Earlier today I accidentally viewed on the internet a man being decapitated via chainsaw. After viewing Teenage Zombies hours later I have come to the conclusion I would very much like to be that man in the video.I figured to myself- "Well hey, here's a 1950's film entitled 'Teenage Zombies'. Perhaps it will subtly play on American angst towards youth and family values, maybe even a little nod towards gender issues in post war America, hell this film could be Rebel without a Cause but with Zombies!"... How wrong I was. What we actually have in this film is acting filled with more wood than a pornstar's pants, a plot so obviously about American fears of the soviets it loses all effect and one zombie, who is called Ivan, a middle aged brainless slave, dumb but strong, perving on the American female who yes, they called Ivan, subtly done Jerry. DOWN WITH COMMUNISM!All in all, I could say so much about this film, I actually find it a little sad that the kids in this movie probably considered it their big break, when in reality most of them never acted again. I'll close by saying this; if you're drunk, drugged off your tits, or maybe even if you hate yourself and can't find a razor blade, watch this film. If you're none of these things, please, just don't.

Plot Synopsis: A group of teenagers travel to a mysterious island in order to explore it. They are then captured by a mad scientist who, in league with a terrorist faction, is working on a gas that will cause all those exposed to it to become zombie slaves. While the teenagers hatch an escape plan, their friends try to get the police to help them in locating the missing teens.Film Review: During the mid-to-late 1950s, there was a spate of genre films that catered to young audiences by featuring teenage monsters. Teenage Zombies was one such example, directed by Jerry Warren, a director who comes from a small mindset of directors who follow an almost unique approach to filmmaking.Warren's approach is of a simplistic nature that resembles more of a stage play than an actual motion picture. The camera stays locked in one place, almost never moving; the actors stand rooted to one spot while reading their lines off an unseen cue card; the sets consist of a couple of walls only (which would save the producers a lot of money in set design). Whatever other faults the film has, the style alone condemns it to mediocrity (thing is, the style would reappear in the late 1980s, with Tim Kincaid modifying the style to make his own films – see my review on BREEDERS (1986) for more information).Style aside, the film's main problem is that it suffers from a real bomb of a script. Jaques Lecotier is perhaps one of the worst scribes in the whole of 1950s genre cinema. His script for Teenage Zombies is so bad that it would rival Ed Wood's works for sheer ineptitude - & Wood's films had the benefit of unintentional hilarity. The script is a mix of clichés & the sort of brainwashing that John Carpenter would later expose in the 80's nutty conspiracy classic THEY LIVE. There is a mad scientist (a staple cliché in most 50's B-films), who is working with (possibly Communist) terrorists in order to turn the USA into a nation of zombie slaves by using a special gas. This idea alone is so improbable that it causes the viewer to either groan in disbelief or laugh – the very idea of releasing a gas to turn a country into zombie slaves is really stupid considering the size of the target country, in this case the USA (although Lecotier seems to be aware of this, adding some dialogue that suggest the gas is not effective enough to take over the entire country, as well as having some side-effects). Not just that, the teenagers shown here suffer from some real bad one-dimensional stereotypes – the males are brave & daring while the females simply stand around waiting to be rescued. The young hero of the piece has an unhealthy obsession with his speedboat & his friends respect adults, even when it becomes painfully obvious that the adults in question are clearly up to no good (one thing that stood out in my mind was that the fact that the young characters were probably the victims of some kind of 1950's government conspiracy to keep young audiences from rising above their stations – something that would collapse with the coming of the 1960s). To Lecotier's credit, he does manage to throw in a sense of irony which almost salvages the film – the only way to restore their zombified friends is for them to expose the scientist to the gas & order her to give them the antidote!

Six all American Eisenhower era kids decide to go water-skiing or at least four of the six do. When the four fail to show up, the other two go looking for their friends.The two who are searching come across this island in the middle of their lake inhabited by a strange scientist woman, her Igor like companion and a bunch of mindless men walking around in a trance. It's those zombies that no doubt they've seen in several horror flicks when they've gone to drive-ins. And could their friends be becoming Teenage Zombies?It's a lot worse than that because our lady scientist who's a poor woman's Gale Sondergaard is a Russian agent. She's experimenting with nerve gas and a way to deliver it in quantity so that they can turn New York, Boston, or Chicago, etc. into a city of zombies, though some might argue that's already happened. In fact she's begging her superiors for more time because the Russians are getting ready with an H-Bomb attack, but her method would be so much neater and would leave all those nice cities intact with a population of slaves.Teenage Zombies has a no name cast most of whom I won't mention because you've never heard of them. I've seen better acting in junior high school productions, especially from the young folks. The sound quality is horrible and the film looks like it was shot from my father's old Bell&Howell.But Katherine Victor who played the lady Russian scientist was a real hoot. This was her second film, she was in another science fiction travesty, Mesa of Lost Women first. If anything Teenage Zombies was an improvement.It says here that the film was released in 1959, but when I saw the film the credits clearly said 1957. The fact that it took two years before the producers inflicted it on the movie-going public should say volumes.

The plot is typical B-movie stuff. Four teenagers are out boating and water-skiing (which is implied, as there is no footage of water-skiing at all in the film), and accidentally discover an island that's run by a mad scientist who intends to use some kind of nerve gas to turn the entire U.S. population into zombies (the mind controlled kind, not the flesh eating variety). The teenagers end up getting captured and it's up to their friends and the local authorities to bail them out.Pretty much everything about this film is bad. The directing is terrible. It was like the director had no idea what he was doing. Sort of like Ed Wood, but in a really bad way. The acting, if you want to call it that, is pretty much non-existent. The writing is excruciatingly dull and the dialogue is pointless, cornball, and delivered with the fervor of someone in a coma. Seriously, someone would speak their lines then there's this odd silence before anyone else would say anything. Anyone who was a zombie just acted as though they were in a trance or something, and did the bidding of whoever was controlling them. I think the effects were only temporary as well, but I don't remember.A few saving graces was the gorilla and the fight scene near the end. Although I also thought the lead zombie was kinda cool in a silly sort of way. Everything else about the film is pretty forgettable, but I guess it's worth checking out at least once.