ASTRO ZOMBIE MARATHON (1968, 2004, 2010, 2012)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

In marked contrast to Ed Wood, who filled the slow scenes in his movies with loopy dialogue, Ted V. Mikels is sort of the anti-Wood, in that all of his achingly slow scenes force the performers to utter the most blandly functional lines. Even the occasional gem of bad dialogue gets lost in all the dullness.

Mikels' direction is the same as his writing. In most if not all of his films, he burns up time with lots of talking-head scenes, broken up by occasional outbursts of violence, usually with only the weakest forms of gore. But he was canny about casting name actors alongside all the non-professional performers in his flicks, and it seems likely that the name of John Carradine is the only thing that kept one of Mikel's best known crapfests, THE ASTRO ZOMBIES, in television syndication back in the day.

Carradine plays mad scientist, Doctor DeMarco, who gets tossed out of some U.S. astronautics program. His response is to go full Frankenstein, getting his ugly mute servant to collect the dead body of a criminal, which he DeMarco transforms into an "Astro Man." (The film's title is thus a cheat: there's only one "Astro Zombie.") The creature goes on a rampage, and despite DeMarco getting it under control, some enemy spies have taken notice of the scientist's efforts. A spy chief named Satana, played by Tura Satana of FASTER PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL!, kills time lurking around with a single henchman for most of the film, eventually getting around to simply invading DeMarco's laboratory to take over his operation. Satana kills DeMarco, and the Zombie goes wild, killing the spies while a couple of useless American operatives hang around on the periphery.

Empty though ASTRO ZOMBIES is, the growth of the cult-film subculture gave its name some cachet over time. Almost forty years after the original, Mikels somehow managed to get someone to pony up enough money to make MARK OF THE ASTRO ZOMBIES. I suspect that over the years Mikels often heard the complaints about the first film's false title, for now there are a small horde of brain-dead zombies on the loose, randomly chopping people with machetes. (Pretty much the same appliance effect is used for every machete-killing.) This time, aliens called "Reptilians" are responsible, though they've adapted the DeMarco process for their own ends-- which I think must be world conquest, though I don't remember anyone saying so. Though both DeMarco and Satana were apparently killed in ZOMBIES, the lady spy, now usually called "Malvina," is still alive, and again played by a considerably older Tura Satana, though again she just has one lousy henchman she occasionally slaps around. DeMarco is conditionally alive in that Malvina has kept alive his decapitated head (played by a mock-up of the late Carradine's face), apparently just so that she can taunt the old scientist. What either of them has to do with the aliens I never figured out. While waiting for the eventual hurry-up-and-finish climax, Mikels again wastes time with copious talking head scenes, most of which are with a crusading reporter (Brinke Stevens). She's reasonably good during all of this hoohah, unlike Satana and everyone else. Some good aliens show up at the conclusion to destroy the Reptilians.

Though Satana seems to get killed at the end of MARK, she's still around for 2010's ASTRO ZOMBIES: MS-- CLONED, though this time the actress only provides a voice-over for an animated effect based on Satana in her youth, presumably an image taken from ASTRO ZOMBIES. In Malvina's one or two scenes, she still has access to the living head of DeMarco, but neither of them has any consequence to the story. The real villains are warmongering weapons-makers of Area 51, who have used cloning to make new Astro Zombies from the remains of those created by the dead aliens.

This time, the director himself plays both one of the Area 51 honchos and his hippie brother. However, the scientist who's most involved in the creation of new Zombies is Stephanie DeMarco, granddaughter of the original scientist. Curiously, one of her bosses tells her that they kept her from knowing about her grandpa's experiments, which means that Stephanie simply recreates her relative's research without any idea of her indebtedness. This time, when the Zombies get out of control, Mikels resorts to a crossover, resuscitating the long dormant franchise of The Doll Squad from the seventies movie of the same name (in which Satana had a minor role).  Most of the current Squad-members are of course played by young women, but as a nostalgic comeback, Francine York reprises her role as the team's leader Sabrina, and looks pretty good for a seventy-plus actress.

The final fight between the all-female Squad and the Astro Zombies comes too late to boost any interest in this lumbering monstrosity, though it makes this flick the only combative one in the series. M3's only distinction, beyond its crossover status, is being the final film-credit of Tura Satana. As it happened, Francine York would have her last credit in another Mikels mess-terpiece, 2017's TEN VIOLENT WOMEN, PART 2.

Four years later, Mikels went to the Zombie well one last time. I'm guessing he didn't have much of a budget this time, since, aside from a few members of the sort-of Mikels repertory company, the only "name" in the cast was Beverly Washburn from the STAR TREK episode "The Deadly Years." I also recognized none of the character-names from ASTRO ZOMBIES: M4-- INVADERS FROM CYBERSPACE, so I guess Mikels finally decided to let Malvina and every version of Doctor DeMarco fade into nothingness.

This time Mikels decides to rewrite his whole scenario. Instead of the Astro Zombies being Earth-corpses brought back to life by Frankensteinian science, or clones of such corpses, there's a whole race of alien Astro Zombies out there that's just itching to invade Earth again. They find a brand new method of invasion: invading through cyberspace, which principally means that they can pop out of the screens of Earth-people's laptops. Also, this time the Zombies don't just run around chopping up people with machetes. For the Internet Age, they can now shoot beams from their foreheads, blasting people into bloody stains and blowing up Big Ben.

The Earth is so helpless before these invaders. some of the interchangeable talking heads began seeking answers from experts in the occult, for no particular reason, including a palm-reader named Madame Bovary (!) But none of the supernatural stuff ends up being of consequence, because one of the talking heads figures out that all they need to do is to hold up mirrors to repel the aliens' rays. I think that after the Zombies are thwarted, Mikels still left the door open for a sequel, but I doubt if even the most dedicated lover of dreck would have cared.

One thing the series does for me: I once debated whether or not the Zombie or his creator was the focal presence of the original film. Now it seems that the Zombies would seem to be the main focus of all four flicks, for whatever that may be worth in the world of genre analysis.