The Incredibly Strange Creatures is difficult to categorize. Is it schlock? Is it the first horror musical? Is it The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies?!? Yes, yes, and again – yes.
The most insightful critical line ever written of this bizarre film was by the late, great rock and roll critic Lester Bangs, who explained that the film wasn’t so much in bad taste as it existed in a universe in which good taste and bad taste no longer existed.
It’s impossible to write anything more intelligent about this film because it’s ultimately incomparable to any other film. It simply is. It exists. What’s it about? Ask someone who has just seen it and they won’t be able to provide a coherent answer.
It’s about freaks. It’s about carnivals. It’s ab Read more...
The Incredibly Strange Creatures is difficult to categorize. Is it schlock? Is it the first horror musical? Is it The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies?!? Yes, yes, and again – yes.
The most insightful critical line ever written of this bizarre film was by the late, great rock and roll critic Lester Bangs, who explained that the film wasn’t so much in bad taste as it existed in a universe in which good taste and bad taste no longer existed.
It’s impossible to write anything more intelligent about this film because it’s ultimately incomparable to any other film. It simply is. It exists. What’s it about? Ask someone who has just seen it and they won’t be able to provide a coherent answer.
It’s about freaks. It’s about carnivals. It’s about beauty. It’s about class. It’s about fate. It’s about addiction. It’s about movement. It’s about the commercialization of all those things. It’s a love affair between Jerry and his blue-eyed beauty. It’s… It’s indescribable.
It’s about muddy dialogue and vapid acting. It’s about depravity. It’s about sex. It’s about dance. It’s about monsters. It’s about beautiful women with moles on their left cheeks. It’s … It’s indecipherable.
Zombies do make an appearance, but they’re not the aimless flesh-eating kind like the ones pioneered in Night of the Living Dead. This is pre-Living Dead; Steckler’s film predates Night of the Living Dead by four years. His zombies are more in the vein of the voodoo-slaves portrayed in White Zombie or The Serpent and the Rainbow. The zombies here will do a villain’s bidding. They’re marionette zombies.
In the comparatively ordinary films of David Lynch, there’s always a final scene with red velvet curtains and a Las Vegas lounge singer. In The Incredibly Weird Creatures, the entire film is like that. The entire film is intercut with velvet curtain epilogues voiced by lounge club dancers and singers. Not night club singers, mind you. These acts perform in crowded, darkened bars during broad daylight. Lynch himself might call it ‘pure consciousness.’
The film is populated with drunken dancers stumbling about and fortune tellers throwing acid. In the end, Jerry’s blue-eyed girlfriend might still be uncorrupted. She’ll rinse the carnival rollercoaster saltwater from her fake lashes and marry the skinny accountant who’s always washing his car in her mother’s driveway. But the carnival will always be there. And the cops will always fire upon her scarred boyfriend – just for the hell of it.
If one has the stomach for muddy dialogue with long musical interludes, then this might be worth a watch.
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