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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 10, No. 35 |
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ZOMBIE MOVIE ROUND-UP #2 "REVENGE OF THE ZOMBIES"  |
Carradine trains zombies
To Serve Nazi War Effort
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THE ZOMBIE MOVIE ROUND-UP We estimate that zombie movies like the new "ZOMBIELAND" soon will eclipse the popularity of vampire movies among young moviegoers. In order to brace evreyone for the upcoming zombie movie onslaught, we figured the time had come to round-up all the previous zombie movies and review them as a guide to the new generation of zombie flicks. We began with "King of the Zombies" (1941) last February and continue our series with the 1943 follow-up, "Revenge of the Zombies." It's a nasty job, but somebody has to do it--and Ron Miller has volunteered! |
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Hollywood first became truly "zombie aware" in 1932 when independent movie producer Victor Halperin signed Bela Lugosi, who was still fresh from his Broadway and movie success in the title role of "Dracula," to play a zombie "master" in the film "White Zombie."
The 1930s turned out to be a golden decade for horror movies, especially when Universal Pictures' launched what would turn out to be several "franchise" series of "monster" pictures. Those films--"Dracula" (1931), "Frankenstein" (1931), "The Mummy" (1932) and "The Invisible Man" (1933)--all would lead to separate series of movies that multiplied in the early 1940s.
But Universal didn't make any zombie movies until the 1940s and there was never a "White Zombie" sequel. In fact, zombie movies didn't really start to proliferate until the 1940s, when the trend really exploded, especially at the Poverty Row studios like Republic, Monogram and PRC.
In retrospect, zombie movies really were bargains for the studios that were short on money. They didn't have to build elaborate sets for "mad laboratory" scenes like Universal did for the "Frankenstein" pictures nor Egyptian temples like the Universal "mummy" pictures required. They didn't need the special effects budgets necessary to create Invisible Men nor the exotic makeup jobs needed for werewolves and man-made monsters. In fact, zombies of the 1940s were low-rent monsters.
A zombie in those days was just a dead person who comes back to life when summoned by a zombie master who knows the right spell. All it took to make a zombie look authentic on screen back then was to make the actor understand he had to plod along slowly and register no emotions. Zombies were also known to be creatures of the Caribbean, so African-American actors could play most of the zombie roles. They were notoriously underpaid, getting mostly union minimums. If they had no lines to speak--and zombies rarely talked on screen--the producers might even get away with hiring much cheaper "extras" instead of members of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG).
Monogram, a low budget studio that first prospered on "B" westerns in the 1930s, became Zombie Central in the 1940s, producing several formula horror pictures that employed mainly low salaried newcomers and a few old veterans who were willing to take less pay in return for leading roles in "B" pictures.
In 1941, producer Lindsley Parsons made "King of the Zombies" for Monogram, which suggested a mad scientist (Henry Victor) was busily building up an army of dead black men who would enable an unnamed foreign power to rule the world. Though his zombies seemed as dull and untalented as most other movie zombies, I guess he assumed he'd work out some way to teach them how to fire weapons, drive tanks and fly bombers sooner or later, In the meantime, they were very inexpensive soldiers because they didn't eat, needed no sleep and were impervious to bullets, poison gas and all the other conventional weaponry since they already were dead.
"King of the Zombies" was pretty successful for Monogram, though most critics seemed to think its only good point was the eye-bugging "Feets, don't fail me now!" comedy of black comic actor Mantan Moreland, whose fear of zombies inspired him to some very funny moments of screen cowardice. Hey, the musical score even earned an Oscar nomination!
So, naturally, Monogram must have been delighted when producer Parsons and his "King of the Zombies" screenwriter, Ed Kelso, proposed a new horror movie called "Revenge of the Zombies." Kelso's new screenplay--he was aided by co-writer Van Norcross, was, to nobody's surprise, about a mad scientist (John Carradine) who's trying to build up an invincible army of zombies for the use of "My country." Since his hischaracter's name is von Altermann and World War II was still in progress, I imagine Carradine's country is supposed to be Nazi Germany.
So moviegoers wouldn't suspect this was just a cheap remake of "King of the Zombies," Producer Parsons clearly made some distinctions. First, Carradine wasn't building his army in the Caribbean, but in a southern state that sort of resembles Louisiana. (It has lots of swampy looking scenery and the quicksand pits I usually associate with swamps in Louisiana.)
Amazingly, Monogram also made sure Mantan Moreland was in the cast, too, playing "Jeff." who drives the car for the film's hero, Robert Lowery. Just as in the previous zombie film, "Jeff" is constantly being told to "wait here" while the white guys go inside the manor house where the mad scientist lives. Immediately, "Jeff" starts looking around, eyes rolling in his head, and, sure enough, quickly spots a zombie peering at him through the jungle scenery. When he calls the attention of his white boss to the zombie, the zombie is never there for the white man to see.
You can see the white characters all nodding at each other, thinking: "Boy, these black people are sure prone to fantasies!"
The white people are visiting Carradine's remote jungle compound because one of them is related to Carradine's wife and they've just received word that she has died. She has died, all right, but Carradine already has injected her with something that has caused her to rise up and walk like a zombie. He has a dickens of a time keeping her in her coffin, where she's lying in state, supposedly awaiting burial.
Though Carradine goes to a lot of trouble to keep his zombie soldiers-in-waiting out of sight of the visitors, for some reason he has no problem letting everybody see his chief servant, who is also a aombie. Perhaps most of the able-bodied men in the area already were serving overseas in the war, so Carradine had no choice but to put a zombie to work as his No. 1 servant. Of course, the servant's name--Lazarus--is something of a "dead" giveaway.
Ultimately, the mad scientist is foiled because his zombie wife rebels against him and rallies the other zombies to join her in chasing Carradine out into the swamps. Mrs. Zombie then grabs him and holds on tight while they both sink out of sight in quicksand. We don't ever find out what happens to the other zombies, but the assumption is they're "free" from their living dead status once their "master" has been killed, which probably means they all fall down and start decomposing.
About this time you may be wondering why anyone in his right mind would watch "Revenge of the Zombies." Well, I think it's kind of fun for a variety of reasons. One of them is trying to enjoy the wonderful jungle sets obviously built on a Monogram soundstage. You probably couldn't walk 10 paces in any direction without running out of jungle and into a soundstage wall. You also can hear the clear sound of the characters' footsteps on the wooden soundstage floor even though they're supposed to be out in the jungle, walking on decaying leaves,
Then there's the interesting cast of players. My favorite of them all is Lazarus, the chief zombie servant, because he is played by the wonderful old James Baskett, who gained screen immortality just a couple of years later when he played Uncle Remus in Walt Disney's "Song of the South" (1946) and got to sing the Oscar-wnning song "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah.".
As it turns out, Baskett wasn't "old" at all. He must have been only 42 ;when he played Uncle Remus because he died in 1948 of a heart attack at age 44. That means he could only have been 40 or so when he did "Revenge of the Zombies." Baskett was the first African-American male actor to win an Academy Award--a special award from the Academy for his portrayal of Remus. By the way, the Disney company refuses to release "Song of the South" to the home video market because the NAACP once branded it as a racist film. That makes "Revenge of the Zombies" one of the few films in which we still can see this beloved performer.
Baskett does have one hilarious scene with Mantan Moreland in this film. Lazarus looks at the nice car "Jeff" drives as the white people's chaufferu and says, in zombie monotone: "I drove car like this for Master...when I was alive!"
Once "Jeff" catches onto the "when I was alive" part of the remark, you can imagine how fast his eyes start rolling and his feet start moving.
Another reason to watch "Revenge of the Zombies" is the female lead--future 1950s TV star Gale Storm, who plays Carradine's young assistant. Storm, who won a Hollywood movie contract in a nationwide contest, couldn't have been more than 21 or 22 when she made the picture. She is so fresh-faced and cute that she looks as out of place in a zombie movie as Woody Allen would be in a western.
The "hero" is played by Robert Lowery, a busy young "B" movie actor who eventually would become the movies' "Batman" in the 1949 Columbia serial, "Batman and Robin."
Another curious bit of casting is the role of the local sheriff, who's Carradine's Nazi ally--at least until we learn he's really a U.S. secret agent working undercover. The actor is Bob Steele, the veteran hero of countless 1930s and 1940s westerns. Steele was impossibly short for a leading man, but I never really noticed how short he was until I saw him standing next to Carradine in this movie. He makes Alan Ladd look like Paul Bunyan. Steele's peak acting performance, for my money, was when he played Curly in the 1939 "Of Mice and Men" and had his hand crushed by Lenny (Lon Chaney, Jr.).
Also of interest is the actress who played the zombie wife of Carradine--Veda Ann Borg. Formerly a fashion model in New York, Borg broke into pictures in 1936 and was doing quite well until she nearly died in an auto accident in 1939 and had to have her beautiful face completely rebuilt through plastic surgery. Borg looks great in "Revenge of the Zombies," but she never made it to big roles in "A" pictures, playing mostly leads in "B" movies and, finally, just bit parts in mainstream movies. She was a favorite of John Ford and was seen in small roles in almost all of his later films.
Another holdover from "King of the Zombies" is the unique black character actress known as Madame Sul-Te-Wan., She plays a cook/housekeeper in "Revenge of the Zombies" and conspires against Carradine. This actress, who usually dressed like a gypsy, dated all the way back to D.W. Griffith's "Birth of A Nation" (1915) and was one of the few black actors who appeared in that film in which most of the black roles were played by whites in blackface.
And that brings me to the star himself--John Carradine. In 1943, Carradine was still trying to establish himself as star name in movies, but seemed only capable of landing leading roles in horror movies, no doubt because of his cadaverous build and his deep, resonant voice. If you remember how good he was in John Ford's 1940 film of "The Grapes of Wrath," you can possibly apprectiate why he was so reluctant to become so closely associated with horror movies.
In my own interview with Carradine many years ago, he told me he took roles like the one in "Revenge of the Zombies" mainly to raise money to finance his own stage company, which performed Shakespearean plays in the Los Angeles area. Carradine managed lead roles at Monogram, but was always billed below his more notable horror colleagues, Karloff and Lugosi, whenever he was cast in one of Universal's big horror pictures. Though he played Dracula twice in Universal horror films, he was billed third to Karloff and Lon Chaney Jr. in "House of Frankenstein" (1944) and billed under Lon Chaney Jr. in "House of Dracula" (1945), even though he played the title character.
Still, Carradine did do some praiseworthy work in these 1940s horror pictures. The one he always liked best was the title role in "Bluebeard" (1944), which he did for the even lower Poverty Row studio Producers Releasing Corp. (PRC), not long after he finished "Revenge of the Zombies." He was right about that film. It's a moody, frightening film and Carradine gives a very soulful performance under the skillful direction of the great Edgar Ulmer ("The Black Cat," "Detour").
Zombies remained popular in the war years and in 1944 Monogram came back with yet another zombie picture, "Voodoo Man," with Bela Lugosi in the leading role and, right behind him, John Carradine.
Today's zombie movies are an entirely different sort of thing. After director George Romero decided zombies ought to eat people and put them to work doing so in his original "Night of the Living Dead" (1968), the zombie movie stopped being so benign and the genre has never turned back.
If you think the so-called Golden Age of Horror Films, roughly 1930-1945, was a time for quieter, more banal horror entertainment, you certainly are right when it comes to zombie movies. With few exceptions, they were rather tepid.
But then we haven't yet come to the one zombie masterpiece of The Golden Age, Jacques Tourneur's "I Walked With A Zombie," which producer Val Lewton made at RKO at about the same time Monogram was grinding out "Revenge of the Zombies" and startling almost nobody.
©2009 by Ron Miller. The movie poster is courtesy of Monogram Pictures and Sinister Cinema. This column first posted Oct. 5, 2009.
Ron
Miller is a lifelong horror movie buff, a former nationally syndicated
television columnist and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration,"
the official companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series.
You can comment on this column online. Please address your message to either "The Editors" or Ron Miller. To send an email, click here and don't forget to mention Ron's name: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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