bad, but I am not sure if any more of his films were riffed. This one was riffed good and it helped liven up what would have otherwise been a very disappointing film! Though something they kind of missed was the fact that at the end of the film it was nighttime and then as the police started chasing Jerry it was like day.So no, this film is not good and if I had not seen this film with the help of MST3K it would of been a bit boring. Just not a lot of film in this other than watching what is a bunch of amateurs trying their hand at dancing and singing. I mean, just wait till you see the one guy come out with his guitar and that pretty much tells me, this film was cast with a bunch of wannabe musicians. The show where most of the stage numbers takes place is supposed to be a girly show too, well an entire family could go and no one would have to worry about seeing anything to gratuitous with the exception of Carmelita the stripper whose nakedness is more implied than actually shown...

Jerry falls in love with a stripper he meets at a carnival. Little does he know that she is the sister of a gypsy fortune teller whose predictions he had scoffed at earlier. The gypsy turns him into a zombie and he goes on a killing spree.The film was originally released by Fairway-International Pictures, Arch Hall, Sr.'s studio, who put it on a lower half of a double bill with one of his own pictures. Later, it was matched with "Beast of Yucca Flats", but working with Hall seems far more appropriate -- his films are notoriously trashy, and he had just worked with Steckler on "Wild Guitar" two years prior.There is really nothing redeemable about this film. Once it gets going, it is tolerably bad, but at least 75% seems to be nothing more than a showcase of women singing and dancing. This adds nothing to the plot. The sound is awful, and cuts out in some places, though even if it were fixed it may not do anything to improve the overall quality of this boring bomb.Had it not been for a catchy title, this film would have faded into obscurity fifty years ago already...

I watched many movies in my teens, most of which I have no memory beyond a name or vague story plot. This movie, in addition to its title, created movie history in a lot of ways. I have to go to Rocky Horror to find an equivalent for several of these (combining horror, sf, comedy in a musical). I still remember the stark, anguished photography, the meaningless actions, the hopelessness so dark it could only be comedy. One review captured this, describing it as "lunar purity". I wasn't surprised to learn that one of the camera operators, Vilmos Zsigmond, went on to win an Academy Award for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Note that this review is written at least 40 years after I saw the film.

Legendary exploitationer in view of its lengthy and catchpenny moniker; amusingly, it was originally called THE INCREDIBLY STRANGE CREATURE OR: HOW I STOPPED LIVING AND BECAME A MIXED-UP ZOMBIE, causing Columbia to threaten suing over its similarity to Stanley Kubrick's DR. STRANGELOVE OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1963) – with the films' respective directors even getting personally on the phone and Kubrick reportedly dropping the matter when Steckler himself suggested to modify his title in the way it now stands! Even so, the film is really weird, not just for its macabre elements but for its being dubbed "The First Horror Musical"!; in fact, the narrative takes place around a sea-side luna park (this milieu seemed to be a favorite with indie horror fare around this time, being also at the center of both NIGHT TIDE {1961} and CARNIVAL OF SOULS {1962} – which, likewise, have become cult items albeit on their own artistic qualities rather than mere wacky eeriness!) and includes about a half-dozen musical numbers, none of them having anything remotely to do with the plot and a couple of them being cringe-inducingly bad into the bargain! Another notable aspect is the amateurish nature of the film, augmented by the soft Eastmancolor (the film was shot by the man behind the influential magazine "American Cinematographer", Joseph V. Mascelli, along with then-rookies Vilmos Zsigmond and an uncreditd Laszlo Kovacs!) and, frankly, the ragged state of the print from which the copy I watched was culled. The film is said to be made in a similar vein to the even more reprehensible works of Herschel Gordon Lewis but, though I did recently manage to acquire a few choice titles of his, somewhat ashamedly I admit that I have yet to check out any of them! By the way, director Steckler himself also essays the leading role here under the ludicrous pseudonym of Cash Flagg – while one of the several women involved i.e. Carolyn Brandt was, for a time, Mrs. Steckler herself! He plays a balding rebellious type (whereas his pal, the no-less oddly-named Atlas King and who apparently furnished the dough when the production ran out of funds{!}, has a prominent rock'n'roll hairstyle) and she a good-looking dancer whose weakness for booze causes her to be embarrassed in front of a packed house! For the record, the horror traits come in instantly, as a villainous fortune-teller (with a conspicuous wart on her face!) is seen taking revenge on the man she is with, after foolishly admitting that he actually prefers her curvy stripper sister, by having her grubby and chain-smoking hunchbacked assistant (called Ortega) hold him upside down while she spills acid on his face (albeit from a bottle labelled "Poison")! Apparently, she keeps a room-ful of such disfigured punters in her tent (the "incredibly strange creatures" referenced by the title, though they are not technically "zombies", "mixed-up" or otherwise!) – no reason is given as to why or how come nobody ever hears or comes looking for them! Anyway, when Brandt is threatened by her boss with the termination of her contract over the afore-mentioned inebriated conduct, she goes to the fortune-teller to learn what lies in store for her and predictably picks out the death card; panicking, she runs into the ghouls but manages to escape. Next up are the hero, his girl and the inseparable pal and, after she has her hand read, the protagonist is compulsively drawn to watching the stripper's act (which, of course, does not sit well with his sweetheart who storms off, accompanied by the dutiful friend). During the show, the hunchback turns up with a card from the dancer asking him to meet her backstage but, when he does, he comes face to face with her wicked sister who promptly hypnotizes him! We now revert to Brandt's resumed performance (emceed by a stand-up comic!), which is however cut short by the sudden appearance of a hooded and wild-eyed Steckler wielding a knife (a spellbound assassin was liable to be dubbed a 'zombie' before the term was inextricably linked with the flesh-eating living dead) and brutally attacking both the girl and her fair-haired partner (who actually looks a bit like Klaus Kinski)! Of course, the next morning he does not remember anything but, when presenting himself to his sweetheart with the requisite apologies for his irrational behavior of the night before, he almost does an encore of his unwitting crime when the sun-bathing girl starts twirling an umbrella (thus evoking the whirling shapes that initially triggered him off) and he attempts to strangle her! At this, he runs off back to the carnival to try and make sense of the way his life is going but he only incurs the wrath of the fortune-teller who promptly fetches the acid bottle and disfigures him too! In the ensuing fracas, however, the other freaks are let out and they run amok in the luna park, causing no end of panic and mayhem (though the Police turn up almost immediately and start shooting them down no questions asked – still, with the fortune-teller, her sister and Ortega dead, they could never have gotten the story of what they were doing there anyway!). Steckler himself is chased all the way to the beach, with his girl and best friend also in pursuit – and, after a protracted sequence in which he staggers perilously between the force of the incoming waves and the slippery, jagged rocks, the protagonist too is killed by a cop's bullet.Mind you, the film is not too bad and certainly undeserving of its ranking among IMDb's "Bottom 100"; however, I do feel that, had the musical numbers been dropped and more attention paid to plot, logic and characterization, it would have greatly benefited the end result: whether it would then enjoy the reputation it has in its present form is another thing entirely and, frankly, debatable...!