Teenage Zombies (1959)

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Disappointment for a huge fan!

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

You would think 70 minutes wouldn't be enough time for a movie to be too long and boring but you'd be wrong. This flick uses the same old tricks of the extreme tight shot and people walking down the same path a dozen times.When that wears thin they throw in some crappy acting powered by a non-existent story. The main characters go to a mysterious island and decide splitting up is a good idea.When they all get caught and thrown in cages,one guy manages to break the lock on the guys cage and goes on to tell the girls it's not a good idea to break the lock on their cage yet. And it doesn't end up affecting the story!! To make sure the movie was total poo they even threw in a few silent fights that were as exciting as watching gay cowboys eat pudding.

By any measurement, this is a horrible film.The plot is silly.The acting is non-existent.The directions is worse than amateurish.There really is nothing to recommend unless you want to see what the The Plot.Teenagers Reg, Skip, Julie and Pam go out for an afternoon of water skiing on a nice day. They come ashore on an island that is being used as a testing center for a scientist and agents from "an eastern power." They seek to turn the people of the United States into easily controlled zombie like creatures. The agents steal Reg's boat, stranding the teens on the island. The four friends are then held captive in cages able only to speculate on their fate. Though they have already been testing the formula on convicts and drunks, the enemy scientist and agents plan to conduct final tests on the teens before they use it on the rest of America. Meanwhile, two of their friends, whom the captives had planned to meet later, search for their missing friends. After a series of suspicious encounters, they urge the corrupt sheriff to search the island where their friends are trapped.

I downloaded this black-and-white film for free (it's public domain) from the Archive.com website. It is about six teenagers (three boys / three girls) who stumble across a sinister Russian plot to zombify major American cities. The experiments for this plan are being carried out on an undiscovered island "thirty or forty miles out" on a lake (?!!). Four of the curious teenagers are taken captive by a creepy woman scientist and her hulking zombie man-servant, and the other two attempt to save them and thwart the Russian plot.Well folks, it's not quite as bad as Monster-A-Go-Go in my opinion but it's just about as bad. The teenage actors are total no-names who were probably paid 50 bucks each to appear in this waste of celluloid. Their acting is what I would expect of some high school sophomores who were looking for a way to get out of summer school that summer. As noted by other reviewers, the "cage" they were held in was a complete joke, the "night" sequences were bright as midday, and the bumbling Russian agents were equally as laughable. All in all, it's really a terrible film. I don't believe it was ever lampooned by the MST3K crew; too bad - Teenage Zombies was an oversight on their part.

this was pretty stooooopid. the only thing missing were those cute little Bots or Abbot and Costello.usually i give movies that are so bad they are good ten star ratings because they actually do constitute good entertainment and are often footnotes in cinema and Hollywood history. i only gave this film one star because i wanted to make a point that not every retro bad flick is always that noteworthy. there wasn't anything particularly noteworthy or exceptional about this. don't get me wrong. it was really, really bad and embarrassingly cheap, but it was pretty typical of the rip off crap they usually tried to take drive-in audiences for a lot around this time period. i'm surprised half the drive-in didn't honk their horns, demand their money back, and make a hasty exit for their home TV sets when seeing stuff like this. i mean like whatta rip.it was pretty funny though. but this lacked the silly imagination of a Eddie Wood or the inane craziness of a 'Skydivers' or Arch Hall movie. the filmmakers arrived at their knuckleheaded conclusions out of a sort of mundane, pedestrian lack of imagination that was sort of a turn off. the monkey suit was tardo but not nearly as over the top as Ro-man. the teen-agers didn't really interest me except for hoping that someone might kill them. the so-called scientist looked liked Gloria Vanderbilt or something. Ivan was kinda scary though.the only redeeming thing of interest here was the premise of the "zombification". the reason for it was to turn the entire population of Amerika into a bunch of "easily controlled slave workers". Hmmmmmm. seems eerily familiar to the mindless protestant work ethic practiced in the work force of today. maybe this movie is relevant after all.