#20 The Astro Zombies(Ted V. Mikels, 1968)

Ed Wood? Doris Wishman? AMATEURS (or perhaps even worse, PROFESSIONALS). With “The Astro Zombies”, Ted V. Mikels gives us the absolute zenith of ‘60s trash cinema, standing proud in its rejection of rudimentary film-making logic, its defiance of all human reason.

Do not ask why this or that shot was included in the film. Do not ask why all this is happening, or what any of it is supposed to mean. As soon as you starting questioning what you are seeing, you will be lost. And yet the questions remain.

Why do the opening credits play out over footage of some toy robots and tanks in a quarry, accompanied by a soundtrack that sounds like it was recorded straight off an old war movie? What exactly is it that separates these ‘Astro Zombies’ from, say, a crazy dude with an impractical rubber mask on? What ARE those police guys in the head office that looks like someone’s living room with a world map hung on the wall talking about? How exactly does that guy using an oscillator to make a brain in a cake tin wobble prove that “one man’s thoughts can be transmitted directly to the brain of another”, and how does that then lead him directly to the notion of “building quasi-men to undertake interplanetary space flight with a steel skin that makes it impervious to micro-meteorites”? How does their conversation then manage to turn to the recent ‘mutilation murders’, which they decide “cannot be coincidental”? Was Wendell Corey reading his lines off a crib sheet on a table just below the bottom of the frame? And did they have to poke him with a stick to stop him falling asleep? Was it really necessary for that one sequence, in which John Carradine repairs a bit of his mad scientist apparatus by taking a small piece of circuit board out of a metal drawer and then slowly putting it back in again, to go on for, like, five minutes, complete with technical close-ups of utterly fake, purposeless objects? Come to think of it, why did they put such effort into building so much elaborate mad scientist gear and showing it all to us at length when none of it is really interesting or noteworthy in the slightest? And what is WITH that hunchback assistant guy anyway? Who’s the girl in the bikini who spends the entire movie politely chained to a slab in their lab, for no apparent reason? Why is it night, and then day, and then night again, and when that guy takes his girlfriend home to bed, it’s like midday again, only there are grasshoppers croaking away deafeningly? Does that means it’s night, or does it mean the Astro Zombie is close? What are those sort of weird, echoplexed burblings and rumblings and tape hiss noises that seem to play in the background throughout this whole movie? And am I the only one who finds them strangely soothing? Why don't ALL films have these noises?

(..pause for breath..)

What kind of crazy-ass foreign government uses a team of undercover agents consisting of Tura Satana, a knife-wielding Mexican gangster kid and a big, dumb Tor Johnson type guy in a porkpie hat? Furthermore, can I go and live in that country, wherever it is? Why does the sky keep changing colour? How can I even pass comment on the hero-guy’s plan to apprehend the Astro Zombie by sitting a pretty girl in a room and waiting until it turns up to get her? Has anyone ever actually managed to make sense of the sequence where those guys chase each other around a crummy looking swimming pool until Tura Satana shoots one of them? Where on earth did she get those astounding outfits? How awesome is the bit where the Astro Zombie ‘recharges’ itself by sticking a torch on it’s forehead and sprinting home? How can one movie manage to pack so many hare-brained schemes and baffling notions into eighty minutes and STILL find time for so much joyously interminable ‘point the camera out the car window’ suburban travelogue footage? And hold on, wow, are you telling us that thing’s supposed to be a severed head?

Remember: there are no answers. Like Jehovah himself, “The Astro-Zombies” is what it is – as inscrutable and astonishing as a transmission from another galaxy.

I know what you’re thinking: maybe Ted V. Mikels can explain what the hell his thinking was when he made this thing. Well, you remember that scene in the nightclub that looks like a country club steakhouse, where that guy is interminably demonstrating a cocktail party magic trick to the other characters while they watch that really terrifying looking stripper do her thing? You remember how the stripper was being accompanied by a bare-chested middle-aged man, frenziedly beating a pair of bongo drums? Meet Ted V. Mikels.

You still wanna ask him questions? I thought not. So seriously, just try to sit back and go with the flow, as Ted takes you places you’ve never been before, shows you patterns and colours and weird, scrunched up faces that are rarely seen by those in full command of their faculties, spits in the collective faces of taste, decency, physics, and the laws of cause & effect, initiates you into the exquisite pleasures of utter boredom, and even lets you play with his robots.

“One of the all-time worst”, said Weldon in the Psychotronic Guide, but I’d like to think he meant it affectionately.