You know, I've seen people act like that in pictures.

What do they call them, zombies or something? Zombie.

What's a zombie? Just what is a zombie? Well, a zombie is... Mr. Bill is... The living dead.

They are the living dead.

It's an army of zombies.

Because a zombie has no will of his own.

What is wrong?

Welcome to Zombie Strains, the podcast where we watch all the zombie movies and talk about them at length, like we're going to do today. I'm John.

And I'm Andy.

I'm Brad.

Hey, guys. Exciting movie today. Is this our second Mystery Science Theater 3000 movie?

Oh, I didn't know they did this one.

I believe Maniac was also, no, it was Riftrax. So this might be our first. I feel like, so we are watching today, The Creature with the Atom Brain, which is an exciting title.

No, no, it's Creature with the Atom Brain.

There's no the?

The the, yeah.

Oh, God.

That's important. They had an artistic vision behind that.

They did. You're right. I'm sorry. Mystery Science Theater 3000 did a variety of films, but when I think of what a generic episode of that show was, it's this movie. It's 1950s scientists being completely dorky, smoking pipes and wearing fedoras.

That is a great insight, John. I hadn't thought about that, but you're right. This has Mystery Science Theater stamped all over it.

And also, it's got many ridiculous things to make fun of. But also, I will say, a lot of zombie firsts. So while they might mock this film, I think you and I are going to be excited about all the gnarly stuff in it.

I am excited to talk about a couple of things in particular, Pat. I'm holding on to my excitement till we get to it. Before we start, we usually talk about, we call out any content or themes that might be upsetting to viewers or listeners of this podcast. I guess I'm happy to say that there's really nothing in this film that struck me as really going to be a problem. It's a little bit more violent, and we're going to get into that than some of other films, but still very pale in comparison to what most of you are used to in zombie films.

But Andy, two adults kiss in a bed in this film. That is beyond the pale.

That is also one of the things I have on my list to talk about. The amount of kissing in this movie. Something happened between the last movie and this one.

For sure.

So, exciting times. So, content warning, kissing, I guess. So, we'll put that out there.

All right, do you want to lay it out for us, Brad?

The Creature, sorry, Creature.

No duh.

By the way, I believe the Eagles band is Eagles, not the Eagles.

Oh, you're right.

Oh, man.

I don't know how you say it without the duh, but anyway.

We need to start keeping a list of these, so I get them right.

All right, Creature with the Atom Brain was released in July of 1955. Movies from 1955 include Lady and the Tramp, East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause, and To Catch a Thief. Science fiction and the Atomic Age are starting to drive a lot of plots in movies and more specifically horror movies, such as It Came From Beneath the Sea and The Day the World Ended are both about radioactive monsters. The Beast with a Million Eyes is about an alien attempting to conquer the Earth. Tarantula is about a spider that escapes a lab experiment and becomes a gigantic menace. And there's also a good old Bella Lugosi movie, Bride of the Monster, directed by Ed Wood.

Oh, God.

Don't you just have a vivid picture of what Tarantula looks like? Because this is the era where they would take like a regular insect.

I can see it in my mind.

Yeah, they would blow it up to big size. Yeah. Carry on. Absolutely.

No, it's good to reminisce. Sam Katzman produced Creature with the Atom Brain. Katzman was a veteran film producer specializing in low budget projects. He produced films from Monogram, including Nine Bella Lugosi. When he moved to Columbia, he made musicals and serials, including the Superman serial. By the 1950s, he began to make movies for the teen audience. He made many rock and roll films that featured rock stars of the era, like Bill Haley and the Comets. And this continued into the 60s with movies starring Elvis, Herman's Hermits, and Roy Orbison. Edward L. Kahn directed Creature with the Atom Brain. And we're going to see quite a lot of his work in the 50s, as he did a lot of these low-budget horror films.

Yeah, I was just noticing this.

Coming up are Zombies of Moratau, The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake, and Invisible Invaders. He also directed It, The Terror From Beyond, which is cited as an inspiration for Ridley Scott's Alien.

Ooh, interesting.

Four Skulls of Adam Drake. That's a great title for a movie. I haven't seen that one.

And we're going to watch it.

It's on our list. It's coming up. Kurt Sidmark wrote Creature with the Atom Brain. He wrote a lot of genre films. The Invisible Man Returns, The Invisible Woman, The Wolfman, I Walked with a Zombie, and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers.

Interesting. So he wrote one of our season one favorites, which is exciting.

Richard Denning plays our hero, Dr. Chet Walker. His big break was starring with Lucille Ball in the radio program My Favorite Husband. This program was adapted for TV as the I Love Lucy Show, and CBS wanted Denning to play Lucy's husband, but she insisted her real husband, Desi Arnaz, take the role.

I think that was the right move.

That was so the right call.

Yes. Denning starred in several TV shows and played the governor of Hawaii on Hawaii Five-O.

And he lived to be 80, which is shocking, considering how much he smokes. I'm surprised his jaw didn't fall off from all the pipe smoking he does in this film.

Michael Granger plays the villain, Frank Buchanan. He started his career in B-movies, but by the 1960s, he was on Broadway playing the butcher in the original run of Fiddler on the Roof. S. John Launer plays the sidekick, Captain Dave Harris. In the 50s, he did a lot of B-movies and TV. He was a judge on Perry Mason for nine seasons. In fact, many of his credits are as judges. One of his last credits is for the film Mommie Dearest. In the famous scene where Fay Dunaway, who plays Joan Crawford, stands up to the Pepsi Company Board of Directors. She's at the end of the long conference room table, and he's at the other end facing her. He's the chairman of the board, who after her tirade, he gives in to her. And it's interesting, because when you watch this film, the acting is very monotone, and you wonder, are these real actors? And then you watch him in something else. You go, oh yeah, he is a good actor.

Yes.

Gregory Gay plays Dr. Wilhelm Steig. He had a small part in Casablanca. He appeared in the Commander Cody serial, and was the Russian ambassador in the 1966 Batman movie.

Which is a fine film for all it was.

And no doubt that is a particularly dignified role.

Yes, I would assume.

Well, they get dehydrated, if you recall.

Yeah, that's right.

Tristam Coffin plays District Attorney McGraw. He starred as Jeff King in King of the Rocket Men, the first of the Rocket Man serials. And no box-offer results are available, but Sam Katzman, the producer, was quoted in 1957 as saying that his films never lost money and averaged one million in gross against budgets of $250,000 to $500,000.

That was a different world.

That's your rundown.

All right.

Shall we jump into what was happening in the world in 1955? July 1955, when this movie hit the big screen. So there's a lot of nuclear stuff going on. That's not a big surprise, I think, if you've been listening to this podcast for a bit. But specifically, this year, Bertrand Russell released the Russell Einstein Manifesto, which was sort of a very prominent call for highlighting the dangers of nuclear weapons and calling for diplomatic solutions to conflict. So that was a big deal.

I think that's important to point out. I think everybody may know it at this point because of the film Oppenheimer. But the majority, not all, but the majority of people who worked on the atom bomb eventually came out and said, look, we did this one thing, we didn't want to escalate this to a whole arsenal, you know what I mean?

Yeah, so it's a whole fascinating piece of history that I think is overlooked. But yeah, lots more nuclear stuff. Arco, Idaho became the first US city lit by nuclear power.

Oh, wow.

And the year before, the USS Nautilus was the first nuclear powered submarine. And I think 55 or somewhere around here, a second more advanced nuclear sub called the USS Seawolf was also launched. So and John, so this one's for you. So this year, the RAF, the Royal Air Force, formed its first atomic bomb unit. And I just wanted to ask, you're kind of an airplane guy. Can you guess what airplane would have comprised that bomber force?

Is it the Vulcan?

Close. It starts at the V. Any other guesses?

I don't know. The Vampire.

Vickers Valiant.

The Vickers Valiant. Okay.

Yeah. So, all right. But besides, so lots of nuclear stuff, I guess, is going on. But outside of that, there's some other stuff going on. Disneyland in California opened up. James Dean was killed in a car accident. And so he was in East of Eden, right?

And Rebel Without a Cause.

And so did he just die? He died right after that movie came out. Is that what I'm hearing?

Let me check dates.

You said that East of Eden was out this year.

Correct. I don't know if he died before or after the movie. He died September of 55.

I guess I didn't realize how quickly his career kind of...

Yeah. He'd done three movies, but they were all giant. He'd done a movie called Giant, East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause. And everyone was like, well, here's your next star. And then he died very suddenly.

Yeah. Crazy. Yeah. So a couple more things here. So GM becomes the first US company to make a billion in profit for a single year.

That's hilarious.

John, I recently read a book by David Halberstam called The 50s. And a lot of that book is about the rise of GM and GM culture in the 50s. Interesting. It was like an empire unto itself. Like I don't think America had seen anything quite like it.

You know, what's funny about that is, we were talking about billionaires the other day with a friend of mine and he's a big math nerd. And he said, I don't think people understand how much money a billion is. And I said, well, how would you say it in a way that would, you know, make sort of astound me? And he said, you would have to make $100,000 a year for 10,000 years to earn a billion dollars. And I just paused and I said, okay, that blew my mind.

I was... Well, hey, I'm definitely on track then.

Yeah, we're all doing good. Thank you to all our supporters. You're getting us just a little closer every day.

Okay, just a couple more things here and then I'll be done. The first McDonald's franchise opens in Illinois. So that's exciting. I'm talking about teenage culture, I guess. The first 70 millimeter film is released. It's Oklahoma with an exclamation point.

Yes.

Alas, I don't think any of the zombie films we'll be watching in the 50s, were 70 millimeter productions.

I'm shocked.

I'll be happy to be proved wrong there. And lastly, Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley and The Comets hits number one on the Billboard charts.

Awesome.

All right. That's what I got for history, unless I missed anything crucial.

Okay. Well, let's jump. Would you like us to give it... Sorry, I'm making you do all the work today, Andy. Do you want to give us the 60 second summary of this bad boy?

Yeah, for sure. All right. So first, I guess, did this movie specify what city it took place in?

I don't believe so.

Okay, so I'm just going to say the nameless city is seized...

The nameless city of Los Angeles.

Yeah, well, yes. Los Angeles...

I recognize Griffith Park, so I will assume Los Angeles.

But half of the policemen are sporting these quasi-Boston accents that really confused my sense of place in this film. But okay, a nameless city is seized by dread as a series of murders unfold that according to the forensic evidence, appear to have been committed by deceased people. Our heroes Chet Walker and his sidekick David investigate, and we eventually learn along with them, that these murders are being carried out by zombies under the control of a gangster named Buchanan. Buchanan was forced to flee to Europe years ago after a number of his gangster colleagues ratted him out, but he has now returned with vengeance on his mind, and with the help of a German scientist, we are seeing a lot of those in these movies of this era, he has created a method of resurrecting zombies and then sending them as remote controlled assassins to take out all of the people that did him wrong. The action of this movie is Will Chet and Dave solve the mystery of what's really going on in time to stop this reign of terror.

How's that? That's perfect. We could make a lot of fun in this movie, and Mystery Science Theater 3000 made a ton of fun in this movie. I didn't watch it, but we can just imagine how much fun they made of it. But I would like to celebrate how the movie starts, which is kind of ominous, and it starts in media res. So we get this backlit figure, a silhouetted figure, like huge broad-shouldered stumbling down the path towards us as this very intense music plays. And he's clearly doing, you know, he's walking towards a building. And in the building, we see, you see like the dome of his head, and it looks like there's a line across his forehead with like suture marks on either side of it. And he starts walking towards this house. I thought this was a great opening and was actually interesting and drew me into the movie, right? Like, yeah.

I thought so too. I'll go so far as to say this entire opening scene is pretty strong.

Yeah. So we cut to what is, it looks like a mansion, but what it really is, is it's a gambling parlor. Apparently, some crooks run a gambling operation out of here. And I love that they have a dictaphone that they record their take in. Like, hey, the mob is a business too. You should have all the administrative assistants and dictaphones and everything. But as we see, the money for the night comes in, a man is counting it and is going to put it in the safe. And this looming creature we saw at the beginning smashes through a window, comes in, attacks the guy. The guy pulls out a gun, and he tries to shoot him, but a voice speaks. And it sounds like, and it just says, I was Buchanan. As if that were to mean something to this person. That's when the gangster, who we later learn is named Hennessey, tries to shoot the monster for no luck. And then tell him how Hennessey eats it, because it's pretty gnarly.

Yes, this is the most gnarly death so far in this podcast.

I think so. Not counting the current movies, but yes.

Yes, the creature picks up the gangster, and you see the silhouette, you see the shadow of him being picked up, and then there's this horrible crunching noise as the monster snaps his spine and drops him on the floor. It is genuinely pretty brutal.

Yes, and the monster grabs some money, but he doesn't take all the money, importantly, and then he leaves as other gangsters come in and shoot him. He then hops in a car and drives away.

Hold on a second, you missed something else important.

Yes.

For zombie films, it's the first Squibb shot. As he's fleeing, the other gangsters- That's right.

You actually see shots explode on his suit. Yeah, no blood, but Squibb's for sure, you're right.

I have been waiting for this because I think we've only seen one other movie that showed us bullet holes appearing in people, but they didn't have any blood or anything, and that was Revenge of the Zombies, I'm pretty sure.

Revolts of the Zombies.

But-

Revolts of the Zombies, sorry. There was a brief shot of somebody, of a zombie absorbing a bunch of machine gun fire across the chest. Yes, but now we're into like- It's felt like a jump in violence to me too, both of those things.

So this whole movie felt, we're going to talk about it, but sex and violence both, this felt like they were turning the dial up a little bit. For sure. I mean, all very tame by modern standards, but it's a noticeable change from the 40s, I'll put it that way.

Yeah, absolutely.

So did you notice, John, did you notice the shaky cam effect we got?

I did see that.

There was a brief moment where we're looking through the eyes of the creature, and we get what looks like a very modern shaky cam shot.

I wonder what kind of camera they use, because old film cameras are not like things, and they actually-

It's probably a team of six people wrangling a giant device.

Yeah. So we find out that two people are controlling this creature remotely using a microphone and issuing instructions. Then we switch to the creature's point of view, because it has camera eyes, and we show it getting into a car, and this is part of the part that shot shaky cam. And he drives away. And then we cut to these two people who've been controlling him. So we find out that these two, one of them is a gangster, his name is Buchanan, and he is the guy who wants revenge, and his first victim is Hennessy because he was wronged, and we can talk about more of that in a minute. The other is the scientist who developed this technology. So here's the conversation they had. There's actually two clips I want to play here. The first one is just, there's a super important zombie clip about how zombies work at the beginning here, and I want to play that because I was so excited to hear it. So we'll do like two clips that are right next to each other, but I want to talk in between them. So let's hear the first one.

He got hit when they shot at him. He might not be able to make it.

If his brain is still receptive, he can be directed.

Well, what if it isn't? What if the bullet hit one of the brain electrodes?

As long as he has an ounce of liquid in his veins, he will return home. I've told you these creatures automatically try to return to their source of feeding when their energies run low.

Yes. That's the first thing.

Do you think the director was like, wait, can we take that again, but turn up the volume on the electrical zapping noise?

I have a need for more electrical zapping noises, like unstoppable. Yes. It's throughout. Every time they're in this lab, that's what it sounds like, the zapping sound.

I'm going to redo all our podcasts. Whenever John speaks, we hear zapping in the background.

So, thoughts, Andy. I was so excited about this. They did mention brains in Revenge of the Zombies, but this is our first scientist saying how these things work.

So, this feels to me like a zombie movie first. Because while other zombie movies have danced around the idea of the brain, this is the first one to just come right out and say, the only way to kill it is to hit the brain.

Yes. And the reason is because they've done a lot of work on the dead people. These are dead people, it's clear. They've done a lot of work on them. They've inserted electrodes into their brains and their eyes so they can control them. We have moved completely from any sort of mystical origin for zombies solidly into science zombies here. Like, no question.

And when we learn about the research that led to this zombie process, it's science all the way back to the beginning. It started with experiments on animals and stuff like that. So it's not like in Valley of the Zombies where it's a scientific process, but someone learned it by going to the Caribbean and picking up a mystical trick.

Yeah.

And they talk about the science a lot throughout this movie. But before we get to that, but also Buchanan and the Doctor lay out the plot for us. So that's the second clip I wanted to play in this part right here.

Your creatures helped us get rid of the first one. I'll see them all die before I'm through.

If I had only known when you first offered to help me financially.

Dr. Stagg, if it weren't for my money, you'd still be experimenting with cats and dogs in that fleece-sized lab of yours in Europe. I made it possible for you to prove your theory with human beings.

That is true. But my theory was to use these creatures to help people live. By doing everything that was difficult and dangerous, you just want to see people die.

Not just people, Stagg. Particular people. I'll get them. Every single one of them.

So I would also like to say, I like that our villain, unlike Zombies of the Stratosphere, has some teeth. You know what I mean?

Yes, agreed.

He's got an opinion. He seems really nasty. He's got a great voice, by the way.

He's not even chewing the scenery like past villains have done. He's pretty convincingly nasty guy, I think. But what did you make though of the using zombies to do dangerous work?

I thought this was interesting because in one of my general notes is I wrote, he's a zombie master, but he uses technology instead of magic. It seems like the rise of the techno zombie master. I think we've seen people use zombies for dirty work before, right? Like, Freddie Washington was raising them to kidnap somebody in Iwanga.

White zombie.

Yeah, my wind went to white zombie. For that reason, this had a dystopian, oblique feel because that seems like the future you could envision if we suddenly had this species of zombie that we could just make them do all the unpleasant work, right?

Yes. It also reminds me of the solution to the zombies in Shaun of the Dead, where they make them collect all of the grocery carts and stuff. Yeah, it's a little odd. But here's where our movie cuts hard MST 3K. Previously, it was pretty interesting and engaging. Not that it's not, but to work on the zombies. The two have to go work on a zombie. The one that came back needs to be patched up. You have to do a lot of stuff to the zombies, I guess. They put on these huge radiation suits, and they have to go into the secure lab that separates the rest of their layer from the places where they live, because there's so much radiation. They have to crawl on their hands and knees, like this plastic inflated tunnel, and then they get to the lab. It's so hard for me to take it seriously and be like, oh, as soon as they hit their hands and knees and we're crawling, which they do multiple times. It's like when the Martians go down the ladder and walk across the sea and then back up the ladder. It's this painfully long crawling sequence that we get multiple times.

It's like all the dignity that the villain has just successfully gathered around him is gone as he's shuffling on his hands and knees through this little tunnel in a ridiculous hazmat outfit.

Yes. Now, they do some work. He does say here that they were never... He's very explicit that these are dead, reanimated people. There's no question in my mind, right?

Yes. I had a certain sense of confusion about the mechanics of this zombie process through the whole movie, despite the definitive statements here. Maybe we can talk about that a little bit later, but it's my understanding that these are all corpses that he has brought back to life.

Yet later when one of the zombies comes back and is injured or wounded, you can have said, is it dead? The doctor said it was never alive.

Yes.

Now, let's talk about our hero. The police come to the mansion where the gambling was running. They don't seem too concerned about the mobsters gambling. Would you describe our hero, Chet, for us, Andy?

Yes. What is his role in the police department? He's like the medical inspector or something?

He's the head of forensics. That is interesting to me for a bunch of reasons. First, he's a scientist, right? He's not a bare-knuckle brawler. He doesn't own a rocket pack. Our hero solving the problem is a scientist, and it's a procedural. He uses discoveries from the scene to solve the crime. So that's the first thing I was so excited about.

Yeah. So he is a pretty bland hero. I'm trying to think what his distinguishing characteristics are.

Well, I think that the problem is there's nothing. He's like your ideal 50s guy.

Yeah. So he's definitely like a young professional in age and demeanor. We're going to learn he has a wife and a young daughter. But despite getting a fair amount, having a fair amount of scenes set around in his house and interacting with his family and stuff like that, he emerges with a very bland 1950s hero personality, I would say.

Yeah. What I kind of loved about it is he's got a suit, he's got a fedora and he's got a pipe. And he hangs out with a bunch of other people with suits, fedoras and pipes all the time.

Yeah. I forget what other movie we were talking about this before, but none of the actors really show emotion throughout this. Everyone, I'm reminded of Zombies of the Stratosphere, where we commented that everyone is just delivering their lines in this generic heroic, with this heroic urgency, I guess. Yes. There's some stuff later in this movie that should profoundly stun and shock Chet, and he reacts to it just with the exact same scientific enthusiasm. Yeah. Not one of our great zombie heroes, at least not yet. We'll give him some time to see if he gets better as the movie goes on. But this forensic scene is pretty fun, John. Do you want to talk about what they find?

So one thing I love about this movie is the press. Just hang out with the police while they're investigating a murder scene. They're just there. I feel like the tight budget of this is another scene later where Chet has to pace to spout his theory. But he's in this small cramped room and he's trying to slide behind people's chairs. The blocking in this movie is very strange. So they're investigating the scene. The press are just hanging out. So they discover a number of things. One is that the fingerprints and footprints of whoever the killer was glow in the dark.

Yeah. I love the handling of the evidence. Did you notice this? I mean, they aren't wearing gloves. They're not putting stuff in bags.

Smoke in a pipe.

He just rips a piece of carpet off that has blood on it. And then you can see him for the rest of the scene twiddling it in his hands like it's one of those spinner things. Yeah, anyway, so that's what went into, that was filed in the police evidence case.

Yeah, it's like the beginning of procedural police traumas, but they haven't, nobody's written the scene where the evidence gets ruined, you know, yet. So anyway, there's a crack. Speaking of the press, somebody comments about how the window was smashed in and somebody else says he must have eaten all his vitamins. So there's your-

Oh, see, I noted a joke in this scene that made me laugh too, but it's a different one. They were joking that not all of the money was stolen, and that was weird, and one of them goes like, maybe didn't want to get in a higher bracket.

Oh, that's right, a higher tax bracket, yes. Yeah. So yeah, lots of corny, wisecracking 50s dad jokes. But I want to get to Chet's lab because Chet's lab is kind of exciting. Chet gets to work and he's solving crimes, and he discovers that the blood is not human blood, it's got crystals in it. And I have noted, this is our first instance, so I'm sure it's happened in other movies, of Technobabble.

Yes, I noted the exact same thing.

Yeah. It's like a Star Trek episode, but in the 50s and police work instead of aliens.

Complete with somebody else then going like, could you say that in English, please?

It was kind of amazing. So he does a lot of experiments. The other note I took here is like, today this would be a montage, right? He's like running the centrifuge and looking under the microscope, and being a 50s movie, he just steps through each task. Whereas today, it would just be like cuts and music and super exciting.

This movie does not speed through these scenes.

It doesn't speed through anything.

I'm afraid to say.

Yeah. He puts a Geiger counter to the blood, which goes off showing that the blood has radioactivity, which I thought was interesting.

Can I know, also, was it weird that they told the press their most unhinged possible theory?

I actually have a clip of that. So he's getting ready to leave. The press are just hanging out outside his office, like you do when you're the press, and they ask him what happened, and here's the response that he gives.

All right then, according to the evidence, Hennessy was murdered by a creature with atom rays of superhuman strength, and a creature that cannot be killed by bullets.

Creature. You don't expect it to believe that.

No. Big joke. Just for that, I'll misspell your name.

I don't blame them.

I don't believe it myself, and I was with you.

Yes. There we got two people. We got first person speaking was Chet, then some reporters, and the last person speaking was Captain Dave Harris, who is Chet's buddy.

In these movies, isn't it the job of the police to not leak crazy, alarming details to the press instead of-

Yeah, we'll get more to that because we have a radio announcer who criticizes the police in this and they have some things to say about this as well. So in any case, he goes home. Chet goes home. He has, I think, a martini, right? Or is that later? I can't remember.

It's later, I think, but-

So we cut to the next day and it's Captain Harris, we'll call him, comes over, knocks on Chet's door and Chet's wife answers the door and tells Harris that Chet is still sleeping. So we get introduced to all kinds of stuff here. But I think there's a big part that you want to come up here is the wife goes to get Chet out of bed and it's kind of spicy.

Yeah. Surprisingly so. I mean, because isn't this, this is the era of TV where husband and wives had separate beds and stuff. And like Lucy had to hide her pregnancy behind different props and stuff. And here we have this husband and wife just like making out and stopping only because this guy is, his friend is waiting for him downstairs.

And Chet Sykeke can wait a while.

They don't have time to take it further. So this, I mean, I don't want to sound dumb or weird about this, but the increase in like physical, like sexuality in this movie compared to the last ones we've seen is really dramatic.

Yeah, and the violence. So I think we're leaning more into sex and violence. Like some of those things have been suggested, right? Women in their underwear and stuff, but here it's much more direct. But this is not a podcast about changing social mores, though it is, and we'll keep talking about it. But it's really a movie about zombies. So Dave Harris, Captain Harris comes in. I don't want to do a huge scene here, but I just want to say we get introduced to Chet's wife, Chet's daughter, Penny, her doll.

This is, I think, our first movie that has had a child with a meaningful screen presence. Am I right about that?

I think so, for us, yes. I think she's definitely channeling, it's a little late for her to channel Shirley Temple, but she's got that adorable young kid vibe with the black patent leather shoes and the white socks. So she's trying to win hearts and minds here.

I felt this scene where we meet the wife and daughter felt like it was really strongly telegraphing that they are going to be put in danger by the end of this movie.

Yes.

And that just has a slightly different feel to it than past movies. We've watched, do you know what I mean?

It's more personal, right?

So Chet has nothing to do with the zombies. He didn't make them, he doesn't know about them, he's not connected about them. Yet in this movie, his family is going to be threatened by the zombies. And that feels like a something with some significance.

Yeah, like in current movies, right? Like you wouldn't make Taken with Liam Neeson, with it being anybody but Liam Neeson's daughter. You know what I mean? Like family in jeopardy is the main motivation for so many movies today, but we haven't really seen it yet.

And like in jeopardy from like an outside threat.

Correct.

Like most of the movies we've watched are people kind of getting pulled in by their own like shenanigans, like their own family drama or their own relationships or things like that. Whereas this feels, I don't know, I don't want to overdo this point, but this felt different to me.

So I think you're right. This film feels like a jump, not only in technology and the way zombies are presented, but just in the culture in a huge way. But we can pick things up here a little bit because we just started this movie, and there's a lot going on. What Captain Harris is here to tell Chet though, is that the fingerprints, which were very obvious at the scene, the attacker didn't hide their fingerprints, is a man named Willard Pierce who had tuberculosis, who died 24 days ago. Of course, Chet has to flee, skip his breakfast. His wife is feeling, I think there's a sense of the neglected wife in this film too. Chet's always running off to work and stuff. So we start to see that here. Then we get another zombie. Somebody's getting in their car, in their home, a nice convertible.

Another gnarly kill.

Another gnarly kill. Somebody comes in and closes the garage door behind him, and then what does he do?

He rips the steering wheel out of the car that his victim is sitting in, and then grabs his victim around the neck and picks him up. Again, I think you see his legs dangling, and then he snaps his neck. It's pretty brutal.

And throws him in the back seat. So we cut to Captain Harris' office, and they don't know about this murder yet. But when they're listening to the dictaphone, they notice that the killer's voice sounds mechanical. They say it almost sounds like a recording of a recording. And while they're making this discovery, somebody comes in and tells them that another man has been killed, and this time it's the district attorney McGraw, who they were just going to see. And we go back, we go to the crime scene, Chet's there, he's got his Geiger counter, the press is just loitering right next to him. And I have a note here, I've missed it, I've missed something here. So what they do note is that this is a different killer. So there's more than one zombie. So Chet says, let's get a meeting with the mayor, and I want you to call in the military. And that eight bodies were stolen from the morgue. They've discovered this as well. And two of these guys were those bodies.

Yeah. So the implication is there's at least six more zombies. And the zombies that have been making these kills are not getting caught. They're like, they're fleeing back to the lab.

Walking away very slowly.

Yeah. For maintenance and repair.

What I love is that throughout this film, the zombies kill people and people scream, and then they walk away very slowly. And at no point do they manage to tail one until the end of the movie.

But we should take a moment and talk about how they walk. How do these zombies look?

They shamble, and they sometimes have their arms sticking out, right?

Yeah, I would say these have a fairly modern zombie vibe to them. They are dressed and they're clean. It's not like they're in torn up grave clothes or anything like that.

No, even zombies.

They're dressed nicely, but they do all have that visible scar around their head, the top of their head. Most of them, I think, are wearing hats when they're committing the murder, so they can pass as regular humans. But that said, they are still pretty slow. And during the first kill scene in this movie, I thought the zombie was moving with a little bit more energy than past zombies have moved. So I thought we might be on to, like, not a fast zombie, but at least a more scary and menacing zombie. However, as this movie goes on and we see more of these zombies, they are pretty darn slow, I would say. And while they have some ability to speak, it's just in a really flat, monotone.

They look like they're the zombies. They look most like the zombies we're used to so far. I mean, there have been other zombies, but these guys walk. They shamble. Their arms are sticking out. They're super violent.

So, John, obviously, you can continue guiding us through this. I bet we can probably speed through a lot of the second act, where there's a lot of just kind of repetitive scenes of people meeting with military leaders and police, trying to kind of piece together all of the stuff that we, the viewer, already know. Found a little aggravating that we were told right up front the whole backstory of what was going on with these zombies, but then you have to sit through a lot of scenes of the heroes slowly piecing it together.

So, like in other movies, like The Ghostbreakers or Zombies on Broadway, we have a snarky radio announcer making fun of either gangsters or in this case, Chet Walker.

Dr. Walker is of the opinion these crimes are being perpetrated by dead men. Yes, I said dead men.

What I love about this is that last bit, Buchanan and his German doctor friend were listening to it in the lab. The gangster says, isn't it time to feed them? Which sounds ominous, but they just really eat radioactive material. However, at this point, Buchanan decides he's got to kill Walker too because he's too smart. This is the plot. We're starting to move ahead here, but there's a general involved. They're going to do surveillance. They're going to try to use radiation detection tools to find out where these zombies are coming from. More crawling through the tunnel back and forth. There's a lot of that. But then they send a zombie to kill Chet. But when they realize Chet has driven to a military airbase, they wisely turn around and don't kill him. But now we know that they're after Chet too because they don't want to get caught. Chet goes home to see his wife. I think this is supposed to be Andy like a scene of domestic bliss in the 50s, which features him drinking heavily, smoking and smacking his wife on the butt. So I think we can just, we can, there's a lot of unpleasant sexist banter here. It's kind of bad and also clearly something horrible is going on, but they don't want to tell the daughter, so they're sort of sneaking around, they hide the newspaper. So at this point, I think we've got everything in place, right? Chet has the basic idea of what he's trying to figure out. Harris is trying to help him do it. The villains, Buchanan and the German doctor, realized Chet could be a problem, but they also learn, and this is the important part, that this whole plot is by Buchanan, which we already know, as you've mentioned, Andy, but they have now figured out that Buchanan feels like he was ratted out. He's a gangster, he had to flee to Rome, and there were five people who teamed up to rat him out. Two of them are already dead, right? Hennessy the gangster, McGraw the DA, and it turns out there were three more. What's happening now is they're going to put those people under protection to protect them from the zombies. But this doesn't work because the zombies look just like us, Andy. Another guy gets killed, what happens here?

I think that one of the corpses they had stolen from the morgue was a police officer, is that right?

It may be, but they certainly just took a police uniform and put it on somebody.

Either that, or they dressed up one of their zombies as a policeman, and they had that zombie go up, and it can talk just enough to say, oh, I'm here to take over for the shift guarding these people.

Yes.

And then the zombie gets in and kills the next person on the list, as well as a police officer who noticed something was wrong and went in to investigate. So, the body count is really starting to rack up here.

Yeah. And so, there's a lot going on here, but the rest of the movie is essentially Chet and Harris racing to save the last two people, which by the way, they fail at. I just want to point out, they don't actually get to save anyone.

Everybody on Buchanan's target list gets murdered.

Yes, except for Chet.

So, sorry, spoiler. A thing that's going on while this part of the movie is playing out, this part of the movie is pretty slow. Yes. It kind of started to bog down here. But, so, this movie has a bigger military presence than any zombie movie we've seen to date.

It's got a lot of extras and a lot of military, there's jets flying overhead, there's military trucks driving around with radiation scanners, like all this is going on.

Yeah, and this felt like a precursor to modern zombie movies where a staple of modern zombie movies is that there's some sort of military presence trying to keep order, and in modern zombie movies that never works. But here, it just felt really of the times in like the 50s, there was jet planes flying patrols over the town. John, did you identify the planes?

I think they were shooting stars, the T80.

I thought they might be F9 Panthers.

Oh, you might be right.

Anyway, so yeah, like you said, there's airplanes flying overhead. There's like armed troops roaming, patrolling the streets of the city. There's military trucks driving around. They've got this like radiation detector equipment set up on their trucks. And just overall, this was by far the biggest, like it didn't seem like a coincidence that in the mid 50s here, we have a movie where suddenly the military is a big part of, like this is the opposite of like the incredibly local zombie problems of zombie movies in the 30s and 40s. And this one, this relatively minor killing spree has been enough to bring in the US military to basically put the town under martial law.

And I think Chet suggests this because of the radioactive nature of the zombies. And I think that's why he wants to involve the military.

Okay, yep, that does make sense.

Yeah, so there's a scene we're not gonna go into in depth here where he goes to see a neurologist to ask some questions because he's trying to figure out how this brain control works. But we can't skip it completely because it has Andy's favorite thing in it. He's explaining how this, the neurologist is explaining how this might be possible. And what does he show, Chet?

A dog, a video of a dog, right?

He sets up a film projector and plays a video of neurological experiments on a cute dog. And I'm like, Andy loves a science movie in the middle of his movie.

This was a painful thing, partly because... So the point of the video that he's showing is like, so this dog is allegedly connected, is being controlled by scientists who can input a command and it makes the dog bark. But it just looks like the dog is just kind of barking and doing regular dog stuff. It's like a really unexciting movie.

It asks the question, why would you conduct this experiment? Because you could just train a dog to do all these things.

Exactly, and I mean, it's like, well, I guess I'll just take your word for it that they are ordering it to walk in a circle because dogs also just do that normally, it would be more interesting if they could control the dog and make it stand on one leg or something like that. But the final thing he says that they figured out how to do is they can send electrical impulses to quote, the dog can be made to resent its food.

Yes, that's my favorite one.

That is the culminating scientific breakthrough. They can send an impulse to make a dog not be hungry.

I know, that's scary.

I'm making fun of this, but this is an interesting thing that feels of the time. Specifically, it feels like science fiction of the time, where a lot of vintage sci-fi and modern sci-fi, I mean, The Last of Us does this. It starts with the premise of like, here's a scientific fact that we have observed in like, nature or in animals or something like that. In this case, it's that, you know, bodies can be manipulated to some extent by electrical manipulation of the brain.

We get some great techno babble where they refer to it as amygdala stimulation.

Exactly. And so, I mean, that's, you know, I mean, that is not portrayed, you know, realistically in this movie, but that is a thing that is a real scientific idea. And so, this movie, like a lot of sci-fi movies, its premise is basically, what if this were the case, but it were applied to humans?

Right. It's sort of like, Jurassic Park is the same thing, right? Like, they've done some small, we've managed to clone like a sheep, right? But let's take 10 steps and get it so you can extract, you know, this DNA from amber and create things from scrap. Like, you know, it sort of like takes a very simple, technically possible thing and expands it into this giant thing.

Yeah, I think about Last of Us is, the whole premise of The Last of Us is, well, there's this zombie fungus in nature that affects ants. What if it affected humans? And then we have a, and that is a horror story all of a sudden. And I do think this points to, you know, this sort of intrinsic nervousness we have about our own technology, right? It's like, we're really amazed by this. What an incredible discovery. But in the back of our minds, well, what if this were used on people? Or what if, like, what is the end point of the journey that this discovery has started us along? And I think just culturally, I mean, every horror movie, I mean, like 80% of horror movies are built around a premise along these lines, right? And culturally, we're just really nervous. There's this real fear that goes along with our awe and excitement at science. And that must have been doubly so in the 50s, I think.

Yeah. And, you know, everyone's afraid of the atomic bomb and atomic energy, and here we have creatures powered by it, and they're terrifying. So the plot sort of accelerates, if we can say that. I think when you're almost at a stop, anything you do is accelerating. So we'll call it accelerating for this movie. But what happens is the gangster does not want all these airplanes flying around and these trucks trying to detect him. So he calls the mayor, I believe, or the governor, and says, if you don't stop all this, I'm going to have the zombies wreak havoc on your community. And the horde attacks, right? So they're making a calculation, our heroes, Chet, the general, the mayor, Captain Harris, should we stop looking for him, or should we keep going, and just handle the zombies as they come? And they decide to keep going. And then we have this destruction montage.

Yeah, this is crazy.

This is crazy. And it feels like an apocalyptic zombie movie.

It does.

Yeah, they have these shots of like the zombie looming towards the camera, and then like a train falling off the tracks, or a car crashing or something. It's these zombies are causing mayhem, and then getting away, which is hilarious. Yes.

Yeah. I will say that I got a little glimmer of like the fear of these zombies being unleashed.

Right? It's zombies gone wild here. It's starting to feel a little apocalyptic.

Because these zombies, I mean, they're more like terminators than zombies, honestly. I mean, they're pretty powerful. And the idea of him sending his whole horde out into the city just to start killing and causing destruction, that's actually pretty terrifying, at least in the abstract. I wouldn't say this movie is very terrifying, but.

Yes. Yeah, I agree. And then our newscaster, after this happens, our newscaster has changed his tune, which cracked me up completely. Let's hear the half producer, Brad.

And with the murder of Jason Franshot last night, I must apologize for my recent skepticism regarding these radioactive creatures. It seems they do exist and they are prowling the street.

Yeah. So thanks.

Everything is just delivered in a way to cause the maximum amount of public panic, by the way.

Yeah, I know. Yeah, like the bad choices around. So in any case, Buchanan decides what he's got to do is kidnap the gangster. Buchanan has to kidnap Chet Walker to stop the plot so they won't get discovered because he's not done killing people yet. However, it's all foiled because Chet says, Hey, Captain Harris, will you take my car home and I'll take your car home for some obscure reason I just made up? All right, I'll see you tomorrow. And so, so poor Captain Harris gets kidnapped instead and brought back to the evil lair. Well, Chet goes home and has a martini with his wife.

Yeah, and killed and zombified.

And killed.

That's pretty grim for these movies, honestly.

Yeah, again, it's surprising. It's done by somebody who's impersonating a soldier. So they take him back, they crawl through the tunnels, crawl, crawl, crawl. They put him on the lab table and they turn Captain Dave, who Penny, the young girl, calls Uncle Dave, into a zombie.

Yeah.

And then he has to leave the lab by crawling out the tunnel as well, which is not the most terrifying introduction of a zombie. They've made an upgrade to Uncle Dave. They're able to stimulate his larynx so that he can speak in his own voice. All the other zombies sounded like Buchanan, but this one can sound like Dave. And what are they going to do with this newfound power? First of all, they hand him a giant knife.

Yeah. Well, I mean, they're going to, now that they have Zombie Dave under their control, they're going to send him after Chet.

Yeah. So I could see this scene as being really scary. It doesn't work at all, but the idea is scary, right? What happens is Captain Dave, Uncle Dave, goes to Chet's house, and Chet's wife and daughter don't realize he's a zombie, and he ends up in their house, overhearing everything they say about where Chet is. But the real scary thing is like, the wife goes in the kitchen, she's cooking a birthday cake, Penny's out there with him. I could see this if it were a more scary movie, where this felt scary and you're really worried about Penny. I think that's what we're supposed to feel.

Yeah. He's left in a room with Penny. So I didn't know if this movie, I didn't think this movie would have the guts to kill the wife and daughter.

No, I didn't think so.

That would be grim and brutal. And in fact, this movie does not have the guts or maybe would not have been permitted to do that.

But there's a stand in for the murder of Penny. What is it?

It's Penny's doll, which the zombie rips to shreds before leaving. Having learned where...

What's the doll's name?

Henrietta.

Henrietta is the doll's name.

Henrietta is the doll's name, yes. And then Penny cries. And then Dave jumps back in the car because he's learned Chet's actual location.

But he's learned where the final two victims on Buchanan's hit list are.

Right.

They're under police protection and posing because he's pretty convincingly can pass as Captain Harris, he can walk right in.

Yeah. And which he does. But I'd like to point out something here, which is, so he drives down the road in Chet's car. And then I realized, and I know this happens in movies and TV shows all the time, but essentially every time there's a car scene, they've just been driving up and down the same stretch of road.

Yes.

Like the whole time. So yes, Captain Harris, Zombie Captain Harris, Zombie Uncle Dave Captain Harris drives to the jail where our two, our last two folks are. And then he goes into the jail and kills them. Somebody, a cop calls on the radio to Chet Walker that Captain Dave is here for some reason. Chet comes down and when Dave is driving away, escaping the scene of his crime, Zombie Uncle Dave, Chet jumps in the car. He's like, Dave, what are you doing? What's wrong with you? He doesn't understand that Dave is a zombie until he hears the following message come over the police radio in the car.

Attention all cars. Lester Banning and Tom Dunn found murdered in county jail. Police Captain David Harris suspect. Proceeding south with Dr. Chet Walker and Yellow Convertible.

So Chet is sitting there going, hey wait, I'm with Dave. Hey wait, that's my car. This is how he figures it out. Which is just hilarious to me. I just laughed and laughed.

I actually like this scene that's just about to start.

Yeah. You want to describe it?

Yeah. So Zombie Dave has Chet in the car with him. And so Buchanan, who is again, monitoring all this through their scientific equipment, realizes he can kill two birds with one stone here, I guess. And he orders Zombie Dave to crash the car and kill both of them in the car. There's like a funny sequence where he's veering wildly around. It's hard to describe.

Yeah. And Chet's like, hey, Dave, cool down.

So he veers around in this insane manner, and Chet's professional demeanor never shifts. He's like, hey, slow down a little bit. And so Zombie Dave does crash the car, but Chet jumps out right beforehand. And importantly, though, the control of Zombie Dave has been kind of broken by this crash. So Buchanan no longer can really control him. So John, anyway, you take it back over.

Well, I think, so they go to the hospital with Dave, and the same neurologist examines him. Long story short, what they're going to do is set Dave loose, because very early in the movie, they said, as long as their brain works, they're going to come back to home base to get their radioactive nutrients, right? So they realize, if we just let Dave go, he'll lead us to them, which they do. He smashes out a window, he steals a police car. Can I just point out right now that Chet and the rest of the police force is a complete failure because everybody who is going to get murdered got murdered.

Yes.

So at this point, they're just trying to solve the crime.

Yes, absolutely.

So that happens and they track him in a whirly bird, a helicopter, the fakest looking helicopter scene. They shoot him in the cockpit of the helicopter, Chet in the pilot, and you see the rotor in the back and it's spinning like half a mile an hour.

I almost stopped to Google because I'm like, do I not understand how helicopters-

No, you do.

You understand the word. Is there a part of the rotor that turns really slowly? So yeah, but there's this huge manhunt is converging, is following Zombie Dave back to the lab.

So we got a bunch of soldiers here, we got a bunch of police cars, they're all following Dave. Dave bursts into the lab. No, no, no, Chet gets into the lab first, right?

Well, so before all that, so this big manhunts, they surround the lab. So Buchanan and the scientists are in there and they realize they've been surrounded.

Yep.

And yeah, what happens to the scientist, John?

Well, Buchanan kills him, that son of a gun, and then in comes Chet.

So before that though, yes. Buchanan sends the zombies out, remember?

That's right. Yes. So he sends his horde of eight zombies, and they're out there tussling with the cops, and the soldiers are shooting them, and nothing is happening, and the zombies are like...

They even throw grenades at them.

They throw grenades at them. It's like an all-out fight. And while this is going on, Chet goes in. So they've decided, first of all, just for an excuse to get this fight going, they've decided, well, we can't bomb the place because there are radioactive stuff in it, and it could throw it into the air. So Chet goes in there, and he fights Buchanan, but he's no match for Buchanan. However, who comes to save the day to save Chet from his fate?

It's Zombie Uncle Dave.

It's Zombie Uncle Dave. He bursts in, he kills Buchanan, and then Chet smashes the place up. And when that happens, all the power goes out and the zombies cease to work. They all fall to the ground.

And it is kind of suggest that the zombies are slaughtering the soldiers out there.

They're kicking butt. The soldiers have no chance. I found that. I want to talk about this more at the end, but absolutely. And then the movie ends. We cut to, well, first of all, like Dave is smashing this place up and everything's catching on fire. And like this is the guy who didn't want to cause an explosion two seconds ago. But they go, so that we cut to Penny's birthday party. She gets a new doll. She's decided she's not mad at Uncle Dave anymore. So she names her new doll Dave, which is absolutely delightful. And then she blows out her birthday candles. And there's a newspaper headline about how all the zombies have been stopped.

Do they suggest that Dave might be salvageable in this scene? I don't think so.

No, they're just lying to her to tell her that Dave's going away for a while.

It is ambiguous, though.

It is ambiguous.

I was wondering if they were lying.

Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, yeah, that's our movie. We went more into the plot than we normally would. But the problem is, or the great thing is, there's a lot of zombie stuff buried in here.

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Like I wrote down again, is this another missing link? You know, like, it feels a lot like they're not misskill zombies. They are not contagious zombies, but there is a horde and they are sort of unstoppable and mindless. So anyway, let's get into it. Yeah.

Yeah. Let's jump into our questions. Is there a hero party in this movie?

Absolutely. Yeah. There's Chet, Dave, Uncle Captain Zombie Dave, and there's various other assorted people, but that's really our two heroes.

And I would stretch things a little bit to include his wife and daughter in the hero party.

Yeah.

In the sense that he has people he needs to keep safe. Yes. The party includes, I guess what you might call some people that need to be kept safe.

Innocent bystanders. Yeah.

Yeah. Innocence. How does the party do, John?

Not so great.

How many of them survive?

We've been keeping answering this question by saying they're fine, but not this time. Dave gets turned to a zombie. This is like a first for us, I think, where one of the heroes, though it did happen in King of the Zombies, where the scrappy Irish guy who played Captain America in the Captain America serial we keep trying to watch, he gets turned into a zombie, but I think he turns back. But this is our first, Dave is one of the heroes and he becomes a zombie.

Yeah. He's just a straight up zombie casualty. I think that is a first.

Absolutely.

Is there a zombie horde in this movie?

A hundred percent. I know it's only eight, but they behave like a horde. What do they do here? They go around destroying infrastructure, blowing up trains, they fight soldiers, and they are winning. There's only eight of them because of the budget probably, but this is a horde for sure.

Yeah. When they come shambling out of the house at the end to attack the soldiers, that could be a bit from a modern zombie movie. These slow moving guys shambling inexorably forward, not responding to bullet shots or anything like that.

Yeah. They don't bite people, but they strangle them. There's even a scene where a soldier unloads a Tommy gun into one of them, and it keeps coming. That's pretty great.

Yeah. During the fight, somebody on the sides is actually shouting, the bullets have to hit the brain basically. The soldiers don't get the message in order to do it. Yeah, for sure. Let's keep going. How are zombies destroyed or killed in this movie?

As long as their brain is intact, they can keep going. It's clearly like destroy the brain or their neurons, and they fall.

Yeah, exactly. Is the world threatened in this movie?

I'm going to say yes.

Yeah, I think so too.

Because the zombies are used to terrify the citizens of this town to execute threats. It's not apocalyptic yet, but I think this community is threatened by these zombies massively. Yeah.

What is the kill count here?

It's much higher, right? Like people getting killed, zombies getting killed. There's way more of this than anything we've seen, don't you think so?

Yep, I totally agree. Yeah. What kind of... So, I mean, this is all leading to this question, John. What is the type of zombie strain we're dealing with here?

These are scientifically created zombies, right? Like you could, like in this movie, it takes an operation to get them to go. But like in 28 Days Later, right? It's a chemical that's invented to induce rage in monkeys that gets free. That's a scientific invention as well. So, I'm loosely throwing these together. You know what I mean? Like science zombies are now a thing and mysticism is gone.

Yeah.

Would it be atomic mad science?

Atomic mad science. Yes. I think that's a distinction we're going to see in the 50s. A lot of atomics kind of things.

It certainly feels like we are firmly in the era of the science zombie. I imagine that we will have some zombie movies coming up that throw back to the more mystical approach. But this feels like a direction that we are charging speedily along.

Yeah. It feels like we made up a lot of ground in one very silly movie.

So what are the zombie firsts that we identify? We called out a good number of them in this movie.

Yeah. Scientific zombies, a zombie horde. We've had some hordes before, but this is a really identifiable. Maybe it's not a first, but a super identifiable horde and the army trying to save the world, like a military response to zombies. That's a first here, which is going to become a staple later. What else? What other firsts do you think we have here?

There's a lot. I think we've covered them mostly, but except for, well, let's wait till the four pillars in it.

Yeah. Let's do the pillars, and then I've got some questions for you.

Yes. All right. John, does this movie feature an apocalypse?

I'm going to argue yes, because it does have repeated scenes of planes crashing. The zombies are creating an apocalypse. The world does not end, but it's not from lack of trying on the zombies part. Yeah.

Is there contagion in this movie?

There is not. You have to be turned into a zombie by a scientist who knows how to do it. It's a process.

And then I would say that in this movie, that is the main thing that prevents this from feeling like a modern zombie movie.

I agree.

It has so many of the other pieces, but that biting and contagion is totally absent. Yeah. Are there tough moral choices in this movie?

I think so. They choose to let Dave loose, right? And they also make a choice. This is not the kind of thing I was talking about, but they choose to like, we got to keep scanning for the zombies, and if he looses them, that's a tough moral choice, and a lot of people die because of it.

Yeah. I think you're onto something there. There is a certain moral choice involved in their decision of how to react. They react in a really over-the-top way that kind of escalates the situation, and it leads their over-the-top response to the zombies, leads to an escalation of the zombie menace.

Yeah. And you can see a movie, 60 Years in the Future, where the F-18s are called in to try to keep them from getting out of Philadelphia or whatever.

Yes.

It's not that severe, but it feels like the same kind of choice.

And lastly, do loved ones turn against you in this movie?

Absolutely, Captain Uncle Zombie Dave threatens Penny and her mother and destroys Penny's doll, which I think is just a stand-in for Penny. It's not an era where you can kill a child in a movie, so let's suggest it strongly by having the doll get torn to pieces. So yeah, for sure.

And then he tries to kill Chet by crashing the car they're at.

Yeah, absolutely.

There's textbook loved ones turning against you in this movie.

Yeah, 100%. But we're in the 50s now, Andy, so I have some questions for you. One of the things we predicted was paranoia as major themes in this movie. Does this movie really have a lot of that?

There's some elements of it, I think. Yes. I mean, the simple fact that, I think this movie has some weak elements of the paranoia feel. So, I mean, there is this threat that someone you know could be zombified and you wouldn't realize it.

And there are a couple instances of a soldier and a policeman who are actually zombies getting access to something that they shouldn't have access to.

So there's a little bit of that. The enemy could infiltrate your ranks, I think you might say.

I would add that the atomic part too, while the people in the film aren't afraid of atomic power and energy, I think the film is trying to create a paranoia about what can happen in the real world.

I think you're 100% right.

Yes, I think that's a good point.

They're feeding on that paranoia for sure. Yep. How is this hero different? How are heroes evolving here in the 50s?

Well, so this hero is pretty dull and bland, but I just have to say again, I think the increased like sexuality present in this movie, just present mostly in the form of just a lot of kissing, is I think it's a sign of the times and a direction that the genre is going to keep moving along.

Do you remember what Chet says when his wife says, Chet pulls his wife into the bed, starts kissing her, and she goes, honey, Dave will hear us. You know what Chet says next?

He says something like, well, let's show him what he's missing out on or something like that.

But doesn't it also say he's an adult?

Yes.

That this is what adults do? It's an acknowledgement that this is real and healthy?

For sure. I think Uncle Zombie Dave, Captain Dave is a bachelor.

I didn't mention this, but there's more than a little loathing of Dave, I think, in some of the wife's dialogue. Yeah, absolutely. She doesn't seem to really appreciate Dave hanging around the house as much.

She's very frustrated that Dave keeps taking her husband away to do work, when she wants to hang out with him. Yeah.

So we are still in the land of the hero is a young professional, he's married, he's responsible.

He's a young child.

He's on the cultural track that mid-century America wants everyone to be on. There's no one in this movie that isn't white. Everyone seems to be from the same generic middle-class background, so there's no movement in those categories.

Well, what's interesting is I think we rightly were like cringing at the sort of black comedy relief valet throughout the 30s and 40s, but now we have no people of color at all. Zero. There's nobody with any accent other than German in this movie.

I thought about that too. It's not that I want the racist portrayals of black people to come back, but this is not the right way to avoid having racist tropes in your film.

It feels going farther away from any kind of diversity. It's saying, it's just eliminated altogether.

I'm sure it's going to be a while before this stops being an issue, but it hurts for me the believability. It hurts my ability to be immersed in this when you see a city, and it's just all identical looking white people.

With fedoras and pipes.

It seems like just a strange... These were not real cities that the people, viewers of this movie, lived in real cities that did not look like this.

Exactly.

Kind of weird that this is the sort of city we see in.

Yeah, it's sort of like the fake grass in the Brady Bunch, right? It doesn't really feel like a real house. Yeah. So here's a big one. You've already answered this multiple times, but did science and sci-fi take a central role in this movie?

Yes, absolutely. We don't need to rehash everything, but this movie is all about science. Very intriguing, maybe even medically exciting science. Yeah. But then followed to a very alarming extreme.

And the last one I'll ask you is is this genre, is it starting to leave sort of the very local small story and move on to a broader American or world stage?

I think so. So the, it's the calling in the military that really does it, I think. That suggests, I mean, I don't know if this is like the National Guard or I don't know if this is the state governor calling this in or the president of the US, but it feels like a national scale response to the zombie menace. And that to me, it's a definite escalation of the zombie threat, I think, from all past movies we've watched except for Asiacues. All right, John, well, let's wrap up with our traditional closing questions. Would you and I survive in this zombie world?

This is the first one where I'm like, maybe not. Not only is there zombies, but there's a sinister plot to use the zombies to kill people more than any other movie. I think we could stumble onto a train wreck. First of all, the train wreck in this movie is such a model train, it's hilarious, but something could happen.

I agree. The zombies in this movie, they are not terrifying yet, but they're more scary both in the micro and the macro. On the micro scale, they are more scary than past zombies. That first zombie that busts through the window and then snaps the spine of that gangster.

It's the indestructibility.

Yeah. That's a pretty scary thing. These zombies have more, like I mentioned, the Terminator. They have more kind of unstoppable killing machine energy to them. Right. Even while they aren't really fast, you could imagine this thing just following you and being impossible to shake. That kind of zombie might be able to get me. But on the macro scale, these are zombies capable of creating societal level chaos. And so that sort of chaos, I could see getting me as well. So I would say my survival in this zombie world is a little up for question.

Yeah, absolutely.

So John, lastly, is this a zombie movie or is this a movie with zombies?

I think it's a zombie movie, solidly.

I think so too.

And we were talking in the Jacuz episode about, hey, did George Romero see Jacuz and see the zombie horde? Seeing this movie, he doesn't have to have done that. He could have just seen this movie. This is a movie that could have inspired him. You know what I mean? In the same way we were talking about in Zombies of the Stratosphere, like the impression it made on a young George Lucas and Steven Spielberg couldn't be more obvious. Again, I don't know this, but I could see a world in which young George Romero was sitting in a movie theater, sees this movie and then 20 years later is like, I have an idea. 13 years later, it's not even that far.

John, do you recommend this movie generally and then specifically to the Zombie fans that listen to this podcast?

Look, there's a reason it was on MSA, on Mystery Science Theater 3000. It's not a great movie, but there's so much good Zombie stuff in here that if you're a Zombie fan, I think you should see it.

I agree, too. I feel like we have maybe, our excitement at these new tropes has maybe dominated our discussion here. I do want to emphasize it is a kind of a clunker of an actual film.

Yeah, it's pretty bad. My favorite bit is that before cell phones, apparently everybody knew where everybody was and they would just call and get them at that place.

Yes.

Yeah, it's a clunky movie, but there are so many tropes here that Zombie fans for sure.

I think it's worth watching if you're a Zombie fan for sure. But maybe you could probably watch the Mystery Science Theater version of it, I would say.

Yes, I think that would be okay.

In fact, I plan to do that.

Yeah, so having said it was a clunker, that means the next one is probably not going to be right, Andy?

Well, so far in season three, we started out with season two, we started out with that bad serial, and then, well, I don't know, there's no pattern to this. I'm just crossing my fingers and playing.

We're trying to impose order on a chaotic world or a chaotic producer anyway. So should we do that?

What's next, Brad?

We are going to 1957, and here is the poster.

Maybe all of that talk about science zombies being the way forward was not true on the basis of this one. This is called Voodoo Island. John, will you do it?

I'll try. So first of all, the illustrations on this are hilarious. It says, a screaming woman who's being attacked by some sort of creature, which I think is supposed to be a giant snake, but it's so poorly drawn, and it has arms.

It has arms.

So I can't tell what it is.

It's like a lizard man of some sort.

We've got a picture of Boris Karloff, who looks like he just got hit in the side of a head with a shovel. Like his mouth is hanging open. Then there's a green-faced fanged creature right behind him. In big bloody letters on the front, it says, Boris Karloff, Voodoo Island. Would you like to read the text?

Yes. There is a one word, the word supernatural across the top of this, which is a very funny word to put on your poster.

I assume that the creatures are not at a power in this. There's also a great description. Would you like to read what this movie promises, Andy?

The weird jungle of cobra plants that feed on women and rip men apart.

Well, there you go.

Okay. I think that is my favorite blurb of poster blurb so far.

It's better than dynamic sex-lutch.

I am worried, however, that it is a lie and it's not going to be nearly as gratuitous as it sounds.

I don't think we're going to see one man get ripped apart.

I don't think so either, yes.

All right. Well, Voodoo Island, starring Boris Karloff, 1957. We're on it. Thanks everybody and we'll see you next episode. You've been listening to Zombie Strains. We'll be back next episode to talk about another zombie movie. If you enjoyed our podcast, please take a moment to rate us in your podcast app of choice. Tell a friend, follow us on Instagram at Zombie Strains. All of this helps like-minded people find the show. See you next time.