Review of Teenage Zombies (1959) by Stuart P — 17 Mar 2010

Ah, the blissful days when all you needed to make a movie was a camera and about a dozen people with nothing else to do. When acting talent meant you were literate enough to read the cue cards off camera, and special effects consisted of eye-makeup and a gorilla suit.

TEENAGE ZOMBIES is a vintage wine of bad horror movies in that it is so awful and unbelievable that it is nothing short of amazing. An entire cast and crew believed so strongly in this hokey scrap of film that they actually shot, edited (to a degree) and released the entire thing for the pleasure, and money, of the viewing public.

Now, that's love.

TEENAGE ZOMBIES is a joke right off the bat because there is never, at any point, a teenage zombie. There is one zombie. A large, eye make-uped dude wearing an obviously over-accentuated suit and lookin' like a monster from Scooby-Doo. Most of the time he walks around, head down and eyes rolled back, either serving food or closing doors. The most menacing thing about him is his stubble.

So, these four kids, two girls and two guys from the local soda shop, get on a boat and find an island 40 miles off shore that no one really knows about. This island is populated by a vampish bad actress and her Scooby-Doo zombie who spend their days testing different gases with which to bomb America with. They've managed to secure a gorilla, which they smoke out in a spaciously built gas room (with a wooden door), and aside from that spend their days hating America, passing gas, and waiting for dipshit teenagers to wander onto the island.

So, these four teenage dipshits wander onto the island.

And despite getting chased by this woman and her Scooby-Doo zombie from the git-go, decide to go to her house and ask for help when their boat ends up missing.

It should be noted that the "creepy lair" of the vampish bad actress looks like little more than the kitchen and dining room of a low-scale B&B. Suffice to say, you can't have a functional mad scientist lair equipped with white, glass front cabinets full of china and sliver.

Naturally, she lures the gaggle of dipshits into the basement and puts them in a giant cage. She wants to use them as test subjects for her zombie gas that she intends to bomb America with using the help of two suit-wearing America haters from Someplace Other Than America.

One thing this vampish bad actress does not know, however, is that American teenagers roam in packs. And there's an extra couple out there ready to meddle in her nefarious scheme.

Evidently the heftiest portion of the budget for this movie went towards renting the gorilla costume. Depicted on the box art and movie poster carrying a helpless human woman, the actual gorilla from TEENAGE ZOMBIES did little more than inhale a room full of bong smoke and later walk slowly across the room to lean on a table. The later probably the result of the former. I only walked out of the room for a brief portion of the movie near the end, but I never saw the gorilla do anything else, girl-laden or otherwise. Still, the rental on that suit must have been massive, because it is definitely the key-stone attraction on all of the publicity.

Another defining characteristic of this movie is the outrageously loud and out-of-place score. Many mundane moments, such as any of the frequent beach walking scenes or trips by the china cabinet, is made much more intense by the repetitious blaring and insistance of trumpet and violin urgency.

The real message of this movie is that horseback riding is Squaresville, daddy-O. As the young, weary of water skiing teens leap into a convertible at the end of the film, one of them asks what they should do next and another responds with the horseback riding suggestion.

They beat him soundly while laughing.

What a fun movie.