TheIncrediblePetrifiedWorld

The Incredible Petrified World (1957)

You know sometimes even I think that I watch too many crappy movies. I should have stopped with this one the minute that I saw Jerry Warren’s name appear as the director. If you aren’t familiar with his work (I have no such excuse) he is the auteur responsible for such “classics” as Man Beast, Teenage Zombies, She was a Hippy Vampire. I should have know better…

So the story here is that John Carradine has created an amazing diving bell that will allow people to go far deeper than they could ever dive in wetsuits (remember this it is important). On their first attempt to use the diving bell the cable breaks and they plunge to the bottom of the sea! They can either choose to run out of air or swim away from the diving bell. They choose to swim and find a cave that has some air in it. Of course why they can swim out of the bell when they said that these depths would kill them I can’t explain. Wait what the hell am I doing? Never ever try and make sense out of a Jerry Warren film, it might kill you to do so. So anyway they find a cave system and another survivor from an earlier shipwreck (damn it my head is going to explode!). Some boring stuff happens on the surface involving John Carradine getting another diving bell. An underground volcano erupts and the other bell arrives just in time to save the day. Isn’t it amazing that all this can happen in 64 minutes and the movie is still boring as hell?

Say what you want about Ed Wood but I would rather watch his movies (and have actually) than sit thru a Jerry Warren flick. But yet somehow I’ve managed to see all of Warren’s films so maybe I’m just nuts? Don’t answer that. The truth is that The Incredible Petrified World is a terrible movie made by someone that clearly had no clue what he was doing as a director. The pacing is all off making it about as much fun to watch as paint drying. The movie has little to no plot. What plot it does have is full of holes. Warren makes liberal use of stock footage to pad the runtime, which is impressive since the damn thing is only 64 minutes long! Hell he couldn’t even get this thing released until he had another of his own films (Teenage Zombies) to pair with it. This thing is just a complete mess and might be the worst film he ever made, which is saying a hell of a lot guys trust me.

So there are bad movies that I still recommend people check out. Sometimes it is just fun to goof on them, which is why I kind of dig some of Ed Wood’s movies. This isn’t one of those movies so don’t bother. I picked this movie up on one of those Mill Creek budget sets. For more information about the sets (which do have some fun flicks in them) head over to http://www.millcreekent.com/

0 out of 4 (avoid for your own sanity)

reviewed by John Shatzer