Astro-Zombies
If asked to point to something - anything - in Astro-Zombies that proves conclusively that this film wasn’t made by Ed Wood, the only thing I’d be able to come up with is that this film is in colour. Not only does this film continue in the fine Woodite traditions of terrible plotting, cheesy globs of exposition masquerading as dialogue and special effects so cheap I find myself rendered speechless; it manages to go further and - in the title sequence - comes up with special effects that are both cheap and irrelevant. I mean, wind up robots and a toy tank? I can only assume that Gary R. Heacock, who put name to these special effects, had an eight year old son.
The plot is an unholy mess of genres involving mad scientist, Dr. DeMarco (John Carradine looking unnervingly similar to Bela Lugosi in Bride of the Monster) who - for the benefit of mankind, of course - has built a solar powered “astro-man” from the cadaver of a murderous psychopath. Of course, this astro-man (or “astro-zombie”, to use the “unscientific term”) goes on the rampage - killing people and stealing their organs. What can I say about the astro-zombie - some guy (Rod Wilmoth) running around in a cheap Halloween fright-mask generates giggles, not tension. And the dialogue DeMarco delivers to his mute assistant, Frenchot (William Bagdad) is amazing… how much pseudo-scientific waffle can one man fit into a single sentence? Watch this film to find out.
For some reason, Frenchot has a woman in a bikini strapped to a table in DeMarco’s Lab. This isn’t explained or justified apart from a single line from DeMarco about his experiments being more important than Frenchot’s. Given that Frenchot doesn’t come across as being smart, to say the least, we can write this off as being a piece of badly-executed and blatant exploitation. Still, it filled valuable minutes, which seems to be the purpose of most of the scenes in this film. Astro-Zombies is a twenty minute story with about seventy minutes of padding.
Hot on the trail of the astro-zombie and DeMarco is the most inept bunch of government agents ever to crawl onto celluloid - led by Chuck Edwards (Joe Hoover) these agents seem to do nothing but provide yet more padding and explore the depths into which dialogue can descend. I saw this film in the cinema and, as soon as Chuck walked onto the set, the entire audience burst into laughter - to cast a leading man with so little charisma takes a special sort of skill. In fact I’d go further - not only does he lack charisma, he seems to generate some sort of anti-charisma. Every time he looks directly at the camera and grins his (not very) winning smile - which is often - you want to scream “For God’s Sake Man, Try Acting!”.
And the third - I don’t want to dignify this by calling it a story arc - part of the film involves a group of spies led by Satana (Tura Satana) who want to gain the astro-man technology for their own unscrupulous ends. Tura Satana is the one high point of this entire sorry mess - she oozes the sort of dangerous sexiness that was put to such good effect in Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! And which is totally wasted here. As soon as you see her, in one of those slit skits smoulderingly smoking an entire cigarette (more padding) you just know that we have a villain that enjoys her villainy - and she does, gleefully murdering her way towards the climactic scene at DeMarco’s lab.
Reading back through this review, I have to apologise for comparing Astro-Zombies to anything that Ed Wood put his name to - Astro-Zombies is much, much worse. This is a truly awful film and one that should be avoided by anyone with a modicum of taste. I loved every minute of it!
Sunday 28 Jan 2001 | Paul Pritchard | Horror
