#fuck Connor because men aren’t as fun to draw

[ask-will-solace-stuff]

Will’s guide to the Hermes cabin:

#fuck Connor because men aren’t as fun to draw #maybe I’ll add him later #digital #will solace #Alice miyazawa #Julia feingold #cecil markowitz #Hermes cabin #pjo fanart #pjo fandom #pjo/hoo #hoo #heroes of olympus #toa #trials of apollo

[mst3kproject]

812: The Incredibly Strange Creatures who Stopped Living and became Mixed-Up Zombies

Okay, first off, fuck that title.  You know how I write out the full title of Attack of the The Eye Creatures every time I refer to it, out of sheer spite?  I'm going to do the opposite here.  I'm not even going to type out the full acronym. From here on, this movie is known simply as Mixed-Up Zombies, which would be a perfectly good title for a movie made by somebody better at movies than Ray Dennis Steckler.  Apparently the title he originally wanted was even longer, being a riff on the full title of Dr. Strangelove. You can google if you want to know what it was, because I'm not typing that either.

The posters bill MUZ as the First Monster Musical, which is a big fat lie.  I'm pretty sure that to qualify as a musical, a movie has to include more than one song-and-dance number that helps to tell the story, in situations where no sane person would be singing and dancing in real life. Horror of Party Beach (which billed itself as the First Horror Monster Musical) is also not a musical, because its songs have nothing to do with the plot and are all performed by the Del-Aires, who are presumably getting paid for it.  I Accuse my Parents is closer to being a musical, because the songs do express the status of the relationship between Kitty and Jimmy – but it's still not quite there, because Kitty only sings as part of her job.  Mary Poppins is a musical.  Singing in the Rain is a musical.  Fucking Jeeves is a musical.  MUZ is not.

The actual plot of MUZ is somewhat mysterious.  I can tell you that this is the movie where Alex the Chimp's creepy robot double wants us to get our tickets here! and the episode in which Mike and the bots keep making transvestite jokes that really didn't need to be made, but I'm not entirely sure what's actually going on in the story. I guess there are these two carnival performers: Carmelita is an exotic dancer luring men into the clutches of her sister Estrella, who turns them into zombie slaves and sends them out to kill people. Why the two of them do this I have no idea.  Possibly it has something to do with Estrella seeing the deaths in her tarot cards.  If her predictions won't come true on their own, then damn it, she'll make them come true!

This rather vague story is told to us through a character named Jerry, played by writer/director Steckler.  He bills himself as Cash Flagg, which is only slightly less stupid of a stage name than Touch Connors. Jerry can't touch Watney Smith on the Hate-O-Meter but he still scores a solid eight out of ten – he's a rat-faced, lecherous man-child who refuses to work because “life is meant to be enjoyed”.  I imagine this is what Steckler himself would say whenever his parents asked him when he was going to stop making terrible movies and get a real job.  Jerry takes his rich girlfriend Angie to the carnival and then ditches her in order to watch Carmelita's strip show.  I think we're supposed to believe that Carmelita hypnotized him into it but nothing in his prior behaviour suggests that this isn't something he would have done anyway.  Under Estrella's mind control, he murders a couple of dancers and then almost kills Angie when she obnoxiously twirls her umbrella at him.  In the end he is unceremoniously shot by the police, who do that a lot in these movies.

One thing that is unavoidably noticeable in MUZ is that somebody, possibly the costume designer and possibly Steckler himself, has a thing about female body hair.  We never see any actual body hair in the movie (even on the men), but the female dancers wear costumes that almost seem designed to make up for the lack!  Marge the dancer's outfit consists mainly of black mesh with a few opaque patches where something naughty might show, and the bit that covers her crotch is a black inverted triangle that looks much more like pubes than it does lingerie.  I thought this might be my own pervy imagination, but then we see the lead dancer at the girlie show.  She also has a black triangle on her groin, with a feathery top to it that makes it look like her pubes come up past her belly button, plus she's wearing that feathery thing around her shoulders that often looks much like armpit hair.  I don't know what to make of this. It's really weird.

Another thing that draws the attention is how tediously uninspired the nightclub scenes are. These, as Tom Servo observed, make up a significant portion of the movie, but they're just not very interesting to watch.  The comedian has the same repertoire as your divorced uncle at Thanksgiving dinner.  Marge and her partner look like they're at their first ballroom dance class and are doing their best to follow the teacher but have no idea what's going on.  The girlie shows Jerry attend consist mostly of dancers walking in circles or doing very limited steps in place, and singers who just stand there.  It's like we're watching video of a junior high talent show.  It's hard to say who's at fault for this... the direction certainly isn't very interesting, but neither is the lighting or the choreography, and the performers are okay-ish at best.  I think we're just looking at a paucity of talent across all fronts.

The various nightclub acts are irrelevant, anyway.  They're nothing but filler, and the movie uses filler to try to distract us from the fact that we never have any idea why these things are happening.  What is it that Estrella and Carmelita are trying to accomplish through their seduce-and-zombify routine? We don't know, because the two of them never talk to each other.  The sisters ought to have some kind of symbiotic relationship.  Carmelita brings Estrella gullible men to make into zombies, and we'd assume that this must also benefit Carmelita in some way – but how?  Is Estrella eliminating competition by killing other dancers who might rise into Carmelita's starring role?  If so then Marge, who is a drunk on the verge of losing her job anyway, was not the best victim to illustrate that.  If the two of them have some kind of larger plan, like world domination (or at least carnival domination), then we never see any hint of it.

The movie would honestly have been way more interesting if it had actually been about whatever the sisters' evil plan is, but instead, it's about fucking Jerry. I think Jerry's story is supposed to be a tragedy, in that Estrella and Carmelita take this happy young man and completely destroy him, but it's impossible to make that work when Jerry really doesn't start off with anything to lose.  He has no job, no ambition, no hobbies... he seems to live as a leech on the ass of his pompadoured, foreigny friend Harold, and his idea of a good time is watching bargain-rate strippers.  There are probably plenty of real people much like him, but they're not the people the average movie-goer likes or admires. A tragic hero is a man who loses everything, but Jerry never had anything except for his romance with Angela, and he ruined that all by himself.

Jerry is not only a singularly un-likeable character, he's not even any fun to hate.  The rednecks in Giant Spider Invasion were so absolutely awful that it was a good time just watching them scream and get eaten.  Jerry is too bland for that, even at his worst.  We fundamentally do not care what happens to this asshole, and as a result, his story is not at all compelling.

As dull and unfocused as the movie is, I think it might have an intentional theme.  Recall that Jerry doesn't want to get a job – he's a free spirit who wants to do his own thing and enjoy himself.  You occasionally hear self-proclaimed free spirits refer to those of us with real jobs as 'zombies'.  Maybe this is a story about Jerry finally having to bow to capitalism, which ultimately destroys him.  The scene about Jerry's joblessness and the fact that the movie bothers to contrast the semi-squalor in which he lives with Angela's wealthy family is just enough to make me think Steckler could have had some kind of economic point to make.  If so, the metaphor is not sufficiently well-developed to really say anything, and we aren't interested enough in Jerry to care in any event.

A lot of MSTies think this movie visually resembles Manos: the Hands of Fate. The two films do share a lack of decent lighting, a warm late 60's/early 70's pallet, and a general 'somebody's last known photograph' feel.  But while Manos' cinematographer was a guy named Robert Guidry who had never done the job before and never did it again, MUZ was shot by fucking Vilmos Zsigmond. You've never heard of him, but only because nobody knows the names of cinematographers – him doing MUZ is kind of the equivalent of finding out Hans Zimmer wrote the Haunting Torgo Theme.  Fifteen years after MUZ, Zsigmond won an Oscar for cinematography on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and he went on to be nominated three more times, for The Deer Hunter, The River, and The Black Dahlia.

Ray Dennis Steckler also kept making movies, but his have titles like The Thrill Killers and The Sexorcist. Unsurprisingly, these have been nominated for zero Oscars and are too obscure even for the Razzies.  I'll see if I can find a couple of them for Episodes that Never Were.

#mst3k #reviews #the incredibly strange creatures who stopped living and became mixed-up zombies #all carnival no magic #60s #everybody do the zombie stomp