This mind-rotting bit of camp trash from 1968 features John Carradine as a mad NASA scientist creating bizarre, machete-wielding undead for no particular reason and Tura Satana, best known for her role in Russ Meyer's Faster Pussycat Kill!..kill!, as a secret agent. It inspired a song by The Misfits, but it won't inspire you to do anything but stop watching.
From 1966, this is a rare zombie offering from Hammer Studios. Animated by voodoo, the dead are used as slave labor in a Cornish tin mine. Andre Morell gives a strong performance as the indomitable doctor who matches wits with sinister zombie master John Carson. The film is atmospheric but the zombies are slightly boring, except for one memorable sequence in which undead hands begin to sprout from the grave like pale flowers.
Somehow I've managed to avoid the strange sub-genre of Nazi zombie movies until now. I'd heard of a few, like Jesus Franco's 1982 Oasis of the Zombies, but I thought they were a thing of the past. Apparently they never die.
Dead Snow is a 2009 Norwegian horror comedy (or at least, it has some humor), with the standard plot of a group of young people spending time at an isolated cabin with no cell phone reception (in this case, it's in the scenic, snowy mountains). The male characters are cardboard (self-sufficient outdoorsman, film geek, horny guy, medical student afraid of blood), and the female characters are hardly distinguishable from each other (the one with dreadlocks, the blond one, the other one). They joke knowingly about the traditional horror film setting they're in, which would have been nice if the script had then eschewed the tropes for something unexpected.
Instead, after the traditional cryptic warning from a random grizzled guy, Nazi zombies erupt from the snow and attack. The film is visually appealing, the special effects are good (realistic entrails are liberally used), and there are a few humorous and unexpected touches, but overall there's not much novel here and the end result is mediocre.
Made even more infamous by Tim Burton's 1994 biopic of director Ed Wood, Plan 9 (1959) is often dubbed one of the worst movies ever made. Aliens attempting to contact Earth are angered at not getting a response; to show they mean business, they start bringing Earthlings back from the dead. Foremost among the undead is Swedish wrestler Tor Johnson, made iconic by his performance here; other notable zombies include Vampira (the ur-Elvira) and, briefly, Bela Lugosi (who died before filming was complete). Look for Ed Wood's wife's chiropractor as Lugosi's unconvincing stand-in, as well as flying saucers on strings and a plethora of other goofs. Plan 9 is good for a laugh, if nothing else.
From 1943, this is the second in famed producer Val Lewton's regrettably small body of work with RKO. Lewton mixes voodoo with a bit of Jane Eyre in the story of Betsy (the doe-eyed Frances Dee), a young nurse who comes to the Caribbean island of St. Sebastian to care for the catatonic wife (Christine Gordon) of a sugar planter (Tom Conway). In her efforts to cure the woman, Betsy comes across a nest of secrets on the idyllic island. With well-realized characters, a multifaceted plot, and wonderful lighting effects, I Walked with a Zombie is one of Lewton's best. And that makes it very good indeed.
Zombie movies have been a popular staple of the horror genre since George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) shambled onto the screen. The visceral fascination induced by watching a few isolated survivors fight off hordes of undead spawned a host of imitators. Like the zombies themselves, zombie movies seem to multiply until it's hard to keep track of them all. I'll be reviewing some of the most obscure, unique, or just plain odd.
White Zombie (1932) has a place in cinematic history as the very first zombie movie. No Romero-esque rotting ghouls here- these zombies are the traditional sort, entranced by a magic powder to do the bidding of the sinister Haitian planter Legendre (Bela Lugosi). When Legendre becomes enamoured with a young American, Madeline (Madge Bellamy), he uses his powder on her, tricking her fiance Neil (John Harron) into thinking she is dead. Can Neil discover the ruse and rescue Madeline from Legendre's evil clutches? Many viewers will find White Zombie overly melodramatic, but the dreamlike chiaroscuro images and Lugosi (thoroughly enjoying playing evil) make the film a pleasure to watch.
She emerges from the murk of a swollen river, mud-streaked, her pale bony face like a skull, enormous eyes staring in confusion and shock.
Mary Henry (Candace Hilligloss) is surfacing from a car submerged after plunging off a bridge in a drag racing accident. Of the three women within, she is the only one to escape. So begins Carnival of Souls (1962), an understated, sometimes surreal film which manages to deliver real chills despite being shot in three weeks with a minuscule budget, a cast of mostly amateur and B-grade actors, and a director (Herk Harvey) whose ouevre otherwise consists of over 400 industrial and educational films ((Carnival of Souls is bracketed by Jamaica, Haiti, and the Lesser Antilles (1962) and Pork: The Meal with a Squeal (1963)). The score, by Gene Moore, is made up entirely of organ music, cold, sinister, and unrelenting. Candace Hilligloss is an excellent lead for a horror film ((she also starred in The Curse of the Living Corpse (1964)), a woman who would be beautiful if she didn’t so closely resemble a mannequin with a wig, staring silently with wide lifeless eyes.
Mary Henry leaves town soon after the tragedy, strangely emotionless, perhaps traumatized by events. She drives to Utah to start a new life as a church organist, although without much religious fervor (“To me, a church is just a place of business.”). Here her troubles begin in earnest.
A strange and frightening (and perhaps dead) Man (Herk Harvey) haunts her, appearing and disappearing, his eyes burning into her soul. The enormous, abandoned carnival pavilion outside of town (“played” by the Saltair Amusement Park outside Salt Lake City, which has since burned and been rebuilt on a smaller scale), a hulking dark shadow on the shore of the Great Salt Lake, exerts a terrible fascination on her.
Her boarding house neighbor (Sidney Berger, who also had a part in 1998's Wes Craven Presents: Carnival of Souls, a film with a dissimilar plot and no redeeming characteristics) at first provides some distraction from her fears, but becomes disturbing in his over-persistent quest for her favors, and metamorphoses into a potential rapist with a drinking problem.
But this is nothing compared with the terror to come. The world changes, and she is temporarily cut off from humanity, unseen and unhearing, walking through the town in total silence, ignored by all (“It was as though for a time I didn’t exist!”). Has she been driven mad by her brush with death? Why does she feel so alone, so empty?
While sound and communication return, things continue to decay. The concerned Dr. Samuels (Stan Levitt) tries to sooth her nerves and diagnose her illness, but it is her idea to cure her problems by facing the carnival pavilion by the lake to which her attention is so strangely drawn, a spooky, desolate jumble of abandoned buildings and rides. Watching her walk through these empty spaces of shadow and silence is almost more terrifying than what is to come, full of palpable menace that brings to mind the oppressive, deserted hallways of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining(1980).
The final ten minutes of the film begin as a descent into madness, an exercise in horror mounting excruciatingly. The final three minutes, unfortunately, detract from the overall atmosphere. There’s a silly supernatural hide-and-go-seek scene not in keeping with the brooding horror of the rest of the film, and finally an unnecessary bit of explanation to clue in those who failed to grasp the not-so-subtle plot points beforehand.
Despite these flaws, despite a very simple plot, despite generally mediocre dialogue and some off-putting flubs (Hilligloss’s hair appears suspiciously dry as she emerges from the river), Carnival of Souls somehow succeeds in frightening. This is not overt, go for the gross-out horror, but a well-crafted and quite creepy supernatural thriller to raise the hairs on the back of your neck.
As an added bonus, it’s somehow encouraging that a group of low-grade actors and a director of educational films, on a tiny budget and a few weeks time, could produce something creepily enjoyable enough to become a cult classic. One can only imagine they had a lot of fun doing it, too. Herk Harvey certainly seems to be enjoying himself, in a macabre sort of way, smiling an evil little smile as he stares into the camera in his ghoulish pancake makeup, far, far away from the mundane concerns of Why Study Home Economics? (1955) and What About Prejudice? (1959). Carnival of Souls is available as a free download from www.archive.org.
, as a secret agent. It inspired a song by The Misfits
, but it won't inspire you to do anything but stop watching.
, but I thought they were a thing of the past. Apparently they never die.
is a 2009 Norwegian horror comedy (or at least, it has some humor), with the standard plot of a group of young people spending time at an isolated cabin with no cell phone reception (in this case, it's in the scenic, snowy mountains). The male characters are cardboard (self-sufficient outdoorsman, film geek, horny guy, medical student afraid of blood), and the female characters are hardly distinguishable from each other (the one with dreadlocks, the blond one, the other one). They joke knowingly about the traditional horror film setting they're in, which would have been nice if the script had then eschewed the tropes for something unexpected.
shambled onto the screen. The visceral fascination induced by watching a few isolated survivors fight off hordes of undead spawned a host of imitators. Like the zombies themselves, zombie movies seem to multiply until it's hard to keep track of them all. I'll be reviewing some of the most obscure, unique, or just plain odd.
