“I was in the business to make money. I never, ever tried in any way to compete, or to make something worthwhile. I only did enough to get by, so they would buy it, so it would play, and so I’d get a few dollars. It’s not very fair to the public, I guess, but that was my attitude…You didn’t have to go all out and make a really good picture.” — Jerry Warren
‘One person’s filmography I was decidedly not in a big rush to get back to was Jerry Warren’s. He holds the distinction here of being one of the only directors to make multiple NO STAR-rated films not even fit for bad movie connoisseur consumption. Furthermore, Warren himself flat out admitted he had zero interest in making good or entertaining films, which I guess makes him a cinematic charlatan of sorts. He was in the business solely to make money, which required cheap as possible investments on what he hoped would be big returns. That’s his entire dispassionate career in a nutshell. While I’ll never begrudge anyone trying to make an honest living, what Warren was doing ventured more into the realm of hucksterism.
‘Any filmmaker who’s worth a damn is either an artist or someone at least attempting to make enjoyable product for consumers. Warren was neither. His usual routine consisted of buying the distribution rights to unreleased-in-the-U.S. foreign films, having them hacked up and re-dubbed (or simply narrated over) and adding cheap, talky scenes featuring American actors so he had names to put on the poster to lure in unsuspecting genre fans. In doing so, he simultaneously destroyed the original director’s work, showed genuine contempt for his target audience and became quite possibly the laziest director to have ever walked the face of the Earth.
‘Though most of his work was pilfered material, Warren did make a handful of his own films. These included the God awful bore TEENAGE ZOMBIES (1959), the almost tolerable THE INCREDIBLE PETRIFIED WORLD (1959), FRANKENSTEIN ISLAND (1981), which I’ve not yet seen, and MAN BEAST (1956), which was also his directorial debut. Still, even most of these “original” works depended strongly on recycled stock footage to fill in the budget gaps and boost the running time, and this barely hour-long effort is no exception.’ — The Bloody Pit of Horror
‘Jerry Warren seems to have been largely overlooked in the chronicles of Bad Cinema (As usual, Jabootu.com has seen this glaring omission and done a great job of addressing it). Far more attention has been lavished on Ed Wood, if only because he was a much more colorful character, whose movies generally have a far higher camp value than Warren’s. But Warren’s output shows him to be a far more likely candidate for the “Worst Director of All Time” than Wood.
‘Both Wood and Warren copied the trivial details of other genre films without understanding the deeper reasons for those movies’ success. Warren usually had access to a… well, a more lively class of actors than Wood did — actors who were at least able to interpret their lines instead of reading them by rote. Still, Warren’s results are far less entertaining, often because he blocks his scenes so that his actors can barely move at all. Both Warren and Wood were terrible writers; but Wood’s bizarre and senseless ramblings are pure surrealist poetry compared to Warren’s dialogue, which is usually merely boring.
‘But Warren sinks lowest when you compare what each director did with other people’s images. True, Wood is legendary for his inappropriate use of stock footage. In Glen or Glenda?, for instance, he includes a few seconds of stampeding buffalo while Béla Lugosi shouts, “Pull de string!” Sometimes the footage is inadvertently appropriate, if equally ridiculous: in the same movie, as two off-screen steelworkers talk about transvestites, we’re shown machinery clipping off phallic steel ingots. While Wood weakened his own movies with ludicrous inserts, Warren did the opposite: he took other people’s entire movies and destroyed them with footage of his own.’ — Braineater
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Stills
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Further
Jerry Warren @ IMDb
Jerry Warren: Cinema’s Own Dr. Frankenstein
Jerry Warren – A Biography
THE FILMS OF JERRY WARREN
Jerry Warren @ Letterboxd
The HORROR And SCI-FI MOVIES Of JERRY WARREN
Curse of the Stone Hand – Braineater.com!
The Jerry Warren Collection
A delicate bouquet of old gym socks….Mr. Jerry Warren
Man Beast @ The Bloody Pit of Horror
The Worst Director of All Time With More Than One Film
Attack of the Mayan Mummy @ Psychotronica Redux
It’s amazing what can be accomplished by a simple blow to the head.
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Extras
Jerry Warren Collection Vol. 1
Jerry Warren Collection Vol. 2
Joe Dante on THE INCREDIBLE PETRIFIED WORLD
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Bio
from Search My Trash
Jerry Warren was born in 1925, in Los Angeles, California. Little is known about his early life, but sometime in his late teens/early 20’s, the movie bug must have bitten him, and he started out as a bit player, appearing in films like the Chic Johnson/Ole Olsen comedy Ghost Catchers (1944, Edward F.Cline) and who knows how many other films. Unfortunately though, Warren wasn’t much of an actor, so he never got past “uncredited”-status. However, Warren used his days as a bit-player to learn plenty about the film business, and eventually he came to the conclusion if he wanted real power in movies, he had to become a producer/director …
Jerry Warren it seems had found just the right time to make his dreams of becoming a producer/director reality: The mid-1950’s. This was a time when the studio system was at its weakest yet drive-ins from all over the country were in bad need of films to sell to their teenage crowd. Drive-in owners in these days were not all that peculiar about quality of the fare they were showing, since their teenaged patrons were a rather undistinguishing crowd that came to have fun with their friends, get past first base with their partners of the opposite sex on their cars’ backseats, and maybe party a bit. They wanted movies that had an easy-to-follow story, a few cheap thrills, and a sensationalist plotline that promised something this then new medium, television, would not show. Actual quality hardly ever came into this equation.
Like Roger Corman and others, Jerry Warren was quick to realize that movies could be sold on their poster-motives and titles alone, and if you had a good poster, you didn’t have to worry about the film attached to it all that much anymore – which was of course an invaluable fact to know for any low budget producer (and Jerry Warren always was his own moneyman) since it took pressure of actual production-values and allowed more shortcuts.
Why is that?
Because as long as the posters at the drive-in promised the teenage crowd the stuff they wanted to see, they would come, and if you didn’t show a total bomb, they wouldn’t complain. Point is that the drive-ins were more of a social gathering ground to begin with, and not too many teenagers actually came for a particular film or were interested in a particular director. One was just going to the drive-in because everybody else was there, too …
One interesting and little-known fact about Jerry Warren’s career is that he not only was a director/producer and general jack-of-all-trades on his movies (after all, personnel doesn’t come in cheap and why pay someone to do something you can do yourself?), no, in 1959 he also recorded two hit singles, Street of Love and Monkey Walk, as Jerry Warren and his Pets. Now of course, Warren was no Elvis Presley, but his tunes were not half bad, songs targeted at the same teenage audience that went to see his films, and they were at least moderately successful.
With House of the Black Death, Warren ultimately left the realm of cut-and-paste filmmaking to make what many consider to be the ultimate Jerry Warren film (though it’s not all that typical for his body of work) while others consider it the worst movie of all time (which it isn’t – though it’s bad enough) while yet others simply don’t get it: The Wild World of Batwoman (1966). The Wild World of Batwoman is essentially about a bunch of bad guys trying to steal an all-powerful hearing aide (!) and the attempts of superheroine Batwoman (as played by Katherine Victor) and her bikini-clad Batgirls to keep it out of their hands – and in the end, the all-powerful hearing aide turns into an all-powerful bomb, too.
The main mistake many people make concerning The Wild World of Batwoman is to take it seriuosly, which it was never intended to be – actually, the film was more of an hommage to/rip-off of/cash-in on the then extremely popular Batman TV-series starring Adam West, itself a masterpiece of campy and surreal nonsense. And made on a way tighter budget than the series, Warren’s film tries to duplicate its over-the-top ideas – and yet fails, at times even miserably, mainly because humour was never Jerry Warren’s forte and because what was campy in the original is only childish here.
Possibly out of frustration over the events surrounding The Wild World of Batwoman, Jerry Warren pulled out of the film business after the release of that film as She was a Hippy Vampire to concentrate on other business options … but then again, what goes for every self-respecting zombie also goes for almost all of the more eccentric figureheads of the horror genre: You can’t keep a good man down – and thus in 1981, when he was pretty much forgotten by his fans of old (which were not all that many) and before rediscovery of films like his on home video kicked in, he out of the blue released a new film, 15 years after his last one, and yet he had assembled most of his regulars from yesteryear again, like Katherine Victor, Robert Clarke, even John Carradine and frequent Jerry Warren-guest star Steve Brodie, plus veteran B-actor Cameron Mitchell, a newcomer to Warren’s cinematic realm.
The film in question, Frankenstein Island, is a story about a group of balloonists stranded on an island full of bikini-clad girls and monsters and controlled by the daughter (Katherine Victor) of Frankenstein (John Carradine), who is with her as a ghost – and it is pure narrative madness, but it’s also a great (and unintentional?) hommage by Jerry Warren to himself: in its mix-and-mash structure of story- and genre-elements it is reminiscent of Warren’s cut-and-paste-movies, while its unrestrained throwing around of pulp clichés can be traced back to The Wild World of Batwoman, and yet storywise, the film is remarkably similar to Teenage Zombies, with Katherine Victor even playing a similar role in both movies. The outcome of this strange blend is of course utter trash and maybe one of the worst movies Warren has ever made – and at the same time, it’s simply hilarious and a film that’s hard to top in terms of low-budget outrageousness …
Of course though, the early 1980’s were no longer the 1950’s, and by 1981, Warren’s directorial style seemed terribly outdated, as low budget filmmaking had moved on from 1950’s drive-in routines quite significantly – so the film failed to find a large audience (though it has probably made its money back on home video). Warren could not help but notice his time as a filmmaker was over, and he never shot another film. He died from cancer in Escondido, California, 1988, at the age of just 63. But as unlikely as it seemed during his lifetime, probably, his films, with all their obvious, undeniable flaws, have lived on since then and will continue to do so for quite a while now, at least as long as there are trash movie lovers like myself.
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Jerry Warren’s 12 films
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Man Beast (1956)
‘This was Jerry Warren’s first film. Which makes it much harder to explain why it was so much better than most — or perhaps, nearly all — of his films that followed. In fact, he followed it up with the exceedingly dull Teenage Zombies. Go figure. Now don’t get the wrong idea here: this is an impressively cheap film, with lots of recycled stock footage, a lot of obviously studio bound scenes (mostly in tents), and lots of talk. Lots and lots and lots of talk. But the end result is something Jerry usually only aspired to: an entertaining, if minor, B-Movie. I suspect Jerry may have picked his actors because they resembled those in his stock footage climbing scenes (from an unfinished Russian film, according to Bill Warren) as they match reasonably well. But the strangest part of this one is the opening credits, which give top billing to Rock Madison. Who never appears in the film. Jerry claimed that Rock (whose only other credit was in one other Jerry Warren film — and doesn’t appear in it, either) appeared in scenes that ended up on the cutting room floor. However, the general consensus is that Jerry didn’t think his cast sounded impressive enough and added another (phony) name.’ — Mark Cole
the entire film
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The Incredible Petrified World (1959)
‘When the cable breaks on their diving bell four people find themselves trapped in a hidden underwater world. None of the following words describe this film. Overlooking the tedious opening and narration, the story initially offered potential with a competent cast and a deep see dive that immediately went wrong. Unfortunately the pace soon meandered, leaving a lacklustre cave meander. A reasonable story still could surface, yet unfortunately nothing of interest transpired.’ — Ian A. Chapman
the entire film
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Teenage Zombies (1959)
‘Jerry Warren, my personal touchstone as the worst director in history, is paired up again with star Katherine ‘Batwoman’ Victor this time in a story of alleged international intrigue. It all involves Victor, a mad scientist, making some mind control capsules on an island which despite being clearly visible from shore, is unknown to everyone but the bad guys. Teenage heroes inadvertently foil the caper and defeat evil in a manner which is comical, yet difficult to comprehend. (When is it a good idea to break INTO jail?) Please also enjoy the ongoing verbal jousting concerning the relative merits of horseback riding versus water skiing! What does this have to do with the plot? Who knows! How prominent is this debate in the film? Very!’ — Robert I. Hedges
the entire film
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Terror Of The Bloodhunters (1962)
‘Jerry Warren is (in-)famous for taking bad foreign films, re-dubbing them and adding or re-shooting or re-arranging or whatever to produce a totally incomprehensible film that is always much worse than anything he ever started out with!!! TERROR OF THE BLOOD HUNTERS(1962) stars Robert Clarke (HIDEOUS SUN DEMON, BEYOND THE TIME BARRIER and MAN FROM PLANET X, the last two directed by cult favorite Edgar Ulmer) as a political/psychological writer/artist imprisoned on Devil’s Island who escapes with the warden’s daughter and a fellow inmate only to be tracked through stock-footage jungles by the guard who wants to marry the girl. It’s all really pretty bad, yet still bad in a fascinating unexplainable way. For a Jerry Warren film this one makes more sense than most and even progresses in a somewhat normal fashion once the actual chase is on, but it’s still a stinker.’ — Richard J. Oravitz
the entire film
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The Violent and the Damned (1962)
‘Here’s another hack-a-thon from Jerry Warren. In this film, a group of men sit around talking about men in prison. We then go to an actual prison where the inmates take over and escape. THE VIOLENT AND THE DAMNED is yet another film that Warren hacked together out of other movies. The original movie was 1955’s MAOS SANGRENTAS from Brazil and from what I’ve gathered it clocked in at a hour. This Warren picture features a new opening with some of Warren’s crew and then we get to the original movie, which has been dubbed. The “new” version clocks in at just 57-minutes but it feels much longer.’ — Michael Elliott
the entire film
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Attack of the Mayan Mummy (1964)
‘Jerry Warren strikes again: the notorious schlock filmmaker takes a bunch of footage from Mexicos’ “The Aztec Mummy”, and adds interminable scenes, dialogue, and narration of his own. The “story” deals with an expedition to a pyramid, and experiments into regression and reincarnation. A woman named Ann Taylor recalls her past life, after which various scientists and treasure hunters go in search of gold. I understand that the original “Aztec Mummy” is supposed to be good for some entertainment, but as usual, Warren does the source material no favours by editing it and utilizing it the way that he does.’ — Hey_Sweden
the entire film
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Face of the Screaming Werewolf (1964)
‘Face of the Screaming Werewolf is a chaotic nightmare fugue that would cause most people to give up after twelve minutes. But I’m not most people. And hopefully, neither are you. Comprised of pieces from two Mexican horror movies (La Casa del Terror and La Momia Azteca) and new footage featuring Chaney, Face has been ridiculed and dismissed for over fifty years. I get it. This movie is confusing and filled with technical mistakes. It features lengthy sequences of people sitting in a living room and talking. But Face has less in common with Warren’s other cut-and-paste experiments, like Curse of the Stone Hand, and more in common with Guy Maddin’s The Green Fog; this is found footage with a mind of its own, and we never know where it will lead us. So it’s best to hop on the stream-of-consciousness journey and lose ourselves in the experience.’ — Joseph A. Ziemba
the entire film
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Curse of the Stone Hand (1964)
‘Sure, as a film, it’s terrible. But as collage art? Two films from Chile dripping with gothic atmosphere, but carelessly abused and carved apart for their imagery alone, then raw voiceover and dubbing slathered over them, and knit together with a few scenes of John Carradine and Katherine Victor hastily filmed and spliced in, a Frankenstein’s Monster bringing to life a barely coherent story about different people (and therefore different movies) inhabiting a house filled with mysterious stone hands. The first, a man who enters a suicide club in order to gamble to win himself out of debt, the second, a man who dominates those around him and turns into a demon – or at least, draws portraits of himself turning into a demon. The visuals are stunning, the audio terrible, and the inserts amusing. Outsider art from Jerry Warren, a guy who saw people making a buck from producing movies and wanted a slice of the action.’ — threepenny
the entire film
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Creature of the Walking Dead (1965)
‘Warren got his hands on a decent, if unremarkable, Mexican horror flick called La Marca del Muerto/The Mark of Death, directed by Fernando Cortes (the original movie seems to have disappeared without trace: even the IMDB’s entry for La Marca del Muerto lists only Warren’s version). Judging from what’s left in Warren’s cut, La Marca… seems to have been a fairly atmospheric variation on the theme of H.P. Lovecraft’s Case of Charles Dexter Ward: a young man summons his own ancestor from beyond the grave, only to have the fiend steal his identity as he continues the search for eternal life. The normal thing for a US distributor to do with a Mexican import would be to strip off the Spanish dialog and dub it into English as badly as possible. This is not Warren’s style. Instead, Warren inserts his own, totally unrelated footage, while removing enough of the original film to make it completely incomprehensible. But the kicker is that Warren does all this because he thinks he’s creating a convincing narrative structure! In Warren’s own, twisted view, he’s making a movie that’s perfectly clear, and that holds together better than the original. In fact, he’s done everything possible to create an anti-film, a movie that works on no level at all.’ — Braineater
the entire film
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House of the Black Death (1965)
‘So it kinda starts enjoyably B-movie but then slows its pace down to the point where you’re like “you’re the most boring Satanists”. Some people get stuck at a villa I guess with babushka Lon Chaney Jr hobbling around getting called out for a fraud of a cult leader, there’s the threat of a werewolf who turns into a (chimp?!!!) during the the climatic scene only to have a weird edit and then he’s dead?? There’s a lot of unrealized scenes and overall bad effects which gives it a real Ed Wood feeling without the charm. Several belly dancing scenes while at the alter of Satan. John Carradine as the most loyal Satanist working with the guy with the magical cross to defeat babushka Lon Chaney Jr. I dunno guys, this was a mess.’ — Bob McQueen
the entire film
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Wild World of Batwoman (1966)
‘Holy rip-off! At the 1960s height of Batmania, schlock movie master Jerry Warren concocted this way-out tale of Batwoman (Katherine Victor with a bat drawn on her chest with eyeliner), a distaff crimefighter who, with her Bat Girls, is hired to protect the Ajax Development Company’s newest invention, an atomic hearing aid, from the arch-villain Ratfink. “Wonderfully woeful and thoroughly brain-dead”.’ — The Phantom of the Movies.
the entire film
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Frankenstein Island (1981)
‘Anyone who tells you they know what this movie is about is lying. There is something to be said for the sheer amount of ridiculous ideas this thing throws at the wall. Regrettably, Frankenstein Island has almost no capacity to follow through with any of it. Except maybe Steve Brodie being the world’s jolliest drunken sailor. Otherwise, it’s 95 minutes of random ideas done as cheaply and nonsensically as possible.’ — Curtis
the entire film
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p.s. Hey. ** jay, Hi. Oh, sure, the Pikmans are excellent games, and masterminded by the god Miyamoto himself. Piracy doesn’t bother me. I’m a serial offender myself. I personally think pale, shaken people are the most attractive, so I’ll happily take some credit for your successful relationship. I’m hoping the imminent Paralympics will be insane, but I kind of doubt it. Thanks! I hope for some environmental insanity for you too, if that sounds appealing. ** _Black_Acrylic, I remember when scenes were coughing up Commie graphics fondly. Scorchio … that’s nice, that might roll effectively off the tongue. Let me try, and I’ll report back. ** Poecilia, Hi, Poecilia! It’s a great pleasure to cross paths with you. I don’t know where I’d be without Archive.Org. How interesting that you wanted to compare and contrast those two pieces. Fictionalising that real life situation made me feel very uncomfortable, which, you know, was the point, I guess. Eight months?! Wow, where are you located that a ‘Frisk’ is so extremely far-flung. Thank you ever so much for your diligence. I’m honored. I don’t know how much Amazon takes, but I suppose it’s a chunk, and then my publisher takes a chunk, and I eventually wind up with a pittance basically. I really don’t make hardly any money from the sales of my books, and I really just want people to have access to them and read them, so I’m not bothered by the piracy at all. In fact I’m grateful for it. You’re an excellent example of why it’s only a good thing. Oh, wow, I would be ultra-thrilled to receive fan art in any form that the person who made it wanted me to have it. I’m not on instagram, but maybe I’d be allowed to glimpse it that way? I’m on Facebook. Or one could email it to me? Or, yeah, snail mail it. I would be amazed to see such a thing by any of those methods. And if you’re hinting that you made something out of what I do, I’m so grateful. I’d be very interested and curious to know more about you and yours if you feel like sharing. In any case, thank you so much! ** David Ehrenstein, Very happy you like them, sir. ** Lucas, Howdy, L! So nice that you like her work, and your friend too. If you end up doing Taron and like it, Black Mamba is quite good too. I suppose rollerskating rinks probably don’t exist anymore except maybe in small American towns? I would assume their physical largesse and the paucity of rollerskating kids would make such a venture unsustainable. Moonlight Rollerway is now a Walmart. It’s back to a normal okayish late summer temperature here, so I’m thinking/hoping you can’t be too far behind? No, thanks for the nudge, I haven’t gotten tickets yet. Paris in November is Paris at one of its most inviting periods. Not to mention that it’ll be so awesome to see you! ** Harper, Hey. I’m happy you’re feeling better. It’s so weird how a mere 24 hours can rewrite one. Or maybe not, but it seems strange. Yes, I agree, it’s the effort and doing that’s absolutely what matters. I have days where I just write one really good sentence, and it can feel like Xmas. ** Uday, Seal the deal. Sylvester was actually quite a tall, bulky guy, and physical grace when excited by music was not his forte. You’re near a cave. That’s exciting, well, I guess depending on the cave. When I was growing up, I lived near the ‘cave’ under Wayne Manor in the old 60s ‘Batman’ TV show, but when I excitedly went to explore it, it was just black paint on cement. I can do a dolphin kick. Or could. I grew up with a swimming pool my backyard, so I can do all those things … backstroke, butterfly, sidestroke, etc. Or could. Maybe I still could. I hope you enjoyed the swim, that sounds so … engulfing. ** Oscar 🌀, Haha, that was an especially beautiful riposte, sir. Oh, btw, some dead relative of yours found my email address on death’s internet and asked me to forward this selfie to you. Obviously chuffed that you dug those textiles a la moi. ‘Mystery Flesh Pit National Park’ … no, I don’t know it. Ooh, it sounds intriguing. Hunt it, I will. Possibly even post-haste. It’s probably too late now, but maybe either enter the PhD office wearing zombie makeup and walking very stiffly or, the easy method, walk speedily, keep glancing at your phone and saying, ‘God, I’m so late’? Or just go ahead and celebrate. I’m sure you deserve it. ** Right. Today I am allowing you, if you so choose, to spend the local part of your day with the guy who a whole of lot people think is the worst film director who ever lived. Want to find out if they’re right? See you tomorrow.
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