The first two minutes of Astro-Zombies centralize around a woman driving her car through the suburbs. The director changes camera angles several times through this two minute scene, shooting the woman from various spots around the car, and focusing on the car's radio every so often as if to say, "Yes, this scene is so boring and monotonous that we're actually focusing on the fucking radio! We don't know how we suckered people into funding it either!". Given the lady's healthy pile of cleavage meat when she exits the car (to be killed by some goofball in a bad Halloween mask wielding a weapon that looks like a trowel duct taped to a hand tiller), you'd think we could've at least been able to enjoy a few seconds more of those love balloons. It's not my job to make the movies; it's just my job to tell other people why they shouldn't be allowed to. This is when I could really use some of that old time disdain to fuel my hot rod of fisting rage.

This opening scene is followed up by either one of the stupidest or ironically coolest opening credits sequences in the history of cinema, as wind-up plastic robots wave their little arms around, eyes lit-up, falling over one another while a toy tank rolls through their ranks and the exhaust from somebody's car rolls through like the world's littlest pansy-ass fog machine. Incredible. One day, when I do finally make a movie, my opening credits will be action figures being knocked over by an RC spider while somebody blows thick cigar smoke all over them. The finale will come as each toy is blown up with M-80s, attached to them by chewing gum or pieces of used dental floss. They'll call me "the Picasso of Moving Pictures"... and I'll sucker everybody into thinking that every retarded thing I do is intentional and therefore art, in which case I'll be the Andy Warhol of, well, being Andy Warhol. I'll have to sell some asshole a painting of a can of potted meat for five figures before I can get started though. Living in New York City, that shouldn't take too long…

After our mind-bogglingly stellar credits sequence, a shady looking Mexican of Torgo-like proportions drags a dead white guy from the mangled remains of a car. Elsewhere, a non-mangled white guy (this one German I believe) rewinds a tape reel as we sit through another minute of automotive scenery (the tape reel replacing the opening scene’s radio), and we finally make it to a scene with dialogue. Hooray dialogue! And hooray BEER! This review brought to you by Red Stripe. Hooray beer indeed. Speaking of the review, Dr. Petrovich is an unassuming chap who works for Dr. DeMarco (John Carradine!), the latter of which is suspected to be involved with a recent rash of mutilations in the Los Angeles area. Despite his association with DeMarco, the CIA doesn't believe Petrovich is actually involved with the murders himself, so they try to use him instead as their man inside to spy on DeMarco's activities and maybe dig 'em up some evidence. This is all covered in the authorities' office, which is little more than a dressed up living room. I see Mr. Ted Mikels is a graduate of the H.G. Lewis “Do Whatcha Can With Whatcha Got” School For Broke-Ass Directors.

According to Dr. P, his boss DeMarco's been working on creating an artificial man servant. This "Quasi-Man" (the Halloween clad marauder from the opening garage scene) would be used to pilot outer space missions, and a new experiment by DeMarco would allow brilliant scientist-types to project their thoughts into these synthetic zombies via radio waves rather than training more able-bodied yet simpler-minded plebeians to do so. It takes the "if you want something done right do it yourself" adage to a new level. You know, the "eXtreme" Mountain Dewian type of level that used to have “the kids” shouting stuff like “SURGE!” a decade ago. As much as Red Bull is like the acrid chunky lung blood of a cancer victim to my taste buds, at least it doesn’t encourage its drinkers to run around shouting “RED BULL!” during games of Grab Ass. Speaking of incoherency, the Chief of this group of policia comes off as a strung-out drunkard desperately trying to keep his lines straight without his head exploding… Elsewhere, in some Cold War coalition of evil, a West German (the aforementioned reel-to-reel guy), a Cuban, and a Chinese woman (uber butch Japanese pussycat Tura Satana!) walk into a bar… to discuss the sale of the Kraut's ultimate party mix-tape. Sorry, I couldn’t think up a good punch line to go with that “walk into a bar” setup. Fritz demands double the money originally promised him by the other two, and things get tense. Yeah, tell me this scene doesn't look a little suspicious going on in a '60s nightclub. It’d be like seeing a trio of Muslim dudes at O’Hare who refuse to put their sneakers on the conveyor belt and started declaring Jihad on Jet Blue.

And if any Muslims read that and took offense, I’m not a prejudice guy and it wasn’t directed at all Muslims, just the extremist ones with a hard-on for holy war. Peace be with you and all that.

Fritz makes the exchange with Dragon Lady and Chico Chulo, but his Kaiser kissing ass gets rundown outside by the duo's Russian partner. You can’t have a “Red Scare Coalition” without a Boris! Back to the retarded Mexican body snatcher, his name’s Francho (!?) and he's in charge of new meat acquisitions for Dr. DeMarco's experimentation. As such, you can guess whose butchering block the dead white guy from the car wreck winds up. In a fairly pointless scene, DeMarco explains the entire brainwashing process of his to his illegal hench-alien. I don't think Francho has the capacity to understand an episode of “The Price Is Right”, let alone complicated computerized brain reprogramming. Speaking of diminished capacities, DeMarco's equipment is about as "advanced" as Dr. Gore's. If you've never seen Dr. Gore, think plastic jugs, random panels of blinking lights, and various light switches glued to broken old pieces of stage lighting equipment and pieces of wood. In fact, DeMarco's "Thermal Freeze Vault" is an old deli case with a few dials and gauges plastered to the side. Charming in that “looks like something out of The Hobo Museum” way… I don’t know if that really made any sense, I just wanted to throw up a link to the Hobo Museum before I forgot.

Away from the story side of things, our CIA heroes (who I couldn’t be bothered to catch the names of) take their ladies out to local speakeasy to watch a topless woman in body paint dance around what is obviously somebody's basement, complete with wood paneling on the walls and an outlet and thermostat right behind her... wow. A set of curtains are also tacked to the wall for her to writhe around with because I guess that was sexy in the ‘60s. Classy. The best part of this little "nightclub"? There's only seating for about 12 people in front of the dancer's "stage". Yowzers. Later, while trying to bug the base of operations for the Red Trio, a pair of snoopy CIA agents are discovered. One of them is captured and killed after the Dragon Lady burns his cheek with a cigarette for no reason other than to try and make the audience squirm like a Jeff Lieberman movie, while the other is just gunned down after a not-brief-enough chase scene. Looks like somebody's stuffing their runtime and it ain't with Kleenex™.

Back at DeMarco's dungeon laboratory, he interrupts Francho's daily game of "douse a random kidnapped woman with bubbling green liquid from a beaker" to show the dirty little half-wit his new solar powered heart and something to do with transmitters... as always, Francho just squints and nods. It’s really starting to feel like I'm being fed random scenes from a spy movie interlaced with these “Mr. Wizard” style laboratory pieces. My brain is water, the movie's oil, and neither one are getting along. I'm also an hour into the movie and no one from any of the three different groups of characters has interacted with a member of another. As such, I'm getting a very disjointed, almost Thomas Tangy feeling, and it equates to pushing a hemorrhoid back into the great beyond.

My suspicion that the three segments were all filmed at different times and would never coincide is eventually shot down as the three paths finally work their way to their convergence point in the woods. The evil communist spies want to get a hold of DeMarco’s synthetic murder men and try to find him by tracking the radio transmissions Dr. D uses to communicate with his creations. Meanwhile, the CIA guys who aren’t dead bait the sinister astro-zombie with one of Dr. Petrovich’s hot lab assistants, as DeMarco continues doing the Bill Nye thing with his shithead Mexican, just waiting for everybody else to get to the party. I don't really give a shit at this point, because a bad movie is one thing, but a badly thrown together mess of a flick that you actually have to put effort into following when it obviously doesn't WANT to be followed in the first place is just hellish. Thrill at random footage of police cars turning around on a small side road. Watch in awe as scenes jump from night into day and back into night again. Yay.

It’s actually not a total loss, as all three stories boil into one frenzied orgasm of a finale complete with knife fighting, machete decapitation, firearm discharge, more blinking lights and puffs of smoke, people dying left and right, and nothing making any fucking sense! This is the bad movie equivalent to a bull in a china shop: all chaos and loud noises and things being broken. The only difference being that the bull didn't have a cool machete, nor did the china shop incident end with more footage of those damn toy robots...

You have to know that The Astro-Zombies could have in no way been taking itself seriously. This self-parody factor is the only reason the thing gets a one-star pass on the Scales of Judgment though. For all I know though, it could very well have been a seriously intended horror flick that was book-ended with gratuitous cheap robot-on-robot violence afterwards so the crew could try to save a little face by making the crappy stuff look intentional. A part of me is really rooting to give this sick dog a good score, but the rest of me is kicking that part in the back of the knees, peeing on it, and taking its lunch money. As such, the solo star rating stands. Que sera.