1943 (USA)
Contains mild spoilers.
Now there's two ways
of looking at this Monogram Pictures sequel to the 1941 zombie comedy King of the Zombies. The first is that it's really just another barely adequate seventy
year old low budget thriller with unconvincing acting, and a hackneyed, long
winded story full of all the charms of racial segregation, servitude and the
perfectly acceptable misogyny that came with the times. The second is that
Revenge of the Zombies is quite the uncredited gem playing more than a passing
role in establishing the many of zombie tropes and idioms we now take for
granted. King of the Zombies may still have had one foot firmly rooted in the
Haitian voodoo zombie origin myth but there were hints of a more western
scientific narrative. Revenge of the
Zombies took the next logical step, shrugging off magic and the devil all
together, fusing the idea and myth of the Haitian Vodou slave with Shelley's
more western scientific methodology of reanimation, arguably for the first time.
Scott Warrington
(Mauritz Hugo) accompanied by his friend Larry Adams (Robert Lowery) have
arrived at a small retreat in the swamps near New Orleans to investigate the
sudden death of his sister Lila von Altermann (Veda Ann Borg), which local
family friend Dr. Harvey Keating (Barry Macollum) believes suspicious. Dr. Max
Heinrich von Altermann (John Carradine) is courteous and welcomes the three
men, and their servant, Jeff, the returning Mantan Moreland into his home where
he shows them her body and promises a quick funeral. Behind the scenes of
course he's the nefarious mad evil (albeit here it's ideological and political
rather than being league with Satan) scientist, his motivations are entirely
morally lacking and goal driven and it's not long before the usual cat and
mouse, room to room intrigue and subterfuge with everyone showing restraint and
decorum befitting those in high society when they actually all get together. 
There's nothing new,
it's all a bit over done and even for a just an hour long it manages to over
stays its welcome. Lila disappears, Lila reappears, there's suspicion, accusation then rinse and repeat. Each actor plays their one dimensional caricatures as
well as could be expected. Mantan Moreland reprieves his role from King of the
Zombies as light relief breaking the scenes of serious drama with his slap
stick style, quick and witty banter and contemporary, even subversive style
demonstrating yet again why if he had been born a different colour he would
have been an undoubted comic legend. However, what the film makes up for
against the trite narrative is the occasional iconic scene and the paradigm
shift in reimagining our zombie friends free of magic, hypnosis and new world
influence.
Well, almost. First
off, it's New Orleans, the heritage home of Vodou and the zombie but that
doesn't mean magic is in the air. The zombies of Dr. Max are reanimated by
science. Drugs, electricity, the idea that a body once mature retains the
ability to be restarted are his methods of reanimation, the careful paralysis
of parts of the human brain are those that gain him control. 'Against an army
of zombies', he tells his Nazi confident, 'no armies could stand. Even blown
half to bits, undaunted by fire and gas, zombies would fight on so long as the
brain cells' that receive and execute
commands, still remained intact.' Writer Edmond Kelso, allowed to continue to
expand his ideas from King of the Zombies might well be responsible for
establishing quite the set of zombie staples.
The zombies of
director Steve Sekely's film might well be impervious reanimated machines built
for fighting but they're still very firmly slaves under the control of a
master. There's no flesh eating or rabid primal driving, they're workers able
to reply to orders and perform all manner of rudimentary tasks implying their
memories and cognitive abilities are still very much intact. There's also the
indication that full self-aware reanimation would actually be possible with
Lila seemingly able to retain some of her will and even the ability to 'turn'
Max's army of zombies back onto him. The narrative for this control is still
quite confusing and incoherent and it's never explained why the zombies were
able to return to their eternal slumber once their master was killed but it did
lend itself for quite the atmospheric final scene in the same graveyard that
was saw the dead rise at the start, this time close the crypt's door.
Credit must be given
for breaking the given notion that zombies are inexorably tied to voodoo and
magic, hinting at a more western and contemporary approach to thinking about
the walking dead in terms of chemicals and science and atmospherically it does a
lot right but ultimately Revenge of the Zombies can't shrug off its dismal
cliché story, shallow characterisation and pedestrian acting. A low budget war time film it's not bad per-se and Mantan Moreland does
shine, but this undoubted piece of important
zombie cinema is denied any real esteem by just being a bit too ordinary, 4/10.
Steven@WTD.
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