#730 – Teenage Zombies (1959)

Teenage Zombies (1959)

Film review #730

Director: Jerry Warren

SYNOPSIS: When a group of teenagers go missing out on a lake, their friends mount a rescue and find a strange lady living on an island. Little do they know she has been kidnapping people for her experiments in mind control..

THOUGHTS/ANALYSIS: Teenage Zombies is a 1959 sci-fi film. Starting out in a diner – although the set is just a table and chair against a wall – we see a group of teenagers who intend to go out on the lake on their boat. They end up finding an island where a woman lives on her own, but actually she doesn’t, as she’s actually a mad scientist who is developing a method of mind control for communists. She captures two of the teens and turns them into slaves, while the the other two try to free them, and their friends back home try and find them all. This all sounds fairly vague because that’s all the film really gives: it’s just the characters moving between three scenes of a a lakeside, a basement, and someone’s front room and/or kitchen. There’s barely any plot or depth beyond the typical b-movie tropes: mind control, a brain-dead servant, mad scientist (although she is a woman this time I suppose), there’s nothing to really differentiate it. I can’t even tell you the names of the characters or anything; it’s all just so generic and bland.

To be fair to this film, it clearly has no budget, and is just filmed with a cheap camera in someone’s house, haphazard music choices and no consideration for audio quality. But even then, there could have been some effort to make the story interesting. As it is, it’s just a back and forth between people in the same three places, with no action, escalation in tension, or interesting developments. At points the film just stops completely while the scientist gives an explanation of how her mind control device works, which is completely irrelevant. Hopelessly naïve and devoid of any entertaining qualities, Teenage Zombies offers very little to any type of movie watcher.