Long Beach's role in the Zombie Apocalypse
People talk about zombies all day long these days. It's like we've all almost run out of topics and we're now deep into the Zs. Everything from who to recruit for your team in the coming Zombie Apocalypse to what's the deal with fast zombies, and is it even fair to have fast zombies?
Before we move on to Zoroastrianism and the Zuider Zee, the zombie discussion can't be wrapped up until we check out Long Beach's great and enduring contribution to zombieism in the form of the 1964 classic - and we use the term with all the gravatus it deserves - film "The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?"
The $38,000 monster epic was filmed largely on location at the Pike amusement park in Long Beach, which is meant to resemble a murky and sinister version of Brooklyn's Coney Island.
You're treated to a tour of the old park, with good looks at the venerable Cyclone Racer and the always sort-of-dicey Laff in the Dark funhouse, featuring the cackling animatronic Laughing Sal and Laughing Sam and Blackie the Barker.
It was billed as the first monster musical, and we've seen nothing to contradict that bold statement. Just one month later, the No. 2 monster musical, "The Horror of Party Beach," was released.
The film's poster maintained that not only was it filmed in Eastman Color, but also Terrordrama, which, judging by the looks of the movie today, means muddy and scratchy.
That wasn't enough: It was also billed as featuring "Hallucinogenic Hypnovision," which sounds like some sort of techno-acid but was merely a bunch of guys running into the theater at intervals to scare the crowd, in the off chance that the movie wasn't doing a good enough job.
The movie itself was written and directed by Ray Dennis Steckler, who also starred in the film using the pseudonym Cash Flagg.
We suppose we need a spoiler alert here, though, really, you're pretty dialed in on the plot after you read the title of the film.
Juvenile delinquent Jerry (Flagg/Steckler), his gal Angela and third-wheel Harold decide to have a nice time at a carnival.
Things go sideways pretty quickly with a dance number by an alcoholic woman, a stripper who hypnotizes Jerry, causing him to dump his girl to go see the stripper's act, and a fortune-teller who turns Jerry into a zombie by using a spiraling hypno-wheel, so he starts killing people. Later, he runs off to the beach where he's shot by the cops.
It's not as good as it sounds.
All this macabre mayhem is wrapped around musical numbers ("It Hurts," "Shook Out of Shape"), strip acts, swirling psycho-hypno effects, a hunchback who looks like the cover of Captain Beefheart's "Trout Mask Replica," and a revue of song-and-dance routines, many of which are filmed at the Pike, with others performed and filmed at an abandoned Masonic Temple in Glendale owned by Rock Hudson. We know: It's hard to believe this isn't a movie beloved by all.
Was "The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?" the best zombie picture ever made? Perhaps not. That's still under discussion.
Was "The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?" the worst zombie movie ever made? Perhaps. Probably. A 2004 DVD, "The 50 Worst Movies Ever Made," has it as the worst. Ever. Not worst zombie film; the worst film. The list-making website oddee.com had "The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?" as the No. 1 worst movie title of all time.
Even so, the crew was not without talent. The cast, maybe, was without talent (though a young James Woods is rumored to have been among the extras), but not the cinematography staff.
The three lensmen on the film were Joseph V. Mascelli, who, as a civilian cinematographer for the Air Force, shot the aerial footage of the first H-bomb test at Bikini Atoll and wrote the biblical "The Five C's of Cinamatography"; the late Laszlo Kovacs, who would go on to work on "Easy Rider," "Ghostbusters," "Miss Congeniality" and many other films; and Vilmos Zsigmond, who made "The Deer Hunter," "McCabe and Mrs. Miller," "Deliverance" and won an Oscar for "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."
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