You distract the director while I climb out the window!
I hate it when a movie made as a high school project makes it onto the air, and I think that’s the origin of Teenage Zombies (1958). This is the story of a mysterious island off the coast where four kids stop to visit in their homemade speedboat. They find people, strange shambling people, being led about, and they make a run for their boat, but it’s missing! Back to the house, and after some clumsily barbed banter, her personal servant, Ivan, takes them prisoner and they’re locked up behind bars.
Turns out the mysterious woman is heading up a research laboratory in search of a drug which, when released into the atmosphere, will turn everyone into soul-less slaves. Who’s she working for? Well, her bosses show up, and it turns out an unnamed foreign power wants to knock the ol’ United States over.
But a couple of more kids show up in something that probably couldn’t even make the trip to the island, see that something’s going on, and return to the mainland to insist the sheriff take them with when he searches the island. Meanwhile, the two boys have picked the lock and are plotting how to escape, but the girls are still trapped.
In a rock-em-sock-em climax, we discover the sheriff is in cahoots – it explains all of his missing prisoners, we inconveniently learn later – but in a falling out, he gets the short end of the stick. Then the good guys defeat the bad guys and the Army gives them all medals.
Seriously.
Let’s see here. Bad dialogue, echoing sound, blurry cinematography, wooden acting, awful plot, no horror (except in the creation of this bomb), and then there was this ape that appeared at the end to take care of Ivan. I think that was the ape’s only role. Or was it a gorilla? And the fight scene just ground on and on. I think it was all just clumsy dancing.
Don’t waste your time on this third-rate junker.
