The Have Gathered and Rise in a Film Like Shamble

This guy's not wearing a mask, it's his replacement head and he's holding a flashlight to it for power. He's an Astro Zombie. What does that mean? Well, John Carridine spends a lot of time, the whole movie in fact, explaining it in 1968's The Astro Zombies. But I'm still not really clear on the definition. Very little is clear in the movie--why three gangsters are working for an unnamed foreign government to acquire the Astro Zombies, why Carridine's character is making them, and why the U.S. government wants them. But those are the big questions, the top layer of confusion. Beneath reside the characters who wander about in the mysterious ball of stuff called the plot. It's a bad movie, but I kind of enjoyed it.

In addition to Carridine, the movie has Zura Satana of Faster Pussy Cat, Kill, Kill, seen here carefully posing before shooting a guy who was running from her gang. I'm not quite sure what the disagreement between them was about.

Meanwhile, the good guys work in a lab, trying to figure out this whole crazy Astro Zombie thing. Which I guess the Astro Zombie doesn't like because whenever one of the female protagonists is left alone in the lab, he shows up attacks her. This is explained by saying the body of the Astro Zombie was that of a psychotic criminal whose deviance was left over in his spinal cord and infected his shiny new head.

There's an old man (Wendell Corey) at the protagonists' lab who explains a lot, too. There are long, extended shots of his head telling us about Carridine's character and how he developed something and might be doing something bad.

Little do they know, Carridine is busy explaining to his Igor-like assistant that he's in the middle of making a new Astro Zombie who will be totally good.

To compare the film to a reanimated corpse, despite emitting a muffled groan that may have been escaping gases, it never quite gets on its feet. Zura Satana is fun berating her lackeys but she lacks the clear motives of her character in Faster Pussy Cat, Kill Kill. Carridine effectively exhibits an inexplicable concern at all times.