King of the Zombies (Jean Yarbrough, 1941)

King of the Zombies, a reliably entertaining b-movie horror-comedy, is also a classic example of white supremacy's perversity. The movie is simultaneously racist and anti-racist. The white characters, heroes and villains alike, and, to a lesser extent, the filmmakers, treat the black characters with bemused condescension, and the black actors are placed in stereotypical roles. However, the movie also regularly highlights and criticizes the primary villain's racism, and the black characters, played by a stacked cast of pioneering black actors, have more vitality and personality and are quicker to understand what's happening in any given situation than their white counterparts. The black actors carry the movie, and their characters are the ones who connect with the audience. It's a fascinatingly contradictory stew, and the product of a country that may never stop being insane.

The film opens with a small U.S. transport plane, en route from Cuba to Puerto Rico, encountering some fierce weather. The three men onboard are pilot James McCarthy (Dick Purcell), Bill Summers (John Archer, fellow native of my home state of Nebraska and father of famous actress/Scientology wingnut Anne Archer), and Bill's valet Jefferson "Jeff" Jackson (Mantan Moreland). Bill's profession is a bit of a mystery the film never solves. He works for the government in some capacity, but that work is possibly some kind of secret. I had a sinking feeling during this opening scene. Moreland has to do the stereotypical bug-eyed scaredy-cat routine while calling his boss "Massa Bill," and the white men are mildly condescending while being steady and calm. It's the usual Hollywood racism of the period, and I worried we'd be in for a long 67 minutes. Thankfully, this is the worst of it.

The men realize this is the same general location where a Navy admiral's plane recently went missing and decide they need to make a quick plan. The weather is too rough to make Puerto Rico. After picking up a radio signal from a nearby island, James makes an emergency landing. The rough landing damages the plane, and James gets a gash on the head, but otherwise the men are alive and kicking, though they've landed next to a graveyard. After regaining their composure and getting their bearings, they see a spooky mansion. Jeff is the only one who expresses hesitation about entering it. He's way ahead of his peers from now on.

The mansion is owned by creepy exiled Austrian Dr. Miklos Sangre (Henry Victor, third choice for the part after Bela Lugosi couldn't get his schedule aligned and Peter Lorre and the producers couldn't agree on the salary), a racist weirdo who takes an immediate interest in James and Bill and an immediate dislike to Jeff. Sangre tells them a supply boat will arrive on the island in two weeks. In the meantime, they can stay with him. James and Bill accept the offer. Sangre offers the men fine brandy from Europe, but when Jeff reaches for his glass, it isn't there. Only the white guys get the brandy. Sangre also makes it clear that Jeff can't stay in the large room prepared for James and Bill and must stay in the servants' quarters.

Jeff is lead to the quarters by Sangre's butler Momba (Leigh Whipper, the first black performer to join the Actors' Equity Association and the co-founder of the Negro Actors Guild of America), where he meets the maid, Samantha (Marguerite Whitten, frequent co-star of Moreland's), and the cook, Tahama (Madame Sul-Te-Wan, the stage name of Nellie Crawford, the first black actress to sign a film contract; Crawford was the daughter of former slaves whose mother became a laundress for a Louisville theater company, which is where the younger Crawford fell in love with acting). Moreland, Whitten, Whipper, and Sul-Te-Wan are the lifeblood of the movie, and their performances keep it from being just another generic b-movie.

Moreland and Whitten have great rapport and comedic timing honed from working together so often, and their characters immediately settle into a friendly antagonism, exchanging affectionate insults and teasing. Samantha tells Jeff about the zombies on the island and tells him he just has to clap twice and they'll come running. She illustrates her point, some zombies come shambling into the kitchen, and Jeff runs away. He tells James and Bill about the zombies, and they respond as condescendingly as you'd expect. Sangre responds with barely concealed anger, and again tells James and Bill to send Jeff back to the servants' quarters. The guy's not just a racist, he's also got some secret zombie hordes. What a dick.

At this point, we meet our final two characters, Sangre's wife Alyce (Patricia Stacey) who is stuck in some kind of weird trance, and Alyce's niece Barbara (Joan Woodbury), who is Sangre's secretary but is not too happy about it.

What follows is layer upon layer of secret intrigue, zombie mayhem, evil plans, and voodoo rituals, and James and Bill finally realizing Jeff was right about everything. Moreland really gets to cut loose comedically in the scenes where Jeff is hypnotized into believing he's a zombie, delivering my two favorite lines in the movie. First, after repeating the phrase "I am a zombie," he zombie-walks over to a line of fellow zoms and says, "Move over, boys. I'm one of the gang now." Second, after much conversation with Samantha about his new zombie lifestyle, she tells him that he can't be a zombie because zombies can't talk. He responds, "Can I help it if I'm loquacious?" To my great delight, I was familiar with some of these scenes from watching them on my prized VHS copy of Horrible Horror. I got it for Christmas when I was 10 or 11, and I've watched it roughly 37,000 times in the years since. It's a compilation of scenes from b-movie horror and sci-fi from the '30, '40s, '50s, and '60s, hosted by the late, great John Zacherle aka Zacherley the Cool Ghoul, a rock DJ and, for years, horror host of late-night creature feature shows Shock Theater in Philadelphia and Chiller Theatre in New York City. "Can I help it if I'm loquacious?" pops into my head about once a week since the late 1980s thanks to this videotape.

Back to the movie. King of the Zombies is pretty damn entertaining, despite the racist moments and despite Jean Yarbrough's pedestrian visual style (see my review of Yarbrough's The Devil Bat a few months ago). The black cast members really pull this one up and give it the life and energy the milquetoast white characters are lacking, though Victor makes a pretty good villain. In some ways, I'm glad he got the part instead of Lugosi or Lorre because he's less immediately readable as a classic baddie. You're left wondering what the hell he's up to for quite a while.

Before I bid you adieu, I have to say a few words about Mantan Moreland. Moreland was a showbiz lifer, working in vaudeville from his teen years, performing live comedy, and acting in dozens of movies until his film career hit a snag in the 1950s. An understandable backlash to the kinds of roles black actors were forced to take in the first half-century of film and how those roles contributed to the perpetuation of racist stereotypes unfortunately led to many of these same actors struggling to find roles in the '50s. Moreland turned to live performance in the '50s to make a living, though he came close to being a Three Stooge after the death of Shemp Howard. Moreland was Moe Howard's choice to replace Shemp, but the Columbia execs told the surviving Stooges they needed to use someone who was already under contract with the studio, so Joe Besser got the gig. Though he popped up in bit parts and cameo roles in the '60s and early '70s in movies including Carl Reiner's Enter Laughing and The Comic, Jack Hill's Spider Baby, and Melvin Van Peebles' Watermelon Man, Moreland's main focus for the remainder of his career was live comedy performance and comedy records, often as part of a duo with Roosevelt Livingood. It's on one of these 1960s Moreland and Livingood comedy records, That Ain't My Finger, that Moreland utters the immortal line, "Shit, if this is gonna be that kind of party, I'm gonna stick my dick in the mashed potatoes," famously sampled by the Beastie Boys on their 1994 song "B-Boys Makin' with the Freak-Freak" to the delight of 1990s teens worldwide.

 

Destroyer (Robert Kirk, 1988)

Destroyer is no great shakes visually and the characters aren't as developed as they should be, but its charismatic cast, punchy edit, and offbeat approach to the slasher film kick it up a couple notches from the standard late '80s cheapo horror movie. It's hard to recommend to anyone who's not already into low-budget horror, but if you are, I give it my lukewarm approval. It doesn't suck, but it won't blow your mind.

Set in an unnamed small city (a blend of filming locations Newark, New Jersey, and the small Colorado town of Brighton, three hours from my rural Nebraska hometown), Destroyer is about a Hollywood movie crew shooting a cheapo women-in-prison movie in the unnamed town's recently abandoned prison, which closed after a horrendous riot resulted in the deaths of several prisoners and guards. The prison's handyman/janitor Russell (Tobias Anderson) is retained by the film crew to maintain his old job and also serve as a consultant, but the facility is otherwise deserted, though a local urban legend maintains that executed serial killer Ivan Moser (Lyle Alzado) survived his ride in the electric chair and is secretly living in the building. Non-spoiler alert: the urban legend is true.

Our main characters from the film crew include a couple, stuntwoman Susan Malone (Valley Girl's Deborah Foreman, now mostly retired from acting and currently teaching yoga and Pilates in my adopted city of Austin, Texas, though she still takes on the rare acting gig) and screenwriter David Harris (Clayton Rohner), director Robert Edwards (Anthony Perkins, a last-minute replacement for Roddy McDowall), absent-minded electrician/pyrotechnic expert Rewire (Jim Turner), and lead actress Sharon Fox (Lannie Garrett), who is pining for past glories, phoning in her performance, and clashing with Edwards. Foreman and Rohner are reunited from the previous year's meta-slasher April Fool's Day, in which Rohner played smarmy rich prick Chaz Vyshinsky and Foreman pulled double duty as rich socialite twins Buffy and Muffy St. John. In Destroyer, Foreman and Rohner earn the Decapitated Zombie Vampire Bloodbath Award for Onscreen Couple with Tallest Hair, 1988 Edition.

Most of the cast and crew know they're making schlock, but they want it to be reasonably professional, entertaining schlock. Sharon, meanwhile, makes trouble by deliberately giving bad performances and fighting with Robert, and David causes behind-the-scenes trouble by digging too deep into the causes of the prison riot and attempting to include elements of that true story in the screenplay or possibly a future screenplay. 

He blames the former warden, Karsh (Pat Mahoney), in a local television interview about the production, angering Karsh, who visits the set hopping mad. Robert calms him down with some smooth talk and introduces him to Sharon, who he's a big fan of and who shares his low opinion of the production. Unfortunately for him, he also meets Ivan during an ill-timed bathroom visit.

The rest of the movie alternates between the ups and downs of the low-budget filmmaking process (mistimed pyro, melting dummies, negotiating the shower scene, etc.) and slasher-movie kills from Ivan. It's a fun time, and I like the setup of a movie crew being picked off one-by-one in an abandoned prison by a 'roided-up maniac, though first-time filmmaker Robert Kirk gives it a perfunctory, TV-movie-ish look (the remainder of his career would be spent making edutainment documentaries for cable TV) with the occasional flashy shot. I'd love to see a take on this same material by a more experienced filmmaker with a strong visual personality. The edit really flows, however, and has a momentum and energy that the directing lacks.

The cast makes everything more watchable, too, despite the thinness of the writing. Alzado is a fun, campy killer who can also be intimidating and threatening, Perkins is excellent at getting a lot from a little, Jim Turner brings most of the successful comedy, and Foreman and Rohner are likable screen presences. Foreman also gets to do a lot of physical stuff in the final third, and she successfully pulls it off. I wish she'd had a longer career with more leading role opportunities. She's so great in Valley Girl, truly one of the best American movies of the '80s.

I couldn't end this post without mentioning the titles of the two songs played in the movie that aren't part of the instrumental score. I believe these two songs encapsulate the human experience: "Never Say You'll Never Fall in Love" and "Kiss My Stinky White Ass."