Astro-Zombies (1968) aka Astro-Vampires
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 32 Dali minutes, rated 3.3 by 1,998 suckers.
Genre: Junk.
Verdict: Ditto.
Ah, our old friend the mad scientist, Dr Professor Emeritus John Carradine, is at it again with his mute and deformed Igor. After being dismissed from The AeroSpace program for ‘going too far’ (huh? Isn’t going far the point of the space program?) and after reading Dr Frankenstein’s case notes, JC has set about creating a superhuman for space flight by piecing together a creature from corpses gathered by Deformed Igor. Warning! This is not someone to sit next to on the bus as it goes through a tunnel.
The creature Doc enlivens with a tweet is badder and madder than is even producer-director Ted V. Mikels and sets about killing scantily-clad young women to 1960s A-Go-Go music. A single Ford Mustang figures in several of the scenes. (Is this the Director’s own wheels being used as a tax write-off?)
Those who originally funded Frankenstein’s nationally competitive grant want to claim the intellectual property to show community impact of the research and in no time at all the FBI, the ARC, the CIA, the NH&MRC, the SPCA, and — whoa! — Santana are in pursuit. The fraternity brothers were gripped by the latter’s frontal assembly.
It gets worse, but it goes on. There are so many gaps and gaffs it is impossible to summarise and it takes itself so seriously that it is as digestible as stone soup. Yet it had long-delayed progeny in Mark of the Astro-Zombies (2004), Astro-Zombies: M3 – Cloned (2010), and Astro-Zombies M4: Invaders from Cyberspace (2012). Yes these titles are listed on the IMDb. ‘But what about M2,’ asked the fraternity brothers?
JC once claimed that he had appeared in more movies than any other single actor. On some days he did his part in three films like this Z-grade effort. The IMDb credits him with 351 appearances and that is surely a type-two error. In comparison, Wendall Corey, who also graces this egregious effort, has a mere 79 credits, including Women of the Prehistoric Planet (1966), discussed elsewhere on this blog. For the cognoscenti Corey co-starred with the imperishable Montgomery Clift in a remarkable film called The Search (1948).
By the way, the script is credited to Princeton graduate and one-time US Navy salt Trapper John. He hung up his typewriter after this disaster and dedicated himself to living it down. More Purgatorio for you, Trapper.