Teenage Zombies / Teenage Torture (1959) -*½

     Oh no… It’s Jerry Warren again. Worse yet, it’s Jerry Warren again with a movie he made from the script up, so we don’t even get to enjoy any broken bits and pieces of some interesting foreign cheapie that never received a proper American release! Teenage Zombies came very early in Warren’s career, too, so you can layer the faults of inexperience atop all the other kinds of ineptitude that we can typically expect from him. Although the film went into general release in 1959, its copyright notice reads 1958, and there are unconfirmed reports that it was shown on some limited basis as early as 1957. Maybe Warren (who produced Teenage Zombies as well as writing and directing it) shopped a rough cut around at various film festivals and trade events? What’s more, Warren is supposed to have written the screenplay on his 1956 honeymoon with his first wife, Brianne Murphy, so it’s possible that on a conceptual level, Teenage Zombies predates even his official debut, the justly forgotten Abominable Snowman stinker Man-Beast. In any case, this movie is no damn good at all, although it does hold a modicum of pathological interest via the puzzle of how a film about a communist mad scientist femme fatale seeking to conquer America with mind-erasing gas could possibly be just as boring as The Incredible Petrified World, in which people do nothing but to wander around in caves for 70 minutes.

     Teenaged water-skiing enthusiasts Regg (Don Sullivan, from The Monster of Piedras Blancas and The Giant Gila Monster) and Julie (Mitzi Alpertson) are hanging out at the local malt shop, planning— that’s right— a water-skiing excursion on the Salton Sea. Their even dorkier buddy, Morrie (Jay Hawk), attempts to derail the scheme in favor of his own recreational obsession, horseback riding, but Regg and Julie aren’t having it. Morrie splits, and his place at the table (along with most of Julie’s milkshake) is taken by another boy called Skip (Paul Pepper), who has an idea for improving the plan instead of scuppering it. Skip has learned that there’s an uncharted island in the Salton Sea, and his source for this surprising intel has even told him how to find it. Wouldn’t it be cool for Regg and his friends to follow up their water-skiing with a picnic in a place that doesn’t officially exist? Regg and Julie agree, and the next time we see them, they, Skip, and Skip’s girlfriend, Pam (the aforementioned Brianne Murphy, whom we’ve seen before just briefly as one of the villain’s human hunting trophies in Bloodlust!), they’re basking in the sun beside Regg’s tied-up speedboat on a none-too-attractive beach.

     Naturally it takes the four kids only a little while to grasp the long-term potential in their picnic spot. I mean, what better youth hangout could there be than an entire island that adults have never even heard of? It obviously behooves them, though, to do some exploring, so as to make sure the place really is as deserted as it looks. Regg and his friends begin by making a circuit of the shoreline, but by the time they return to their starting point, the boat has astonishingly gone missing! Regg and Skip alike are certain that they moored it too securely for the feeble little breakers to drag it away, which can mean only that there’s somebody else here after all, lurking in the island’s interior. Boy, is there ever! Tucked away at the center of the isle, where no one would see it from the water even if they managed to discover the island itself, is the home of Dr. Myra (Katherine Victor, whom Warren would later edit into the films that became Creature of the Walking Dead and Invasion of the Animal People) and her army of chemically zombified slaves. You might think of her as the lead contractor on a project to facilitate a communist takeover of the United States by chemially depriving its people of the will to resist. And wouldn’t you know it, a pack of vigorous young guinea pigs on whom to test the latest iteration of her consciousness-suppressing nerve gas is just the thing she needs right now. The boys manage to elude Myra for a while, but the girls are swiftly captured by Ivan (Chuck Niles, from Hand of Death and Invisible Invaders), the most successful result to date of the mad doctor’s experiments.

     When Regg and the others don’t come back from their water-skiing trip in a timely manner, Morrie and his girlfriend, Dotty (Nan Green), eventually get sufficiently worried to alert the local sheriff (Mike Concannon, from Terror of the Bloodhunters) to their disappearance. The sheriff dutifully launches a foray out onto the Salton Sea, but it’s a damned big lake, and it’s already late in the day when he gets started. Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t turn up anything. With the impulsiveness and obstinacy typical of youth, Morrie and Dotty take matters into their own hands at that point, borrowing a boat for a second search. Jerry Warren seems to forget here that the sheriff was supposedly driven back to shore by the setting sun, because the two teens have no difficulty at all finding Myra’s island. Nor do they have any trouble finding her house, although they don’t stay long after the doc assures them that she hasn’t seen any of their friends. Neither Morrie nor the rather more perceptive Dotty will be able to explain why later on, but they become convinced at once that Myra is lying— and if that’s true, than there’s simply no non-nefarious reason for her deception that they can imagine. Then, while departing from the island, the kids catch Whorf (Steve Conte, of The Kindred and Face of the Screaming Werewolf) and Brandt (J.L.D. Morrison, whose house in Brentwood supplied the amusingly frumpy interiors for Dr. Myra’s lair), the foreign agents for whom Myra has been working, arriving to check up on her progress.

     What brings Whorf and Brandt to the island today is that their ultimate bosses in the Politburo are getting antsy to launch some kind of attack against the capitalist West. Obviously they could use hydrogen bombs— and they will if it comes to that— but they’d still rather do it Myra’s way if she can get them the desired results soon. Not only would it avoid all the physical destruction of a nuclear attack, preserving America’s cities and industrial base for the cause of red revolution, but it would also provide a large, tractable populace, already experienced in the use of the nation’s advanced machinery and equipment. The difficulty on Myra’s end has been in developing a chemical weapon that does exactly the right amount of what it’s supposed to do. As she demonstrates to her paymasters, the first version of her zombie gas rendered the subject totally catatonic, plunged permanently into a kind of waking coma in which they could neither act on their own initiative nor carry out instructions of any kind. Later formulations had less catastrophic effect on the higher mental functions, but required regular maintenance doses to keep the subject entranced; that was no good for the Kremlin’s purposes, either, unless Khrushchev would like to spend the rest of time re-bombing America with fresh gas canisters every week or two. With the newest recipe, though, Myra thinks she finally has something close to what Whorf and Brandt really want. Her animal experiments so far suggest that its only drawback is that the effects are reversible, albeit only with a special drug that she developed for reasons that don’t make a lot of sense if the whole point of the exercise is to create zombies that can’t be cured. In any case, it’s this latest zombie gas that Myra intends to test on the four teens now locked in her basement.

     Meanwhile, back on the mainland, Morrie and Dotty return to the sheriff’s office first thing in the morning to report the results of their own search for their friends. The sheriff takes some convincing, but he does concede that two strangers boating out to an island that isn’t on the map after dark sounds like something he ought to look into at the very least. He’ll need Morrie and Dotty to lead the way, of course, but that’s no problem. The sheriff would have had a hard time getting them to stay behind anyway. There’s just one thing the two teens haven’t thought of. The Salton Sea might be a big lake, but this town is very small. Myra has a great many variously unsatisfactory zombies hanging around her compound, so she’s obviously been at this a while. Do you really believe that she, Whorf, and Brandt could have kept an operation like theirs running for so long, or victimized so many people, without some local authority figure covering for them? That’s right— the sheriff’s in on the conspiracy, too, and Morrie and Dotty are walking into a trap. It’s just a good thing that Regg and Skip are smarter than they look, and have been working on an escape plan ever since they fell into Dr. Myra’s clutches.

     The first thing you’ll notice about Teenage Zombies is that Jerry Warren means by that title something completely different from what most modern viewers would expect. That shouldn’t be a surprise, though, because it was the late 1950’s, and most of what we now think of as “zombie movies” were still years in the future. The second thing you’ll notice, however, is that even on its own terms, Teenage Zombies features an extraordinary paucity of teenage zombies. It’s more “teenagers menaced with the possibility of turning into zombies,” which might help explain why some later distributor reportedly tried releasing it as Teenage Torture instead. In any case, what we have here is really a totally by-the-numbers mid-century mad science flick. It even has the most indispensable prop of such films, a man-in-a-suit gorilla that eventually escapes confinement, and climaxes its involvement in the story by carrying around an unconscious girl. Adjust your expectations accordingly.

     Mind you, no matter how far or in what direction you adjust them, Teenage Zombies is still going to disappoint you. Rarely has such a gonzo premise yielded a film of such paltry entertainment value. For instance, would you believe that for all the protagonists’ fixation on water skiing (seriously— for practically the whole first act, they speak of nothing else!), Warren never even bothered to film the kids actually doing it? Don’t get me wrong here— I’m not asking for water-skiing. It’s just that omitting it reveals an alarmingly fanatical dedication to the maxim that talk is cheap, but action costs money. Showing the girls zipping around the lake in their bikinis would have been by far the easiest way to give the audience something to look at besides young putzes trooping in circles on the beach or various groups of characters yakking at each other on a handful of nearly featureless sets, and yet Warren foregoes it without a single apparent qualm. And speaking of featureless sets, you know your movie’s in trouble when a cast-member’s real-life kitchen holds more visual interest than a mad scientist’s laboratory! The mad scientist herself, meanwhile, holds interest in very much the wrong way. Katherine Victor is probably best known for playing the lead role in The Wild World of Batwoman, and her performance here has much the same vibe. Imagine walking in on a seventh-grade English teacher from the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio, just as she’s getting into the swing of some kinky roleplay scene that you don’t want to know the first fucking thing about, and you’ll have the general idea. Whorf and Brandt, for their parts, are the least impressive communist agents this side of The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues, which is a formidable accomplishment indeed. These guys should be selling vacuum cleaners door to door, not plotting the global overthrow of the bourgeoisie. And inevitably, all six of the young stars are just total nonentities. I tell you, it’s been a long time since I was this happy to see a guy in a gorilla suit show up!

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