| Rated as one of the worst movies ever made, with one of the longest ever titles. A 1964 monster movie, produced, directed and starring Ray Dennis Steckler (appearing in the movie under the bizarre name Cash Flagg). Made for a mere $38,000, the movie was promoted as the first "monster musical". Having only beat the second "monster musical" The Horror Of Beach Party by just one month. The movie is sometimes wrongly credited as at the time having the longest movie title in cinema history. In fact it had the second longest, the accolade for the longest going to cult film-maker Roger Corman's 1957 movie The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent. (Notably also rated as a terrible movie.) See Weird Retro's BuzzFeed article about the movie for alternate poster designs, trailers and to view the movie in full. |
The ludicrous plot involves three friends, a weird carnival, a hypnotic stripper and her fortune-telling sister who with her henchman turn people into killer zombies by throwing acid in their faces. That's just about the whole plot summarized right there... All interspersed with utterly meaningless and bizarre song-and-dance numbers.
The movie was released originally by Fairway-International Pictures, who stuck in as lower half of a double-bill. Steckler was unhappy with this and bought back the movie, deciding to promote it himself. Like any good carnie, Steckler hawked it around the Grindhouse circuit, changing its name every so often to confuse punters in to coming to see it again. Some of the titles that he used included, The Incredibly Mixed-Up Zombie, Diabolical Dr. Voodoo and The Teenage Psycho Meets Bloody Mary.Also in the gimmicky Grindhouse tradition of the likes of William Castle, Steckler had the movie advertised as being in shown in a variety of made-up formats. He used tag-lines like filmed in “Bloody-Vision”, to “Terrorama” and “Hallucinogenic Hypnovision” to drawn people in and milk every last dime out of them. In some of the screenings, Steckler himself sometimes and employees would run into the theater auditorium wearing monster masks, to scare the audience. It was often double-billed with the equally now infamous “so-bad-it’s-good” cult movie The Beast of Yucca Flats, that starred Tor Johnson of Plan 9 From Outer Space fame.
Weird Retro Film Fact: The film was lampooned in 1997 by Mystery Science Theater 3000, which brought it to the attention of many cult film fans, who had previously not been subjected to the awfulness of this ridiculous cult classic.
The movie was released originally by Fairway-International Pictures, who stuck in as lower half of a double-bill. Steckler was unhappy with this and bought back the movie, deciding to promote it himself. Like any good carnie, Steckler hawked it around the Grindhouse circuit, changing its name every so often to confuse punters in to coming to see it again. Some of the titles that he used included, The Incredibly Mixed-Up Zombie, Diabolical Dr. Voodoo and The Teenage Psycho Meets Bloody Mary.Also in the gimmicky Grindhouse tradition of the likes of William Castle, Steckler had the movie advertised as being in shown in a variety of made-up formats. He used tag-lines like filmed in “Bloody-Vision”, to “Terrorama” and “Hallucinogenic Hypnovision” to drawn people in and milk every last dime out of them. In some of the screenings, Steckler himself sometimes and employees would run into the theater auditorium wearing monster masks, to scare the audience. It was often double-billed with the equally now infamous “so-bad-it’s-good” cult movie The Beast of Yucca Flats, that starred Tor Johnson of Plan 9 From Outer Space fame.
Weird Retro Film Fact: The film was lampooned in 1997 by Mystery Science Theater 3000, which brought it to the attention of many cult film fans, who had previously not been subjected to the awfulness of this ridiculous cult classic.
