a_chinn Uber cheap teen horror film makes a Samuel Z. Arkoff production look like something by Samuel Goldwyn. And oddly enough, there are no teenage zombies. The story is instead about a group of teenagers being captured after snooping around an evil scientist's private island, who are then experimented on by the scientists. Pretty bad Z-grade stuff.

Red-Barracuda A mad female scientist who lives on an isolated island carries out insane experiments sponsored by the Russians on unfortunate human guinea pigs, turning them into pliant zombie-like creatures. A bunch of pesky teenagers pitch up and thwart their plans.This is one of several films from the time that not only was specifically made for the large teenage cinema-going demographic but which also went so far as to add the word 'teenagers' in the title. Like most of them the title hardly makes sense. Teenagers from Outer Space (1959) did not feature any teenagers from outer space in a similar way to how Teenage Zombies isn't really about, well, teenage zombies. But the idea of the title was to make it abundantly clear that these were films for teenagers. Now obviously nowadays if you gave an average teen a copy of this film for their birthday, they would be less than impressed. These off-their-time curiosities are now the sort of things that cult film and retro genre fans seek out.In all honesty, this is a bad film although it does have its moments. The plot-line is ludicrous of course and the idea that the evil Russians are blamed for these zombie-making, gorilla-baiting antics is typical for the time it was made – the communists were seemingly to blame for everything in most American films of the 50's. There's also an amusing and unexpected plot strand where the town sheriff is sending prisoners and drunks over to the island to be experimented on. There's also a shuffling, lumbering henchmen and that old chestnut, a man in a monkey-suit. So it has some entertainment value but is overall pretty poor stuff.

DigitalRevenantX7 Plot Synopsis: A group of teenagers travel to a mysterious island in order to explore it. They are then captured by a mad scientist who, in league with a terrorist faction, is working on a gas that will cause all those exposed to it to become zombie slaves. While the teenagers hatch an escape plan, their friends try to get the police to help them in locating the missing teens.Film Review: During the mid-to-late 1950s, there was a spate of genre films that catered to young audiences by featuring teenage monsters. Teenage Zombies was one such example, directed by Jerry Warren, a director who comes from a small mindset of directors who follow an almost unique approach to filmmaking.Warren's approach is of a simplistic nature that resembles more of a stage play than an actual motion picture. The camera stays locked in one place, almost never moving; the actors stand rooted to one spot while reading their lines off an unseen cue card; the sets consist of a couple of walls only (which would save the producers a lot of money in set design). Whatever other faults the film has, the style alone condemns it to mediocrity (thing is, the style would reappear in the late 1980s, with Tim Kincaid modifying the style to make his own films – see my review on BREEDERS (1986) for more information).Style aside, the film's main problem is that it suffers from a real bomb of a script. Jaques Lecotier is perhaps one of the worst scribes in the whole of 1950s genre cinema. His script for Teenage Zombies is so bad that it would rival Ed Wood's works for sheer ineptitude - & Wood's films had the benefit of unintentional hilarity. The script is a mix of clichés & the sort of brainwashing that John Carpenter would later expose in the 80's nutty conspiracy classic THEY LIVE. There is a mad scientist (a staple cliché in most 50's B-films), who is working with (possibly Communist) terrorists in order to turn the USA into a nation of zombie slaves by using a special gas. This idea alone is so improbable that it causes the viewer to either groan in disbelief or laugh – the very idea of releasing a gas to turn a country into zombie slaves is really stupid considering the size of the target country, in this case the USA (although Lecotier seems to be aware of this, adding some dialogue that suggest the gas is not effective enough to take over the entire country, as well as having some side-effects). Not just that, the teenagers shown here suffer from some real bad one-dimensional stereotypes – the males are brave & daring while the females simply stand around waiting to be rescued. The young hero of the piece has an unhealthy obsession with his speedboat & his friends respect adults, even when it becomes painfully obvious that the adults in question are clearly up to no good (one thing that stood out in my mind was that the fact that the young characters were probably the victims of some kind of 1950's government conspiracy to keep young audiences from rising above their stations – something that would collapse with the coming of the 1960s). To Lecotier's credit, he does manage to throw in a sense of irony which almost salvages the film – the only way to restore their zombified friends is for them to expose the scientist to the gas & order her to give them the antidote!

bensonmum2 An obvious attempt at cashing in on the success of I Was a Teenage Werewolf and even I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, Teenage Zombies is a complete disaster. It makes those other two movies look like masterworks in comparison. The problem – well there's really too many to mention, but at the top of the list is the lack of anything remotely interesting in the plot. What a nothing movie! I'm having trouble thinking of a movie that bored me quite as much as Teenage Zombies with its nothingness. Dull doesn't begin to describe it. The 70-something minute runtime was the longest hour and ten minutes I believe I've ever spent in my life. The title may evoke images of teenagers being turned into mindless zombies, but that never happens. Instead we see naturally mindless teenagers walking around an island, driving a boat, and trying to carry on conversations. Exciting, huh? The teens do run into a band of Communist types bent on world domination, but if this sad group of teens is able to take them down, they really never posed much of a threat. If the movie wasn't bad enough already, with about ten minutes to go and out of nowhere, the director decided to throw a gorilla into the proceedings. What was that all about? A desperation move that fails epically. And then there's the ludicrously bad acting, the often inappropriate music, the strange silent pauses at every turn, and the poor sets. No matter how you slice it, Teenage Zombies is one badly made, dull as dishwater movie.