Before he discovered a penchant for importing and bowdlerising Mexican and European films, adding newly shot footage that vaguely matched the originals (Invasion of the Animal People (1962), Attack of the Mayan Mummy (1963), Curse of the Stone Hand (1965), Face of the Screaming Werewolf (1965) et al), Jerry Warren had a go at making actual proper films, mostly all newly shot (though sometimes with whatever stock footage he had lying around at the time), all made on the cheap and none of them bearing up to serious scrutiny. Man Beast (1956) was his first such effort and The Incredible Petrified World (in which former actor Warren takes a cameo role as a plane passenger) his second.
It beggar’s belief that a film that runs barely 67 minutes can feel as painfully long and soul-crushingly boring as The Incredible Petrified World. But such was the unique talent of Jerry Warren that he could take just about any subject and suck all the life from it. The Incredible Petrified World begins with a six-and-a-half-minute nature lecture, packed with stock footage including a tussle between a shark and a squid. Narrator Robert Carroll sounds like he’s reading from a high school textbook. When it’s all over it turns out to be a film being watched by a group of people, led by Dr Willard Wyman (John Carradine) who are preparing to test out Wyman’s experimental new diving bell.
Paul Whitmore (Allen Windsor), Craig Randall (Robert Clarke), Lauri Talbott (Sheila Noonan) and Dale Marshall (Phyllis Coates) are sent down in the vessel only for a line to snap and strand them on a sub-aquatic ledge. Suiting up to explore, they find themselves in a mysterious network of caves (filmed in Colossal Cave in Tucson, Arizona), an underwater world that turns out to be neither incredible nor petrified. It’s just caves and our dull heroes are obliged to tramp around them for an eternity while up on the surface Wyman frets over getting them back. Eventually they run into a man (George Skaff) who was shipwrecked 14 years earlier and has survived only to end up sporting the worst fake beard you’ll ever see. The earth itself decides that enough is enough and detonates a volcano, freeing out motley band of adventurer and putting audiences out of their misery.
Like all of Warren’s films it’s all talk. Lacking the budget for anything resembling spectacle, Warren simply has his actors stand around chatting about everything and nothing. By the time the volcano provides blessed relief, we’ve spent over an hour listening to them and learned virtually nothing about them. Elsewhere, to get the running time up to something approaching feature length, Warren pads out proceedings with yet more stock footage and uninteresting footage of Wyman’s younger brother (Joe Maierhauser) – who by happy chance has built a replica diving bell for no particularly good reason – leaving his house, getting into his car, driving across town while listening to the radio and taking an air flight in what sometimes feels like real time.
It’s all so dull you end up trying to work out why the trapped explorers didn’t simply go back out onto the ledge and swim to safety. The bell comes to rest “not too far below the surface” we’re told, and that “at this level the pressure shouldn’t bother us.” But no, instead of trying the obvious they mooch about in the caves having melodramatic breakdowns and talking nonsense. The cast are frequently stranded by Warren’s listless direction – all those cutaways to poorly edited reaction shots – and his terrible script.
At one point, Warren planned to have the group menaced by a monster but when he saw what was delivered he decided that it was too awful to use. Consider that for a moment. A monster suit so staggeringly awful that the man who made Man Beast decided that it was too dreadful to use. No-one bothered to tell the publicity department at distributors Governor Films though who plastered the poster with the strapline “See monsters! Earthquakes! Volcanoes!”
And it’s not like they didn’t have time to make changes. The Incredible Petrified World was shot in 1957 but was deemed unreleasable, gathering dust in a film vault until Governor decided to finally free it onto a double bill with another Warren monstrosity, the equally lamentable Teenage Zombies (1959). That one was alt least 100% Warren, with no trace of the stock footage that infests The Incredible Petrified World. Which isn’t saying much really.
In an interview with Tom Weaver, quoted in Fred Olen Ray’s book The New Poverty Row: Independent Filmmakers as Distributors, Warren was remarkably frank about his approach to film-making: “I’d shoot one day on this stuff and throw it together…I never, ever tried in any way to compete, or to make something worthwhile. I only did enough to get by, so they [the public] 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.” And it’s painfully obvious from The Incredible Petrified World that he wasn’t trying one iota to make any of this even remotely entertaining.
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