All about 'Teenage Zombies'!

By Steve D. Stones

TEENAGE ZOMBIES: A Jerry Warren “Schlock-ster-piece.”

Anyone who wants to climb on board the convenient bandwagon of labeling Ed Wood as the “worst director of all time” needs to spend some time sitting through a Jerry Warren film. Wood, in my opinion, is the Ingmar Bergman of low-budget filmmaking in comparison to Jerry Warren. Warren’s films are like watching a seventh grade stage production: entertaining, but extremely amateurish and very hokey. He also fills his films with lots of voice over narration that very quickly becomes annoying to the viewer. Go watch Creature of The Walking Dead or the opening of The
Incredible Petrified World and you’ll see what I mean. Although Teenage
Zombies has its share of flaws, the one thing going for it is that it
does not have any of Warren’s trademark voice-over narration in the
entire film. That is a relief for anyone who mines his films.

A group of teenagers, lead by Don Sullivan, star of The Giant Gila
Monster and Monster of Piedras Blancas, discovers a remote island. They
explore the island and are captured by evil terrorist-scientist
Katherine Victor. Victor’s dopey slave zombie Ivan captures the teens
and holds them in a cage. Meanwhile Victor and her colleagues have plans
for world domination by developing mind-controlling capsules that they
hope to drop in the waters and streams of most major American cities,
thus turning people into mindless zombies. The plot is ludicrous, but
that’s it in a nutshell.

Friends of the captured teens group together and go searching for their
lost friends. They ask the aide of the local sheriff. When the search
party and the sheriff arrive at the island and are lead to Victor and
her colleagues, they discover that the sheriff is also in on the plot by
providing Victor with drunks and derelicts to test her mind-controlling
capsules on. The teens are able to escape by the end of the film, but
not without encountering a man in a cheesy gorilla costume.
Unfortunately, George Barrows is not the man in the costume. Eventually
they arrive back in their hometown and the military awards them an award
of bravery and a visit to the White House to meet the President.

If you’ve never seen a Jerry Warren film, I would suggest that you start
with his best film, which is Man Beast, followed by The Wild World of
Batwoman, also starring Katherine Victor. Batwoman was also released as:
She Was A Hippy Vampire. Apparently Warren had some copyright issues in
using the word batwoman in the first title. The Wild World of Batwoman
is a parody of the James Bond, Batman TV craze of the 1960s. If you
don’t take the film too seriously, it is a real hoot to watch. As for
Teenage Zombies, it may take some getting use to viewing a Warren film
before you can sit through this film. Happy viewing!!!