Creature of the Walking Dead (1965)

The Fountain of Youth is filled with blood.

Jerry Warren: two words to fill the heart of a bad movie lover with joy (or perhaps despair?!) Jerry ‘made’ 11 movies in his less than stellar career. The inverted commas are there because some of Jerry’s films were mostly other people’s work. He’d buy Mexican horror movies, shoot new U.S. footage in English and blu-tak the results into a seamless whole.

Or a god-awful, incoherent mess, depending on your point of view.

‘Creature of the Walking Dead’ (1965) is one of the best, or worst, examples. It started life as ‘La Marca del Muerto’ (1961), a flick about a scientist who decides to carry on his long dead father’s experiments into immortality and then resurrects him! Unfortunately, Dad was a bit of a nut job before he died and a couple of decades in a crypt hasn’t improved his sanity. The Mexican film actually looks ok; its what Jerry does with it that turns into a classic of bad cinema.

We begin with a static shot full of shadows (and possibly trees? It’s hard to see). Here we meet VoiceOver Man. He gives us the lowdown on his father, Professor Malthus, and his obsession with eternal life. In fact, he waffles on for a good few minutes about it. The shot never changes. Eventually, the credits roll. Very slowly. Then we get some of the original film as a weird looking old man kidnaps a girl off the street and takes her to his secret lab. He’s about to perform a homemade blood transfusion when he’s interrupted by a noise. Going out, he’s nicked by the local rozzers who are a bit miffed about all the girls missing in town. A few seconds later and he’s been convicted and hanged.

‘Your right shoulder needs a lot of work!’

Now we cut to one of Jerry’s scenes; two policeman discussing the case while one of them gets a massage. This treatment is curious as it seems to focus exclusively on his right upper arm. Obviously, he has some serious problem with it. The chat is 1 part exposition and 9 parts drivel. And, again, the camera never moves. We just get 2 cuts towards the end of the scene, which feels like it goes on for at least ten weeks.

Flash forward to modern times and the nut job’s son (a doctor/scientist?) is off to see the old house he has just inherited from his father (blimey, probate court can really tie things up for a while). We know this is what’s happening because Jerry includes a totally unconvincing cutaway of ‘his’ nurse having a one-sided telephone conversation with the Doc’s fiancé. When he goes rambling around the old man’s pile (helpfully accompanied by VoiceOver Man), he finds the secret lab and experimental journals (uh-oh). Inspired, he takes a quick trip to the boneyard, digs up Dad and brings him back to the lab, which is no longer covered in dust and cobwebs but is ready to go (nice work with the scissors there, Jerry). We are about halfway through the movie at this point and the main character hasn’t delivered one line of dialogue!

With Dad back in the land of the living, girls start to vanish and we meet the local cops in another of Jerry’s scintillating add-ons. Fiancé confronts son about what’s going on (after another brilliant cutaway to ‘her’ servant) and this is where Jerry rises to the occasion. How to deal with an extended dialogue scene in Spanish? Simple; turn the volume right down and let VoiceOver Man take up the slack & explain what they’re saying. Brilliant. Finally, with events jumping to their thrilling conclusion, Jerry pulls his last master stroke. One of the American detectives goes to visit a medium we met in an earlier scene. The camera actually pans across from the cop to the group having a seance. It’s an exciting camera move (well, the only one really) so it was probably in the trailer. Medium and detective then have a good 5 minute chat about not very much at all. The camera doesn’t move again, of course. Why is this scene such a stroke of genius? Because it happens in the last 10 minutes of the movie! Of course neither character appears in the fiery climax. I mean, how could they? They were in a different film.

The alleged ‘star’ of the film is the butch sounding Rock Madison who plays ‘Ed, a Cop’. Madison was also the lead in Warren’s Yeti monster mash ‘Man Beast’ (1956). Problem was that Madison didn’t actually exist – Warren made him up for the marquee value of the ‘name’ and to make the cast look bigger! Jerry, you were truly a genius…

What more is there to say? Further comment would seem unnecessary. I don’t know how good ‘La Marco del Muerto (1961) may be but I do know that ‘Creature of the Walking Dead’ (1965) is simply one of the worst films I have ever seen. And I’ve seen a lot of bad movies!