The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?
Tags: cult, murder

Plot synopsis:
Free spirited Jerry (Steckler as "Flagg"), his girlfriend Angela (Sharon Walsh), and his buddy Harold (Atlas King) head out for a day a seaside carnival. In one venue, a dance number is performed by Marge (Carolyn Brandt), a superstitious alcoholic who drinks before and between shows, and her partner, Bill Ward, for a small audience. Backstage, Marge sees a black cat, and disturbed by its appearance, visits powerful carnival fortune-teller Estrella (Brett O'Hara) to find out what it means. In her fortune telling booth, Estrella predicts death for Marge, who runs out, terrifed, past Jerry, Angela, and Harold. The three decide to have their fortunes told. Estrella predicts "a death near water" for someone close to Angela.
After leaving Estrella's booth, Jerry sees Estrella's sister Carmelita (Erina Enyo), a stripper who hypnotizes him with her icy stare and he is compelled to see her act. Angela leaves the carnival, disgusted, with Harold in tow. After the show, Jerry is tricked backstage into Estrella's room with a note and she turns Jerry into a zombie by hypnotizing him with a spiraling wheel. Jerry then goes on a violent overnight rampage he will have no memory of, killing Marge and fatally wounding Bill. The next day, Jerry attempts to strangle his girlfriend Angela as well. It develops that Estrella, with her henchman Ortega (Jack Brady), has been turning carnival patrons into zombies by throwing acid into their faces, then imprisoning them in her fortune telling booth.
Interspersed through the film are several song-and-dance production numbers in the carnival's nightclub, with songs like "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie" and "Shook out of Shape".
Jerry, suspicious of his fragmented memory, confronts Estrella at the carnival. He is hypnotized a second time, and that night, stabs a carnival showgirl and barker in the showgirl's home. Returning to Estrella, she throws acid in Jerry's face and attempts to imprison him, only to have her other zombies escape. The zombies immediately kill Estrella, Carmelita, Ortega and several performers before being shot by police. Jerry, himself partially disfigured but not a zombie, escapes the carnival and is pursued to the shoreline, where the police shoot him dead in front of Angela and Harold. Estrella's prediction of "a death near water" for someone close to Angela is fulfilled.

Review: Still, it's a movie that shows Steckler's love for film, even if this somhow doesn't make up for LENGTHY semi-burlesque dance sequences and the absence of any real "zombies." 
B-movie fans in the bay area have been treated over the last few years to Steckler's appearances at Will Viharo's "Thrillville Revue", and I'm happy to say that Steckler is a director who can sit in a theater and laugh at his movie with an audience (you just have to take my word for it that there are A LOT of directors who make bad films and take them VERY seriously...
(And the soundtrack is pretty darn good,too.) Ray Dennis Steckler stars in his own movie under his pseudonym "Cash Flagg".
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'??
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.
The awful make-up, the comically inept sidekick (wild & crazy guys come to life!), the riotous night club dancers, the super-cheesy zombies...It's hard to believe this movie was so deliberately inept without having some other (admittedly pretty subtle) agenda of humor.
To tell you the truth, a film with a name as such and a plot like the one this movie has, I wonder how it's slipped past me watching it for so long (it's been about a month since I've bought it).
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.
I caught this movie on MST3K and was intrigued enough to find a copy of the movie to watch it without the call backs.It's the story of lovable loser Jerry (played by director Ray Dennis Steckler, under the name Cash Flagg) who runs afoul of side show fortune teller Madame Estrella and her hirsute henchman Ortega, murder and mayhem ensue.
During the course of this gripping "monster musical", you'll meet Jerry's unintelligible roommate Harold(who may be foreign or something), Jerry's helmet haired girlfriend, Angela, and ungainly dancer Marge (played by Steckler's one-time leading lady Carolyn Brandt, talentless stripper Carmelita, and other sketchy characters.
"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?
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.
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.
Young man falls victim to a carnival gypsy who has been turning the people who offend her into disfigured zombies.Ledgendary alone for its insane title, this camp classic from B movie director Ray Dennis Steckler is just as bad as everyone says, but it's amusing enough drive-in fodder.
There's lots of shadowy imagery, one creepy montage for the opening credits, and a royally bizarre music score.The cast isn't very impressive, with the exception of Brett O'Hara who comes off menacing enough as the villainous gypsy.A flawed, yet truly strange cult film that only a B movie lover could enjoy!
STRANGELOVE OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1963) – with the films' respective directors even getting personally on the phone and Kubrick reportedly dropping the matter when Steckler himself suggested to modify his title in the way it now stands!
Even so, the film is really weird, not just for its macabre elements but for its being dubbed "The First Horror Musical"!; in fact, the narrative takes place around a sea-side luna park (this milieu seemed to be a favorite with indie horror fare around this time, being also at the center of both NIGHT TIDE {1961} and CARNIVAL OF SOULS {1962} – which, likewise, have become cult items albeit on their own artistic qualities rather than mere wacky eeriness!) and includes about a half-dozen musical numbers, none of them having anything remotely to do with the plot and a couple of them being cringe-inducingly bad into the bargain!
Apparently, she keeps a room-ful of such disfigured punters in her tent (the "incredibly strange creatures" referenced by the title, though they are not technically "zombies", "mixed-up" or otherwise!) – no reason is given as to why or how come nobody ever hears or comes looking for them!
We now revert to Brandt's resumed performance (emceed by a stand-up comic!), which is however cut short by the sudden appearance of a hooded and wild-eyed Steckler wielding a knife (a spellbound assassin was liable to be dubbed a 'zombie' before the term was inextricably linked with the flesh-eating living dead) and brutally attacking both the girl and her fair-haired partner (who actually looks a bit like Klaus Kinski)!
Steckler himself is chased all the way to the beach, with his girl and best friend also in pursuit – and, after a protracted sequence in which he staggers perilously between the force of the incoming waves and the slippery, jagged rocks, the protagonist too is killed by a cop's bullet.Mind you, the film is not too bad and certainly undeserving of its ranking among IMDb's "Bottom 100"; however, I do feel that, had the musical numbers been dropped and more attention paid to plot, logic and characterization, it would have greatly benefited the end result: whether it would then enjoy the reputation it has in its present form is another thing entirely and, frankly, debatable...!.
You know the kind: the ones who have so little imagination they can't enjoy a movie like this without the inane yammerings of those MST3K silhouettes to tell them what they're supposed to laugh at.
Long live filmmakers like Ray Dennis Steckler who swam against the tide, a tide which sadly seems to have washed REAL independent film away for good.
Had it not been for MST3K, this movie (and every other film by renowned trash master, Ray Dennis Steckler) might have been lost forever...and depending on who you talk to, that might not have been such a bad thing.
Everything is real here, in all of its hideousness...the cocktail joint, the wood paneled homes of the suburbanites, the godawful, towering hairstyles...this is a unique window into the 60s and all of the low budget splendor one can find there.Jerry (aka Cash Flagg, aka Ray Dennis Steckler, aka The Director) is a young man with no future; lazy and irresponsible, he somehow manages to win the heart of Good Girl Angie, who comes from a Good Family.
Now Estrella wants revenge, and with the help of a hunchbacked Colombo and a hypnotic pinwheel, Jerry becomes AN INCREDIBLY STRANGE CREATURE WHO STOPS LIVING AND BECOMES A MIXED UP ZOMBIE!
He drifts through life until the fortune teller gives him a new career opportunity, mass murderer!Bizarre music, drug-like dream sequences, pitifully ugly dancer/strippers and singers, interminably long footage of carnivals, and very poor sound round out this one as another MST3K special.
There are so many terrible things about this movie that I might not get to them all but I will try.First of all, the title doesn't make any sense.They were normal humans who never stopped living, they just had acid thrown in their faces.But I've come to expect these old movies to lie in the title so I shouldn't be surprised.So it's about some "teens" and some dancers.Of course the teens are all well over forty.The main teen even sports a comb over that would embarrass a seventy year old.Even though he looks elderly, they try hard to make us believe he's a bad boy.He refuses to work or go to school but has no problem having a house and car.His best friend, and several others, have weird eastern European accents even though the movie clearly takes place in southern California.So old man teen becomes one of these zombies and stabs a bunch of dancers in the face while they were performing on stage.Then he just goes home and goes to bed and the cops have no leads.Weak.The worst part is that more than half of the movie is footage of empty carnival rides and people singing and dancing.They literally perform a dozen full songs that have absolutely nothing to do with the story.Did I mention they have some fool introducing all the acts and even when he holds his microphone at waist height, his voice is always the same volume?This could have been an OK thirty minute short but instead it's a terrible reminder of why people shouldn't try to make movies when they have no clue.Never see this..
Jerry's murder of both Marge and Bill was staged in such a surreal way that it took almost another ten minutes, when the homicidal Jerry attacked his girlfriend Angie, that you realized that it really happened and wasn't just a dream on Jerry's part.The movie, or better yet Jerry's murderous rampage, reaches a bloody crescendo when he together with a dungeon full of mixed up Zombies break out of their confinement killing their master Madam Estrella and her guerrilla-like assistant Ortaga.
Mindlessly murdering everyone in sight the Zombies end up getting shot down by the cops at the carnival with the helpless Jerry, who's not really himself, chased down to the beach where he meets his fate on the rocks pounded by the mighty Pacific Ocean.Besides being filmed in color something almost unknown, back in the early 1960's, in cheap and shoe-string budget movies like "Mixed up Zombies" there's also a number of well staged song and dance act in the film.
The song and dance acts are amazingly good and far better, which didn't take much, then the films almost indescribable storyline.The films longest and most unusual song number happens just moments before Marge and Bill are murdered by the Zombie-like Jerry.
Can you figure out the plot of "The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?", cause I couldn't really figure it out.
You don't even see any zombies until near the very end of the movie and that's only briefly cause they all get shot within 3 or 4 minutes except for one of the stars of the film who leads 1 police officer on a long and boring chase along a beach before the cop finally shoots him.
The Incredibly Strange Creatures...is also unique for the longest movie title ever(though also giving an indication of what you're in for), that I know of anyhow, and I loved Angela's hair.
Seeing as there are several ways to rate this movie, I'll try each point of view...The movie itself: It is sporadically paced, the plot is strange enough to cause interest, the acting is indescribably bad, the musicals are a pain to sit through, etc...
What else can I say about the movie - no, no - the attraction that is "The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?" When one watches this movie, whether it's uncut, or on the funny show "Mystery Science Theater 3000" (whew!
There clearly are some references to some of the '30's genre stuff and I also actually have no doubt about that some of Ray Dennis Steckler's other movies are far better ones, as long as they had a more decent enough script to work with but I'm probably being too kind and hopeful right now.The title of this movie might make you curious enough to watch it but trust me, you are far better off simply skipping it, even if you are into bad cinema.2/10 http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/.
This film has some good things going for it like a twisted fortuneteller, a strange carnival and interesting camera work.
I do like the concept of Jerry, the main character, getting hypnotized and becoming a murderous zombie but it takes too long to get to this point in the story and there's just too much bad music to put up with until then.
This film was so bad that I don't even feel it's worth it to type the title of it.The plot seems to be a secret between Ray Dennis Steckler and his writer because he never revealed any of it in two hours.
Don't worry about bathroom breaks,  you won't miss anything in this movie.If you want to cut to the chase, may I suggest fast forwarding about 70 minutes into the film to the "zombie scene."  You can cut your intake of beverages down to about half then.E.M. KevkeWriter filmography1.Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, The (1963) (story)    ...
To make the movie worse (if that is possible) this quasi-musical has the absolute worst dancing and songs ever put to film, including a song that was supposed to be `shook out of shape' but sounds more like `Schick out of shape' is she singing about her razor?
Nothing in this film is good(except the title,which is brilliant),the lightning is bad and the shooting is even worse.The acting is inferior and the story has got nothing to offer.It said on the cover that it was the first horror musical,but there was nothing "musical" about it.Alright it has got a lot of bad songs and dances,but that still doesn't make it a musical.I rented it at the Cult Video Store in my hometown Amsterdam together with "Frankenhooker" and Kaufman's "Mother's Day".This movie was by far the worst of the bunch,although I thought that it would be great considering the title.
It is not the worst movie,cause that is of course "Cobra" with Stallone."The Incredible Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies": Go and see it,cause then you've seen rock bottom in film making.Step a side Ed Wood,Ray Dennis Steckler is here!
Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies, The (1964) BOMB (out of 4) Ray Dennis Steckler's notorious cult classic has become a rather big cult item over the past decade so I was really looking forward to it but in the end this might beat out Orgy of the Dead as the worst film I've ever seen.
OK, I just saw this Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode last night and the movie was The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, quite a title, huh?
The strange thing is that as much as I love Mystery Science 3000, this movie was so bad, I don't think Mike and the robots could help it.
I know there are some films that are so bad that it's good, but honestly The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies is not one of them.From what I gathered, there's a strange psychic, who has this insane(you don't know what kind of country she comes from) accent.
There is a group of teenagers and Jerry falls in love with one of the strippers from the carnival who is the psychic's sister and they hypnotize him into trying to kill his girlfriend, Angela.This is just an incredibly stupid movie, I just couldn't believe that something like this got green lighted.
Please, I am warning you to stay away from The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, from the title, you should already have a good enough idea what kind of a film this is.1/10.
Meanwhile, we watch three or four dance numbers, three or so singers and a very bad comedian as Jerry (the loser) tries to find a way to get not mixed up before he is turned into a zombie!
I finally watched this Ray Dennis Steckler movie with the really long title.
As MANY others have mentioned, this is far from a good movie and suffers from lack of real experience, but "The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?" is such a strange experience I couldn't turn away, wondering what was gonna happen next.
Knowing that Ray-Dennis Steckler himself certainly was an incredible strange creature it could be him who become a mixed-up zombie.