Back in the early 1980’s, I discovered the Golden Turkey Awards books and my search for bad movies began. It was also around that time that video stores began popping up. Before the days of Blockbuster Video, it seemed like you could go to these smaller video stores and find many of these Golden Turkey award winners if you were willing to search hard enough. Those stores were looking for any kind of content to fill their shelves and these stinker movies were often just the right thing to pad their number of movies. For someone like me who loved these movies, a film with the title The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies was a must find.
The first time I saw this film was when my wife and I went for a weekend visit to see a couple that we had been friends with since high school. None of us had ever seen the film before and it was quickly obvious why it was on a bad movie list. The star of the movie also the director, Ray Dennis Steckler who used his stage name “Cash Flagg” for his acting credit. He plays a character named Jerry who goes to an amusement park with his girlfriend and his buddy. The fortune teller that they visit has a knack for throwing acid in the faces of customers and imprisoning them as “zombies”. Jerry and his friends get away with just a prediction of death for one of someone close to Jerry’s girlfriend.
Jerry angers his girlfriend when he insists on going to the stripper show next to the fortune teller’s booth, so his buddy takes her home. At the strip show, he is enticed backstage by the star who takes him to back to the fortune teller where he is hypnotized and sent on a homicidal rampage to kill strippers and other dancers. One of the dancers is a lady that had also gone to the fortune teller and been told that she would die. In the middle of all this action, there is a series of musical numbers of terrible songs and many poorly choreographed. Eventually Jerry is chased down by the cops and shot on the beach in sight of his friends.
My family discovered a Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode of this film years later and it quickly became one of our favorite episodes. We also found a DVD version with commentaries by Ray Dennis Steckler and comedy film critic Joe Bob Briggs. At one point in the film there is an insane dream sequence where one of the dancers will chant “JERRRY”. My family will often refer to this film with just this chant. Our family has also discovered other films from Ray Dennis Steckler like the Batman parody Rat Pfink a Boo Boo but none of his other films have quite the same appeal as The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies.
