...Not exactly a masterpiece of film-making though. "The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?" - Which fan of cult cinema and amusing camp stuff could possibly resist a title like this? No one, of course, especially since Ray Dennis Steckler's 1964 film has the reputation of being one of the most outrageously awful things ever brought to screen. A reputation which is not completely justified, in my opinion, as while "The Incredibly Strange Creatures..." is doubtlessly a 'bad classic', it is in no way as awful as some other contemporary bombs, such as "Eegah" (1962) or the incredibly tedious "Beast of Yucca Flats" (1961), which also appear on the bottom 100 list of the all-time worst on this site. "The Incredibly Strange Creatures..." is stupid, ridiculous and miserably acted beyond belief, no doubt, but, hey - at least it is entertaining (which really cannot be said about "Eegah" or "The Beastof Yucca Flats"). As a matter of fact, this film is incredibly entertaining for its unintentional fun-factor, even though it sometimes gets very tedious in-between. It doesn't compare to the crème de la crème of bad movies, such as Ed Wood's wonderful "Plan 9 From Outer Space", but at least the film manages to be far more entertaining than some other films which share its bad reputation.

The most mixed-up thing about the film are actually not any Zombies (?), but the incredibly confused plot itself. Most of the film is set on a carnival, where a gypsy fortune teller is vengeful for whatever reason. Then there's a young couple who get mixed up by her desire for vengeance. And there's the couple's rock'n'roller friend with greasy hair. And there's an exotic dancer who likes to drink... or something. The plot really doesn't make a lot of sense, and one can be prepared to have forgotten half of it an hour after watching the film, but, as said above, at least it entertains. Overall this is recommendable to fans of bad cinema and cult stuff as well as people who simply like a good laugh. People who only like the "Citizen Kane" type of cinema should avoid this like the plague. There's no doubt that "The Incredibly Strange Creatures..." is incredibly awful, but neither is there a doubt that it's amusing.

This is a fascinating artifact from another era of pop culture; From the convoluted title (complete with "!!?" at the end) to the open mike "Amateur Night" numbers to the horribly muddled sound recording to the goofy throwaway dialog to the discombobulated ending to the paper-thin plot, this one has to be seen to be believed.

You know the old saw about a movie being 'like a train wreck - you can't look away'?? Well, imagine if a school bus ran into the train wreck and a 727 crashed on top of it and then a herd of lemmings swarmed over the smoking remains on their way to go over a cliff. And then the Jolly Green Giant picked up everything and threw it over the mountain range and into the next state.

The movie piles one jarring, disorienting choice after another in rapid succession. First 'Jerry' rubs boogers out of his eyes on camera, then 'Harold' is jamming our ears with his Lithuanian/Chicano accent, and then 'Angela' throws off the composition of an entire scene with her Mile High Beehive of Hair, following which a bunch of 'dancers' perform bad choreography with all the precision of a dance recital for kindergarten girls, and then some dick-weed who can't carry a tune in a bucket sings the most insipid love song in the history of music while strumming a guitar that sounds like a ukulele. Then Elizabeth Taylor spins a pinwheel to make Jerry commit badly staged murder to cover up the fact that she threw acid in the face of a lumpy alcoholic, following which Jerry dreams that he got his face painted at a Renaissance festival and leaps about like a Thompson's Gazelle while a montage of women point and laugh at him. Then a mechanical wind-up monkey shrieks that we should "GET YOUR TICKETS HERE!! GET YOUR TICKETS HERE!!!" and a bunch of people who previously got acid thrown in their face and were drawn by the Rat Fink Hod Rod guy and have apparently been living on Angel Dust and Pop Tarts break loose and rampage through an Inuit/Swedish/African dance revue until the police come and shoot everyone, including Jerry who also had acid thrown in his face just before the titular 'zombies' got loose. Oh, and there's no moral, THE END.

I'm making the movie sound more coherent than it really is.

And yet, the whole mess is somehow entertaining and amusing, and I ended up being glad I saw it. If I were to meet Steckler (unlikely), I'd shake his hand and comment on how weird the movie was and ask him "WHAT THE HELL WAS HE THINKING?" when he made it.

MST's riffs on the movie are inspired and their version is worth getting hold of. But the movie stand on its own as a lunatic pinball of weirdness, careening randomly off the walls of our expectations of pop culture.

See it if you have a fondness for silly stuff. Otherwise, stay far, far away.

If there were only words in the English language to describe how luridly horrid this film really is.It features some of worst acting EVER,has reams of brain-numbing dialogue,and dance numbers so badly done they must have been choreographed by Satan himself.I would attempt to give you a plot outline,but I never could find anything that even RESEMBLED a plot line.If there was one,it was some sort of post psychotic,Tarintino/Hitchcock nightmare,but only in a horrible mind-devouring way.As if Kafka had written it after a four week acid trip/rotgut moonshine drunk.If that were it's only problem it would have been bad enough.But,the wost part is the absoluetly pathetic special effects/set design/costuming.All were absolutely lame to the max.

If you love terribly disgustingly awful films, then this is one you have to see.Otherwise,avoid this film like a dose of the clap.This movie will make you wish YOU COULD stop living,and become blind,deaf,or anything that will allow you to never see anything resembling this film.Ydnar