THE INCREDIBLY STRANGE CREATURES WHO STOPPED LIVING AND BECAME MIXED-UP ZOMBIES!!? (1963)
Article #813 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 6-6-2003
Posting Date: 11-3-2003
Directed by Ray Dennis Steckler
Featuring Cash Flagg, Carolyn Brandt, Toni Camel

A teenager falls under the hypnotic spell of an evil fortune teller who uses him to commit murders.

Title check: As this is a movie in which you can’t avoid talking about the title, I’ve included all title comments in the commentary below.

A few thoughts on THE INCREDIBLY STRANGE CREATURES WHO STOPPED LIVING AND BECAME MIXED-UP ZOMBIES!!?

1) I’ve had to type out the title twice now. I don’t want to do it again. Therefore, I’ve decided to shorten it from here on in. Since it’s still fairly lenghty to shorten it to THE INCREDIBLY STRANGE CREATURES and to type in the initials (TISCWSLABM-UZ??!) is clumsy, I’ve decided to refer to it from here on out as THE!!?.

2) By the way, you have no doubt noticed the !!? at the end of THE!!?, whereas most referrals to the title of the movie have merely referred to it as THE. Believe it or not, the !!? actually appears on the movie itself, but nobody seems to have realized yet that it is part of the actual title. I have now amended this problem.

3) As far as the title goes, the makers either spent too little time on the title of the movie, or way too much time.

4) Why is the title so long? My guess is someone figured it would have to be a second feature to something, so they wanted to make sure it crowded out the title of the main feature. This would work for everything but THE SAGA OF THE VIKING WOMEN AND THEIR VOYAGE TO THE WATERS OF THE GREAT SEA SERPENT (a title I will not bother to shorten since it will not appear again in this write-up).

5) I don’t know what you might expect of a movie with a title like THE!!?, but I would expect it to be pretty weird, though not necessarily very good. Believe it or not, the movie actually lives up to the title. Not so much in the plot (which is pretty ordinary) but in the characters and the execution it certainly goes off the deep end.

6) It’s billed as “The First Monster Musical”, which is a nice way of coming up with an excuse as to why the movie is cram-packed with musical padding. It even had a soundtrack album. Do you have it?

7) Trivia everybody knows time: Cash Flagg is actually Ray Dennis Steckler.

8) Some of the camerawork is actually a little impressive in this cheap little movie, as it actually does leave you with a dizzy, world-out-of-kilter sense that is appropriate to the story. Unfortunately, there are definite problems here; the sound is worse than anything this side of a Herschell Gordon Lewis movie, and Steckler never knew when a scene was going on for too long.

9) When the make-up is as bad as it is in this movie, you shouldn’t have as many close-ups as this movie has.

10) Actually, even though the movie is called THE!!?, I think it should be called THE!??. I really think the question marks should outnumber the exclamation points.