TheLittleSongbird
I saw this movie after it featured on MST3K, and the "Mystery Science Theater 3000: 10 Worst Movies They Riffed" made it sound every bit as bad as it was made out to be on the show(the episode was entertaining of course but not one of their best for me). Actually, I have seen far worse movies than The Incredibly Strange Creatures..., it is a bad movie but one of the worst ever made? Not for me. I actually thought the photography and editing were quite good and the make-up likewise. 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. There is not much else though that is good though. I found very little to remember about the music itself, other than that it sounded like bad scratchy saxophone playing. The choreography is clumsy and it looks awkward too, and the musical numbers go on for too long and with no momentum. The script has a very ramshackle structure, with confused and crass at best dialogue. The story, one that is so paper-thin you can do it in 20 minutes easily, is just weird(the weirdest movie I've seen possibly, though I knew even from the title it was going to be), goes along at a snail's pace and doesn't make any sense, concluding with an ending that is rather pointless and will make you go "what?" The last act is the most eventful it gets, but in a way that doesn't gel with the rest of the movie and it has no kind of tension and such whatsoever. The zombies don't even appear until only the last act, they're alright-looking enough but don't do anything of note and their screen-time is short-lived. The acting is enough to make anybody cringe, Brett O'Hara in particular chews the scenery to pieces in the worst of ways. The actresses for Carmelita and Madison suffer from the fact that their characters don't seem to have any point in the story. To conclude, bad and brings the word weird to a whole new level, but I've seen worse. 3/10 Bethany Cox
louellyne
Imagine those directors being sucked into that black hole, and being stretched and torn into many little pieces. Then,imagine that they are reconstituted into a hot mess of a cinema pile without regards to anything remotely resembling coherence, and maybe you can begin to approach this movie. I said approach, since you won't begin to understand it. In fact, I think that this movie must be seen as an acid-fueled dream,filled with bizarre and senseless images assaulting your eyes while frying your brain. I would like to comment on the cinematography, which is actually quite beautiful. I believe that it was done by Vilmos Zsigmond, who of course went on to do great work for much better films. In fact, the images he shoots for this picture go a long way towards giving it a nice,dream-like effect. Believe it or not, the very famous and credible Movies on T.V. by the great Steven Scheuer gave this title 2.5 stars our of 4, praising it mostly for the work of Zsigmond.
MARIO GAUCI
Legendary exploitationer in view of its lengthy and catchpenny moniker; amusingly, it was originally called THE INCREDIBLY STRANGE CREATURE OR: HOW I STOPPED LIVING AND BECAME A MIXED-UP ZOMBIE, causing Columbia to threaten suing over its similarity to Stanley Kubrick's DR. 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! Another notable aspect is the amateurish nature of the film, augmented by the soft Eastmancolor (the film was shot by the man behind the influential magazine "American Cinematographer", Joseph V. Mascelli, along with then-rookies Vilmos Zsigmond and an uncreditd Laszlo Kovacs!) and, frankly, the ragged state of the print from which the copy I watched was culled. The film is said to be made in a similar vein to the even more reprehensible works of Herschel Gordon Lewis but, though I did recently manage to acquire a few choice titles of his, somewhat ashamedly I admit that I have yet to check out any of them! By the way, director Steckler himself also essays the leading role here under the ludicrous pseudonym of Cash Flagg – while one of the several women involved i.e. Carolyn Brandt was, for a time, Mrs. Steckler herself! He plays a balding rebellious type (whereas his pal, the no-less oddly-named Atlas King and who apparently furnished the dough when the production ran out of funds{!}, has a prominent rock'n'roll hairstyle) and she a good-looking dancer whose weakness for booze causes her to be embarrassed in front of a packed house! For the record, the horror traits come in instantly, as a villainous fortune-teller (with a conspicuous wart on her face!) is seen taking revenge on the man she is with, after foolishly admitting that he actually prefers her curvy stripper sister, by having her grubby and chain-smoking hunchbacked assistant (called Ortega) hold him upside down while she spills acid on his face (albeit from a bottle labelled "Poison")! 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! Anyway, when Brandt is threatened by her boss with the termination of her contract over the afore-mentioned inebriated conduct, she goes to the fortune-teller to learn what lies in store for her and predictably picks out the death card; panicking, she runs into the ghouls but manages to escape. Next up are the hero, his girl and the inseparable pal and, after she has her hand read, the protagonist is compulsively drawn to watching the stripper's act (which, of course, does not sit well with his sweetheart who storms off, accompanied by the dutiful friend). During the show, the hunchback turns up with a card from the dancer asking him to meet her backstage but, when he does, he comes face to face with her wicked sister who promptly hypnotizes him! 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)! Of course, the next morning he does not remember anything but, when presenting himself to his sweetheart with the requisite apologies for his irrational behavior of the night before, he almost does an encore of his unwitting crime when the sun-bathing girl starts twirling an umbrella (thus evoking the whirling shapes that initially triggered him off) and he attempts to strangle her! At this, he runs off back to the carnival to try and make sense of the way his life is going but he only incurs the wrath of the fortune-teller who promptly fetches the acid bottle and disfigures him too! In the ensuing fracas, however, the other freaks are let out and they run amok in the luna park, causing no end of panic and mayhem (though the Police turn up almost immediately and start shooting them down no questions asked – still, with the fortune-teller, her sister and Ortega dead, they could never have gotten the story of what they were doing there anyway!). 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...!
