Creature of the Walking Dead

Creature of the Walking Dead (1965)

** (out of 4)

The horror. The fear. The terror. Jerry Warren strikes back with another hack job.

This time he takes the Mexican horror film LA MARCA DEL MUERTO and adds voice-over narration, new scenes with American actors and hacks up the original film. The "original" movie was about a mad scientist who discovers eternal life so he kills young women for their blood. The scientist is eventually killed for his crimes but centuries later a relative, also a scientist, digs up his body, gives it a blood transfusion and the old mad scientist is back alive and committing more crimes.

Obviously it's impossible to fully judge the original film since it's dubbed here, edited down and of course there's the new footage. With that said, watching the footage here certainly makes me want to seek out that film because there was some nice moments in it including a rather good looking monster, some nice atmosphere scattered throughout and it has a fairly interesting story. The sets are all rather cheap and silly looking but at the same time that adds a little charm.

Director Warren made some movies on his own like TEENAGE ZOMBIES and FRANKENSTEIN ISLAND. Whenever Warren made movies on his own they were usually downright awful with very little actually going for them. He often bought the rights to foreign movies and did hack jobs like this one here. His most popular was probably HALF HUMAN with John Carradine. So, how is this film? For the most part it's entertaining thanks in large part to the original footage. The narration added here is all rather silly and there's no question that the newly added footage is horrible. As with his other hack jobs, the new footage is just a group of American actors sitting around and talking about stuff.

A doctor revives the corpse of an ancestor without realising that, before his death by hanging, he maintained his youthful looks by siphoning the blood from young women into his own body. A cinematic cut-and-paste job from Jerry Warren, who bought the rights to what looks like a half-decent Mexican horror movie from 1961, talked all over the foreign-language dialogue, and added a few English language scenes which have virtually nothing to do with the central plot. It's as messy as it sounds - and not in a fun way

This film begins in the 19th century with a man named "Dr. John Malthus" (Fernando Casanova) stalking and then kidnapping a young woman coming home from church one night. After placing her unconscious body in his laboratory, he immediately begins to drain her blood with a hollow tube and siphoning it off into his own body. How much blood he intended to drain from her is unknown because, just moments into the procedure he is interrupted by the police and dragged off to jail while she remains tied up and unable to free herself. She eventually dies of hunger in the laboratory while Dr. Malthus is tried and executed for the previous murders of several other people. The scene then shifts to a number of years later with a relative of Dr. Malthus named "Dr. Martin Malthaus" (also played by Fernando Casanova) inheriting the house and discovering the secret laboratory previously used by his infamous ancestor. Not only that, but inside the laboratory he also discovers a secret journal that Dr. John Malthus used to write a formula for immortality. Fascinated by this discovery, Martin decides to dig up the body of his ancestor and, with modern laboratory devices, attempts to recreate the secret formula in an attempt to bring to bring him back to life--and it's then that the horror begins all over again. Now, rather than reveal any more, I will just say that, when I first began watching this movie, I thought that I had seen it before as everything was much too familiar. Sure enough, I soon realized that the initial part of the movie was borrowed from the 1961 film "La Marca del Muerto" but with music and narration in the place of the original dialogue. Likewise, key segments of the original film were also inserted at various other times to essentially create an entirely different picture. The problem with this cheap and disingenuous technique was that it lent a rather patchwork quality to the picture and rendered it somewhat incomprehensible at times. For example, in one particular scene Dr. John Malthaus is conducting an experiment on a woman but it never showed how that woman came to be found in this predicament. Admittedly, there exists the possibility that the film I was watching had been edited and was a bit incomplete in that regard. Even so, I'm not sure it would have made much difference as I didn't enjoy this film that much and for that reason, I have rated it accordingly.

No, this slight, silly, forgettable feature is not a spin-off of a certain popular TV series. It's yet another of schlockmeister Jerry Warrens' shameless "cut and paste" jobs: he takes copious footage from a Mexican horror movie, "La Marca del Muerto", removes its soundtrack, adds hilariously moronic narration, and adds some newly shot scenes of his own.

The story has a young scientist removing his grandfathers' body from a mausoleum, using blood and lab equipment to resurrect grandpa, and finds out that - surprise, surprise - grandpa is evil, and he will continue to abduct hapless young victims, and replenish himself with their blood. Meanwhile, in the newly added Warren material, characters basically lounge around and talk about the plot.

Normally, this viewer loves schlock, but this is pretty dull overall. Although there are indications, as usual, that the original foreign film is at least fairly decent, it's all but ruined with the clunky revised soundtrack, and the flatly directed scenes from Warren. This material has dialogue that seems to go on forever, and is not of the slightest interest.

Familiar faces pep things up just a bit. Warren again works with regulars such as Lloyd Nelson, Katherine Victor, and Chuck Niles. Bruno Ve Sota, a corpulent actor and filmmaker who turned up in a fair bit of B movies from the 50s and 60s, is mildly amusing as an inspector who yammers on while getting a massage from Niles' character.

"La Marca del Muerto" does look like it may be worth checking out, due to its Gothic flavours and atmosphere. It's too bad that Warren did it no favours here.

Four out of 10.

Had to do some research on this one. This film was originally a Mexican film directed by Frederic Corte and titled 'La Marca Del Muerto' American director Jerry Warren bought the rights, threw in a few new scenes, took out a lot of the dialogue and dubbed the rest in English. Mostly instead of dialogue he gave it narration explaining what you are viewing. You can really tell the difference from the original scenes and the ones that were added by Warren. The original footage seemed to have great atmosphere had a neat Gothic look about it. The added American scenes are terrible. The constant narration is aggravating and the scenes added by Warren are almost laughable. I have to say almost laughable because it's really a shame that he probably butchered the original 'La Marca Del Muerto'. It might have been nice to see it before the hack job and with legitimate dubbing. Creature of the Walking Dead is a pretty bad movie. It's not worth your time to view this film only to end up disappointed.