Astro-Zombies, The

Poster tagline: SEE ASTRO SPACE LABORATORY!!! SEE BRUTAL MUTANTS MENACE BEAUTIFUL GIRLS!!! SEE CRAZY CORPSE STEALERS!!! SEE BERSEKR HUMAN TRANSPLANTS!!! Ted V. Mikels, the star of midnight TV shows, has the same cult status overseas as Ed Wood Jr. Unfortunately, he's almost unknown in Europe, which is a shame because the guy is a lot of fun. There's no rush in his low-budget C-movies, and especially not here. The then B-movie star John Carradine (for the less knowledgeable, the daddy in Kill Bill) performs his "operation" (as the film says: inserting radio-electric implants, coagulating blood, extracting memory and installing solar power in the heart), he appears in a good 20 minutes of runtime, during which he explains in detail what he's doing, with constant boring cuts to his leering hunchbacked servant, agents from various organisations going around in confusion, or chasing each other in a hotel for a quarter of an hour in – for an already convoluted plot – an irrelevant scene, and an astro-zombie running around strangling women in all that mess. The sexual revolution that had been gradually gaining momentum is also manifested, so that the female victims are stripped of their tops, the legendary Japanese sex symbol Tura Satana, here in the role of a kind of chief of agents, has a distinctive slit in her skirt, so that she constantly shows her thighs and her cleavage, and throws around orders. The contact fights and the whole story structure in general they the absolute worst. The opening and closing credits are absolutely bizarre, they have children's robots and model tanks running around the screen shooting at each other. It makes as much sense – i.e. none at all – as the lizards in Robot Monster. And what is the absolute gem for a cinephile? That this screenwriting mess is the work of Wayne Rogers, later the lovable Trapper in the M.A.S.H. series. Everybody has to start somehow :o) Summary: amused 1* for the disbelieving laughter, but don't be fooled, it's actually a terrible long-winded bore :o) (2018.08.01)