Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Better Off Ted

More than 40 years after Ted V. Mikels cranked out the 1968 low-budget sci-fi flick The Astro-Zombies with John Carradine and Wendell Corey, he has a threequel - Astro-Zombies M3: Cloned - making the special engagement rounds. Shot last summer in Las Vegas, the film screens Saturday, June 19th at the 5 Points Theatre in Jacksonville, FL, a testament to the miraculous energy of this now 81-year-old auteur.


To get an immediate sense of the off-center octogenarian, all you have to do is pay a visit to his official website TedVMikels.com. For starters, the black backgrounded pages with wildly scattered oversized yellow font text blocks are a throwback to the very early days of the World Wide Web. For another, few filmmakers of any aesthetic stripe can claim an endorsement from John Waters who, in connection with an upcoming documentary about Mikels, raves that Ted is the man who put "exploit" in "exploitation."

The pair of screenings in Jacksonville were organized by 43-year-old fan and M3: Cloned co-star Ed Tucker, who relished the chance to portray one of the synthetic humanoids on a demented mission to "kill, kill, kill." In that sense, the bad guys of the Mikels series are more like replicants than zombies.

The plot of the belated third entry has the U.S. government finding astro-zombie remains and attempting to clone its own A-Z army. Aspiring independent filmmakers would do well to figure out a way to latch on to the fountain of creative youth that powers Mikels, right down to his Salvador Dali-like moustache.

[Ted V. Mikels]

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for the mention! We've posted some photos from the Florida premiere of Astro Zombies M3: Cloned here.

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  2. You're welcome. I see also that Halloween 2010 is the street release date for your John Waters-narrated documentary THE WILD WORLD OF TED V. MIKELS. Makes ghoulish sense.

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