JERRY WARREN

“I only did enough to get by...it’s not very fair to the public, but that was my attitude. You didn’t have to go all out and make a really good picture.”--Jerry Warren, 1988

Well, Jerry, no worries there. You never made a really good picture...or even a somewhat good one. And that is your key to fame…

It took me a good long while to work up enough nerve to tackle the career of Jerry Warren. Now long time fans of our film section here at Wormwood know that we usually have a soft spot for what you’d call fiscally challenged movie directors….we’ve taken a look at Al Adamson, Andy Milligan, David L. Hewitt and even the man considered the worst of the worst, Coleman Francis. If Jerry Warren heard that Coleman Francis was the cheapest of the cheap, I’m sure he would say “hold my beer”.

The truth is that there was never a cheaper, more slipshod or uncaring director or producer than Jerry Warren. That’s not counting the Youtube hacks who shoot stuff in their backyard. Although Jerry would use his backyard without a second thought. As bad as they were, the movies of Ed Wood and Al Adamson had a certain energy or even delirium to them that kept you watching. Coleman Francis’ technique was so frozen and motionless, that his films achieved a kind of Zen-like feeling of peaceful emptiness. With Jerry Warren, his stuff was just plain lifeless. Films like “Teenage Zombies” and “The Incredible Petrified World” are dull in a workman-like fashion, without the weird quirks of the others we’ve mentioned. They are the true definition of hackwork.

That’s why I’ve held off on Warren for so long. But now, I feel the time is right to take the plunge into the somnambulist cinema of Mr. Warren. So grab some No-Doz and follow me…

Born in 1925, Jerry Warren was a California boy from the start and always grew up wanting to be in show business. He was lucky enough to have Hollywood practically in his backyard. Like many of the other great hack directors, he started off as an actor. He got into dinner theater and then managed to swing some walk-on parts in fairly big budget productions like “Unconquered” and “Anchors Aweigh”. Some how the glamour of being an extra escaped him and he soon started think about other ways he could make money from the movie business.

He was the exact opposite of a Cecil B. DeMille. Where DeMille would spare no expense, Warren would throw around pennies like they were manhole covers. The prospect of spending more than a few dollars filled him with horror. Every corner was cut in the movies he all directed and made from scratch.

Jerry boldly dived into the film world with 1956’s “Man Beast”, a film inspired by current news about the Abominable Snowman. The amazing thing about “Man Beast” is that it is probably Warren’s best all-around picture even though it’s a cheap B-movie in every way. Warren’s career proceeded in exactly reverse fashion...he got worse with every single movie, culminating in the final abomination of “Frankenstein’s Island” in 1980. I don’t know of any other director whose film-making skills formed a graph line headed straight for the basement.

The film was loaded with stock footage of other movies and documentaries set in the Himalayas. Not many directors used more stock footage than Jerry. Interspersed with the footage of mountain climbing were Jerry’s own scenes, done in his trademark style...static shots, almost no camera movement and a distinct lack of energy. As flat as “Man Beast” was, it was frenzied mile a minute action compared to later films. The shaggy Yeti, its face totally obscured, was played by no less than Jerry’s own wife, Brianne Murphy! She helped Jerry with many of his early films until their divorce in 1959. My guess is that there weren’t many diamonds and Dior gowns for Brianne and that the Yeti suit was the closest she ever got to a fur coat.

Around this time, Jerry was already getting weary of producing, directing and sometimes writing his own movies. This led to a major change in the way he did business. He had set up his own film distribution company called ADP and started acquiring movies to show. One of these movies was a peculiar Swedish science fiction film called “Space Invasion of Lappland” that was filmed in Finland using American director Virgil Vogel. The film told the story of an alien craft that crashlands in Northern Finland, home of the nomadic reindeer herding Lapps. A giant hairy monster with tusks begins attacking the Lapps and attracts the attention of scientists. It’s eventually learned that the monster is basically a pet of the aliens, but the poor hairy beast is killed by the humans anyway, leading to the aliens returning to space. The original Swedish version of the movie is actually rather entertaining and certainly a different kind of SF film.

Jerry Warren couldn’t stand having an actually decent film associated with him, so he bought the movie,  cut 18 minutes out of it and retitled it “Invasion of the Animal People”. He paid John Carradine, the man who could never say no, to do some narration for the film. Having done this awkward surgery, he put the movie on a double bill with a movie he directed in its entirety, “Terror of the Bloodhunters”. Once again, that title promised more than the film delivered and showed that Warren could take a movie about escaped convicts fighting headhunters and jungle beasts and make it dull.

“Invasion of the Animal People” did modestly well and lit a spark under Jerry. From now on, he would acquire low-budget foreign films and perform “surgery” on them by adding his own cheap scenes. This was a low effort way to keep movies circulating on the drive-in and grindhouse circuits. Warren went on a spree of doing these kind of “pseudo-films” in the 60’s, such as “A Bullet For Billy the Kid” (originally from Mexico), “No Time To Kill” (originally from Sweden) and “The Violent and The Damned” (originally from Brazil). One thing Warren was really good at was jazzing up these movies with great exploitative titles.

Jerry found a special connection to movies from Mexico, much like fellow schlock entrepreneur K. Gordon Murray. Two notable South of the Border films that he butchered were “Attack of the Mayan Mummy”, part of a popular Mexican horror series, and “Face of the Screaming Werewolf”. For this latter movie, he somehow got a slumming Lon Chaney Jr to pop up. Chaney got to play a werewolf who was actually wrapped up like a mummy! This was the first time in years that Chaney played a werewolf. Another “real” Aztec mummy also shows up, revived by a mad doctor. Warren actually stitched together two Mexican movies for this one, adding his own hastily shot scenes. All comedy was removed from the comedic film, although many would dispute that after seeing the final “Warrenized” mess. Perhaps more than any other film, “Face of the Screaming Werewolf” showed just how utterly cheap and clueless Warren’s approach to film was.

1965 was the peak of Warren’s output of patchwork movies. In addition to “Face of the Screaming Werewolf”,  he released “Curse of the Stone Hand” and “Creature of the Walking Dead”, two more films of Mexican origin with added scenes.  Of special note was “House of the Black Death”, which paired Lon Chaney Jr. and John Carradine as two brother warlocks feuding with each other. Not even Ed Wood or Al Adamson could have botched this up as badly as Warren did. The two aging horror stars never appeared in the same scene with each other and Carradine was completely bed-ridden for his role. Chaney seemed to be in the depths of his alcoholism here. The senseless movie was padded with interminable scenes of girls belly-dancing in front of a “satanic altar”. They don’t even bother to take their clothes off….even Ed Wood’s “Orgy of the Dead” managed to have topless hotties dancing in it.

In 1966, Jerry Warren was overcome by “Batmania” after watching episodes of the campy Adam West “Batman” show. The whole country seemed to be “bat-crazy” in 1966. Warren was inspired enough to write, film and direct an entire movie once more, instead of just tossing a few new scenes into foreign potboilers. The result was “The Wild World of Batwoman” and while the movie could not be called good in any level of the term, the result was so goofy that it is one of Warren’s most watchable movies.

It helped that Katharine Victor played the title role. As the voluptuous Batwoman, she commanded a crew of young “batgirls” to help her fight for truth and justice. The movie finds her up against a masked moron called “Rat Pfink”. This has resulted in a lot of confusion over the years, as this “Rat Pfink” had nothing to do with the character of the same name in Ray Dennis Steckler’s equally batshit “Rat Pfink a Boo Boo”. I can’t believe that there were two characters of the same name in equally atrocious superhero spoofs.

Nevertheless, Rat Pfink is conspiring to obtain the plutonium-powered “Atomic Hearing Aid” from the unscrupulous Ajax Corporation. Apparently this wonder of science is able to eavesdrop on anybody in the world. Well-known B movie hacks Bruno ve Sota and Steve Brodie wound up in this mess, along with stock footage stolen from “The Mole People”. The movie raised the ire of DC Comics, who said in infringed on their “Batman” trademark. In response to this, Warren just changed the name of the movie to “She Was A Hippy Vampire” and released it again. This man had no shame.

The battle with DC seemed to take all the wind out of Jerry Warren. He abruptly ceased all film-making activity and even stopped distributing foreign films. He simply dropped out of the movie world altogether. But he had one last explosion of ineptitude left. After a gap of 14 years, he released his final...and what many called his worst...movie in 1980, “Frankenstein’s Island”.

“Frankenstein’s Island” was almost a statement of how little the film-maker had learned during his career. Almost a quarter century after Warren had got his start with “Man Beast”, his final movie almost showed him going backwards, not forwards. Films in 1980 were technically far in advance of what they were in 1956, but you’d never know it by watching this film. Now it was in color...at least Jerry conceded that much. But in almost every other way, this movie was a total anachronism.

In terms of star power, though, “Frankenstein’s Island” was Warren’s biggest production. Katharine Victor was back, this time as Dr. Sheila Frankenstein, the most recent descendant of the legendary mad doctor. Speaking of which, John Carradine was coaxed out of the nursing home to film a few feeble scenes as the disembodied ghost of the original Dr. Frankenstein, who is cheerleading for his great great great grand-daughter as she conducts her own bizarre experiments. The great Z-movie legend Cameron Mitchell is here, along with Steve Brodie, character actor Andrew Duggan and the vet of many a 50’s sci fi film, Robert Clarke. 

All of this star power was wasted in a crazed, surreal story of hot air balloon sailors stranded on a remote island inhabited by a gang of pirates, the female Dr. Frankenstein and her army of sunglasses wearing zombie slaves, and a tribe of hot bikini babes descended from space aliens! And oh yeah, the original Frankenstein Monster is there, too...he pops up for a couple of minutes near the end. Now if all this random craziness sounds at least outlandish enough to be interesting, remember who is directing the movie. While Al Adamson or Ted V. Mikels might have injected energy into the lunatic script, good ol’ Jerry Warren does the best he can to drain any energy out of it.

Already something way out of its normal time period, “Frankenstein’s Island” promptly sank like a stone on its release and even grindhouse vets of 42nd Street were bored stiff by it. Word has it that Warren actually wanted to do a sequel to the film, but encroaching poor health due to his heavy smoking habit and even more rapid changes to the film landscape conspired against him. Jerry passed away due to lung cancer in August, 1988.

As bad and static as Jerry’s films were, there remains something endearing about them. They are a pure example of totally cut-rate film-making and a reminder of a time when the absolute cheapest films could be given national release. Those days came to an end in the mid-80’s or rather, they were transferred to the fledgling direct-to-video industry. One wonders if Jerry would have tried his hand at that style of low budget film-making if he had survived. Alas, these days, even the days of VHS are long in the past and every film is a Hollywood CGI juggernaut. If Jerry Warren could do CGI, I’ll bet he’d do it on a 1990 Amiga.