Zombie Holocaust aka Doctor Butcher M.D. (Marino Girolami, 1980)

Zombie Holocaust, titled Doctor Butcher M.D. upon initial theatrical and home video release in the United States (Dr. Butcher was my primary care physician until he stopped accepting my employer's insurance), was filmed simultaneously with another Italian horror flick, Lucio Fulci's Zombie. Both films share sets and some actors and crew, and both begin in New York City before moving to a remote island (a fictional Caribbean island in Zombie and Indonesia's Maluku Islands in Zombie Holocaust, though Lazio, Italy, mostly stands in for both; Fulci also filmed in the Dominican Republic and Mexico). Fulci's film is the only one of the two that features a zombie fighting a shark, but Girolami gives us zombies and cannibals and a mad scientist. Take that, Fulci.

The movie opens in a New York hospital morgue. Some weirdo in a trench coat sneaks in at night and saws off the hand of a corpse. In what will be an unexplained Zombie Holocaust trend, bodies don't appear to have any bones. A budget thing? "We only have money for guts and blood. You want bones? Go to Hollywood." The next day, when a doctor who is listed as Dr. Drydock on IMDb, Dr. Dreylock on Wikipedia, and Dr. Drake in the dubbed English dialogue of the version I watched (Walter Patriarca) and his morgue assistant/aspiring anthropologist Lori Ridgeway (the stunning Alexandra Delli Colli) prepare to cut into the cadaver's stomach for a class of medical students, the absent hand is immediately noticed, despite Dr. Three-Names downplaying it. A couple of smartasses crack wise about the missing hand, infuriating the doctor, who kicks the students out and cancels class for the day.

The doc is disturbed. Several corpses have been mysteriously robbed of body parts in recent weeks, but Dr. Whatever won't call the cops despite Lori's insistence because he doesn't want his hospital's reputation damaged. This leads to a classic bit of conversation between the doc and his assistant. Dr. Maybe-Drake: "We must have a psychopathic deviant in the hospital.… Something like this would make sense in a society of primitive savages, but today in New York City?" Lori: "But Dr. Drake, do you really think we're that much different than the savages?"

Events escalate from corpse-robbing to murder, with a strange symbol left on the bodies that anthropology nut Lori recognizes as a ritual symbol on one of the Maluku Islands. Despite the doctor covering things up, a journalist named Susan Kelly (Sherry Buchanan) hears the rumors and barges into Lori's apartment for a scoop. Lori doesn't like her pushy style or the fact that she interrupted her gratuitous nudity moment (relax, pervs, we get several more nude scenes later) and gives her the brush-off. Back at the hospital, an orderly from (you guessed it) the Maluku Islands, is caught eating a patient's heart. He leaps to his death by smashing through a window. We get a great shot here of his stand-in dummy falling several stories to the sidewalk below and landing with such impact that the dummy's arm breaks off. They leave this scene in the movie, though when the camera returns to the orderly's body, his arm is once again intact. I love it. When the arm of the dummy falls off, you gotta keep it in the movie. It just looks too cool.

Lori finally convinces Dr. Three-Names to call the police. Two men show up who I assumed were NYPD detectives. They ask a lot of questions about the victims and the orderly, and Lori gives them the Maluku Islands scoop and introduces them to an anthropology professor she assists when she's not assisting in the morgue.

When Lori goes back home, she hears someone in her apartment, and her Maluku Islands dagger is missing. Fortunately, one of the two NYPD detectives (or so I thought) happens to be knocking on her door, and he searches the apartment. He doesn't find the intruder, but he sees the empty case where the dagger was. Then he says, "We should call the police." What the fuck? I thought youse guys were the police. What gives? I'll tell ya what gives. The two dudes who show up in trench coats and start investigating the crimes right after the hospital workers call the police are not detectives. They're anthropologists! This is the kind of shit that happens all the time in Zombie Holocaust. And I have no problem with it. I thrive on this kind of nonsense. It gives me life.

The two anthropologists are Dr. Peter Chandler (Ian McCulloch, not the Echo and the Bunnymen singer) and his assistant George Harper (Peter O'Neal). The two men plan an expedition to the Maluku Islands and invite Lori along for even more assistance. She's reluctant because she lived there as a child and doesn't want to spoil her fond memories. What? Why is she only bringing this up now? And why was she living there? We never find out. She finally relents but is irritated to discover that annoying journalist Susan is also on the trip because she's George's girlfriend and thinks this story will put her on the map.

One of Peter's old buddies, a former New York doctor and medical researcher named Obrero (Donald O'Brien), now lives on one of the Maluku Islands and hosts our quartet. He gives them directions to the island connected to the New York corpse-robbing but warns them to be careful because the natives don't like outsiders. His assistant (so many assistants in this thing) Molotto (professional wrestler-turned-actor Dakar) takes them out on the boat the next day, until Peter realizes Molotto is deliberately steering them to the wrong island. He makes Molotto change course against his will. Big mistake, dawg.

Dr. Obrero was deliberately deceiving his old buddy to keep him away from the island and its secrets (and Dr. Obrero's), but now that Peter's found the island, friendship is just another word. Our gang has to fend off the island's cannibalistic natives, bloodthirsty zombies (who are mostly your basic run-of-the-mill zombies except for the cool didgeridoo-esque sounds they make), and Dr. Obrero himself and his really fucked-up laboratory. Interestingly, the cannibals are filmed like Romero's Night of the Living Dead ghouls (several shots are ripped off wholesale) more than the zombies. We also get some pagan rituals involving body painting and a stone altar with a silhouette indention carved into it. We don't know what any of this means or why it causes certain events at the film's conclusion, but it does give Lori another excuse to get naked.

I enjoyed the absurdist New York chunk of the movie more than the standard-issue mad scientist, zombie, and racist cannibalism biz, but Girolami keeps things moving and is not afraid of piling on the blood and gore, Delli Colli has a mesmerizing movie face, and the dubbed English dialogue is a source of joy for me. There is always something beautifully off-kilter and hilariously strange about the way English-language rhythms, sentence logic, and slang get mildly scrambled in translation in mid-'60s-early '90s dubbed Italian horror, and it's one of the many reasons those films are so pleasurable, even a less-than-stellar example like Zombie Holocaust.

Man Made Monster (George Waggner, 1941)

Man Made Monster, the grammatically challenged absence of a hyphen in the title making it read like a sentence delivered by Dr. Frankenstein if he also spoke like his creation, is a fairly standard-issue early-'40s mad-scientist movie, but it's a likable one with a cute dog and a hilariously psychedelic goofball special effect, and the hourlong running time doesn't overstay its welcome. Lon Chaney Jr. doesn't have his dad's charisma or screen presence, but his everyman persona nicely fits the bill here.

The movie opens with a bus crashing into a transmission tower after sliding off the road during a terrible rainstorm. Everyone onboard is electrocuted, but one passenger, Dan McCormick (Lon Chaney Jr.), miraculously survives. Dan is a carny grifter who performs as Dynamo Dan the Electric Man, doing an act he describes as consisting of "yokel shockers" to "fool the peasants." Most of the act is a staged performance, but he does use real electricity for part of it. After reading about the accident, doctor and scientific researcher John Lawrence (Samuel S. Hinds) visits Dan in the hospital and leaves his card. Dr. Lawrence suspects that Dan has built up an immunity to electrical shock after years of working with electricity, hence his surviving the accident, and wants to conduct more research.

A now-unemployed Dan visits Dr. Lawrence's mansion/research laboratory after his release from the hospital. The mansion's occupants also include Dr. Lawrence's niece June (Black Friday's Anne Nagel), cook/butler/servant Wong (Chester Gan, referred to in the closing credits as "Chinese Boy" despite having a character name and being 33 years of age at the time), Corky the dog (playing himself), and Dr. Lawrence's scientific research partner Dr. Paul Rigas (Lionel Atwill). (A newspaper reporter played by Frank Albertson also becomes an important character.) 

Dynamo Dan's nice-guy demeanor immediately endears him to Dr. Lawrence, June, and especially Corky, and he agrees to temporarily move in for room, board, meals, and salary as a research subject for Drs. Lawrence and Rigas. He will be administered low-level doses of electricity, and the doctors will study his blood samples, reflexes, etc. The fact that Dr. Rigas dreams of creating a race of electrified supermen is a source of conflict between the two researchers, but Dr. Lawrence is not as alarmed by it as he should be, especially considering the research they're working on with Dan.

While Dr. Lawrence is out of town at a convention, Dr. Rigas amps up the juice and administers far more electricity to Dan than is ethically kosher. The easygoing nice guy who loved playing with Corky and chatting with June is now a shell of a man, withdrawn, listless, and depressed, and hooked on the electricity like a junkie. Not only is he addicted to the juice, he's also now under the command and control of Dr. Rigas. After the final treatment, Dan is lit up like a Christmas tree, an electrified halo of light surrounding his entire body. It looks crazy as hell. Dr. Rigas gives him a rubber suit to conserve the electricity, which looks even crazier.

When Dr. Lawrence returns from the conference and sees what's happened to Dan, he's not too happy, though, to be honest, he should've seen this coming. You can't let a guy who wants to create an army of electrified supermen live in your mansion and work in your lab, no matter how tight of bros you are. When Dr. Rigas realizes he's never going to convince his colleague that this electrified superman biz is a major breakthrough in the electrified sciences, he decides to set Dan loose on Dr. Lawrence. It doesn't end well for anybody, and Dan ends up on Death Row. You can guess what happens when they put him in the electric chair. We're talking an electrified rampage, eventually leading back to Dr. Rigas.

Perhaps the funniest part of the movie is the lack of mention of Dan's glowing electrified body halo when a sea of reporters, prison employees, and detectives call their various bosses. They just mention that Dan's on the loose and is at such-and-such location. NO ONE, and I mean ABSOLUTELY NO ONE, thinks to say, "The guy you're looking for is glowing and electrified." I'd be leading with that shit. It's like if Godzilla were loose and wearing a Hawaiian shirt, and I called the authorities and told them some dude in a Hawaiian shirt is trashing the town without ever mentioning that he's a giant fucking lizard.

Besides the novelty of a glowing Lon Chaney Jr., Man Made Monster is a typical hubris-of-man mad scientist movie that hits the usual beats, but it's skillfully photographed and edited, the narrative is concise and entertaining, and the cast is solid (including the dog). The bond between Dan and Corky the dog is also delivered with more pathos and less cutesiness than you'd expect. The Rigas and Dan roles were originally intended for Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, respectively, but I'm actually a little relieved it didn't happen, despite my Lugosi and Karloff fandom. We'd seen both men in these kinds of roles multiple times by 1941, and though Chaney is a far less exciting actor than Karloff, he makes a better everyman (and probably looks a lot more natural playing with a dog), and I'm always happy to see Lionel Atwill.

Director George Waggner (who must have been so irritated by people leaving out the second "g" in his last name that he insisted on being credited as "George waGGner" for a few years in the late '30s and for a longer period in the mid-'50s to late '60s) may not have set the world on fire with Man Made Monster (it wasn't a flop but wasn't a big hit, either), but it paved the way for his most famous film (also starring Lon Chaney Jr.), The Wolf Man, later that year. 

Waggner was a born-and-raised New Yorker and WWI veteran who dropped out of college and moved to Hollywood to try to make it as an actor in the silent era. He landed a handful of roles but decided he liked being on the other side of the screen better and spent the remainder of his career as a screenwriter, director, and songwriter of musical numbers in a time when even the non-musical features frequently included an original song or two. Though The Wolf Man is his best-known movie, he specialized in westerns and spent the last decade of his career directing television, with Code 3, 77 Sunset Strip, and the Adam West Batman being his most frequent employers.

  

Devil's Nightmare (Jean Brismée, 1971)

Like the movie in my previous post (The Devil's Wedding Night), Devil's Nightmare is another slice of early '70s sex- and violence-filled European castle weirdness with a possessive devil in the title (the two films even shared a triple bill with In the Devil's Garden on their initial U.S. release), and I am, as the 40-year-old teens on social media say, here for it. Unlike The Devil's Wedding Night, which was about vampires, the devil actually shows up in the Belgian/Italian coproduction Devil's Nightmare, alongside a busload of wacky tourists, a succubus, and a cursed old Nazi general/baron-turned-alchemist and his butler. We're talking the perfect ingredients for one crazy night, my friends.

In an unusual move for a sexy Satanic '70s castlesploitation flick, Devil's Nightmare opens with black-and-white footage of the bombing of Berlin in 1945. The B&W continues in a pre-credits flashback sequence in which Baron von Rhoneberg (Jean Servais, whose other credits include Rififi, Le Plaisir, Fever Mounts at El Pao, and The Longest Day), also a Nazi general, nervously awaits the birth of his firstborn child during the bombing. His wife is not doing well, despite being attended to by a nurse (Frédérique Hender). She dies in childbirth but the baby is born healthy, though the Baron is extremely dismayed that the newborn is a daughter and not a son. We suspect this isn't just standard-issue misogyny from the worried and knowing looks the Baron and his butler Hans (Maurice de Groote) keep giving each other. Hans ushers the nurse to the basement for shelter, which gives the Baron the opportunity to quickly christen his daughter before killing her with a big-ass knife. We find out why later.

Kablammo! A creepy castle appears in vivid color and the opening credits roll. A strange and exciting scene that has little to do with the plot (love when this happens) ensues, though we do learn that the Baron and Hans are living in a castle in the Belgian countryside and they don't want the castle to be photographed.

Cue the tour bus. A small, ragtag group of Euro-misfits on a tour of the castles of Belgium runs into some trouble when the usual country road leading to the next castle is closed, but we'll circle back to that. I want to introduce our tourists first. Mason (Lucien Raimbourg) is a sour-tempered elderly man who frequently smokes a pipe and always complains. Mason is hilariously pissed off about everything all the time, and his lines being dubbed in English by someone clearly much younger than him makes him even funnier. Alvin Sorel (Jacques Monseau) is a Catholic seminary student soon to become a priest. He's already wearing the collar. Alvin is a devoutly religious young man, but he's also overly confident about his devoutness and priestly skills, and he's a little too proud of how great he is at playing chess. Nancy (Colette Emmanuelle) is an unhappily married wealthy woman who fiendishly craves even more wealth, and her husband Howard (Lorenzo Terzon) is an unfaithful playboy who can't stop pursuing every woman in his eyesight. Corinne (Ivana Novak) is a bisexual seductress who has her sights on both Howard and Regine (Shirley Corrigan), a blonde bombshell in hot pants who is passively receptive to the sexual attention but is mostly super into lounging in bed, napping, taking long relaxing baths, and sleeping. Finally, our tour bus driver Ducha (Christian Maillet) is a hardcore glutton who never stops eating and drinking wine. His bedside reading is a cookbook, his suitcase contains several smoked meats and cheeses, and he even tears into a chicken (or possibly turkey) leg while driving. I mean, he goes to town on the damn thing.

Back to the road closure. Ducha pauses his poultry bite to slam on the brakes, angering Mason, who gives him the business. The passengers see a bald, thin figure with long teeth in the woods, tending to a fire and grinning creepily. (This thin man is the wonderfully named Daniel Emilfork, a character acting legend who was the go-to guy in European cinema from 1955 until 2006 when anyone needed a bald, thin creepy guy with weird teeth and a magnetic screen presence.) Ducha rolls down his window and asks the creepily grinning man how to get around the blocked road. The man tells them to turn around, head back toward the village, and take a right at a different castle. This castle is not part of the tour, but the owners will provide shelter for the night until the road is reopened. They take the weird guy's advice, which is bad for them but great for us.

After some mishaps involving a falling stone gargoyle face, a large frog, and inappropriate flirting with a hot pants babe in front of your spouse, the gang enters the castle, meets Hans and the castle's unfriendly cook, and is shown into their rooms. Each room has something weird going on (I'm not just talking about the late-'60s/early-'70s-as-fuck wallpaper and carpeting), and Hans is more than happy to tell the sordid history of who died in that room, what year the death occurred, and how it happened. This scares Regine enough that she requests to share a room. Corinne hornily offers hers. Cue some '70s softcore Euro-sex between one of the horniest women in Belgium and one of the laziest.

The Baron makes his appearance at dinnertime and talks about his alchemist lab in the basement and the centuries-old curse on his family. You know, the usual small talk. The alchemist lab talk gets greedy Nancy all hot and bothered, and she asks for a tour after dinner. The woman has a fever and the only prescription is more gold. (Devil's Nightmare takes it as a given that you can turn lead into gold. Just roll with it.)

Dinner is rolling along swimmingly when there is an unexpected knock on the door. The cook answers, recognizes the visitor, Lisa (Erika Blanc), with horror, and refuses to let her in. Hans butts in, overrides the cook (I'd credit the actress but I can't find her in the listed credits online), and tells Lisa she can come in and stay in the remaining spare bedroom. She joins the gang mid-meal in some atypical dinnerwear, a very revealing dress with a large oval cutout from the bottom of her breasts to just below her navel. She sits next to the seminarian and starts flirting. Could this be a succubus? Or just a really weird sexy lady?

Erika Blanc (real name Enrica Bianchi Colombatto), who plays Lisa, is a strikingly memorable Italian actress with a slew of credits during the golden age of the European exploitation/genre/b-movie era, appearing in dozens of Italian horror films, spaghetti westerns, non-porn erotica, and crime thrillers (many of which have incredible English-language titles), including Mario Bava's Kill, Baby... Kill!, Django Shoots First, Vengeance Is My Forgiveness, Will Our Heroes Be Able to Find their Friend Who Has Mysteriously Disappeared in Africa?, A Man for Emmanuelle, Sartana's Here... Trade Your Pistol for a Coffin, The Night Evelyn Came out of the Grave, Stay Away from Trinity... When He Comes to Eldorado, Love and Death in the Garden of the Gods, A Dragonfly for Each Corpse, and The Naked Doorwoman, just to name a few.

Once almost every character is in place at the castle (Satan shows up later but you may have already met him), the movie really kicks it up a notch. The succubus lures each tourist with his or her own deadly sin in genuinely creepy scenes that owe much of their effectiveness to Blanc's incredible performance, some top-notch freaky-ass makeup from makeup artists Nancy Beaudoux and Duilio Giustini (the movie's secret weapon), and the atmospherically spooky score from Morricone and Rota protégé Alessandro Alessandroni (also an expert whistler, Alessandroni is the guy whistling on many of the Morricone scores for Sergio Leone's westerns).

I had a blast with this movie. It's soaking in '70s Italian and Belgian atmosphere, the locations are perfect, the cast is excellent with tons of screen presence, it's sexy, it's scary, it's funny, the music's great, and there are no dead spots. Something interesting is happening in every scene, and the images have maximum impact, especially the closeups. I had even more fun with this one than I had with The Devil's Wedding Night.

Oddly enough, this is director Jean Brismée's only feature. I wish he'd made more. Primarily a screenwriter, Brismée's only other directing credits are educational short films about mathematics, science, and film history. He also cofounded a film school in Brussels whose graduates include several prominent international filmmakers, screenwriters, and actors, and he wrote a book about Belgian cinema in 1995. He died in 2024.

The Devil's Wedding Night (Luigi Batzella & Joe D'Amato, 1973)

Though the title's a bit of a misnomer (this is a vampire movie), The Devil's Wedding Night is an entertainingly campy bit of Gothic horror, despite the second half having too many pad-the-running-time scenes of characters wandering confusedly through a castle in the dark. Those scenes aside, we get some hilariously arch dialogue, knowingly heightened performances, one of those great scenes in an old-timey inn/tavern where the locals get weird when the out-of-towner says he's going to the spooky castle (I never get tired of that), blood, copious nudity, an amulet vs. ring accoutrement showdown, a Pazuzu namedrop (shoutout to Pazuzu and my fellow Exorcist II defenders), and lots of vampire action. It's a reasonably good '70s b-movie time.

The movie begins with playboy archeologist Karl (Mark Damon, in one of his final roles before he became a big-shot movie producer) in his cozy library/study, researching the existence of the Nibelungen in the ancient tomes. He's convinced the ring is is real, has been used by a succession of historical figures (Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, etc.) to control the world, and is most likely somewhere in the Carpathian Mountains in Transylvania at present. He impulsively decides to find it, seize it, and put it on permanent display at an archeological museum, where it will be free from the hands of men. This begs the question, if the ring is so powerful, wouldn't there be constant attempts to steal it from the museum? Maybe put it in a safe and bury it in a secret location?

Karl's twin brother Franz (also played by Damon) enters the study and begins razzing Karl with some poetry from hot new talent Edgar Allan Poe. Franz doubts the ring is real, but if it is, he thinks Karl should make some money off of it instead of donating it to a museum. He's also mildly concerned about Karl's impending journey to Transylvania, especially when Karl tells him he's going to Castle Dracula. Just in case vampires are real, Franz gives Karl an amulet that wards off their power and says he'll make the trip, too, if Karl gets in any trouble. Why does he have that amulet? These are some strange dudes.

Karl makes the long trip to Transylvania on horseback, where he fails to notice a creepy man in the woods smiling at him. He arrives at the inn, spooks the locals by asking about the castle, and orders a "very tall beer and a warm bed." The creepy smiling guy is there, too, but Karl again does not notice. The innkeeper's attractive daughter Tanya (Enza Sbordone) takes him to his room, where she warns him about vampires and tells him he's arrived the evening before the Night of the Virgin Moon. Every 50 years, five virgins make their way to the castle and never return. She's scared. Karl tells her vampires aren't real and he's got a pretty sweet amulet to ward them off if they are. He also apologizes about prioritizing his own safety "when (dramatic pause) I should be (dramatic pause) worried about (dramatic pause) yours." With each dramatic pause, Karl moves closer to the woman's lips. You don't need to be the Psychic Friends Network to know what happens next.

Fresh from bedding down Tanya, Karl hops on his horse and rides to Castle Dracula. Guess what? He left the amulet at the inn. (Oh shiiit!) A creepy servant named Lara (Esmeralda Barros) answers his knocking. He presents the lie that he's an architect studying the castles of Europe and would like a tour. She allows his entry and tells him the mistress of the house is away. Bored of waiting, Karl wanders the castle, checks out the crypt, and finally meets Countess Dracula (Rosalba Neri). After some amusing banter, they have a late dinner together. Karl does his best playboy seduction routine, the countess reciprocates with some hilarious dialogue that goes over Karl's head. Soon, they're knockin' boots, but the countess turns into a bat mid-coitus and gives Karl the ol' neck-chomp. Karl's one of the gang now. And, oh yes, the countess has the ring.

It's going to be a great Night of the Virgin Moon. The countess thinks Karl will make a fantastic new husband, and she can finally move on from the dear departed Count Dracula. First, she'll bathe in the blood of the five virgins with the assistance of Lara, a big bald vampire enforcer dude, and five hooded vampire men who will take the dead virgins as their coffin brides for the next half-century. Then, Karl will make a blood sacrifice of Tanya (kidnapped while attempting to bring the amulet to Karl), and the wedding will ensue. The countess and Karl will live happily ever after.

These plans are complicated when Franz shows up. Though Franz told his brother he'd make the trip if he heard that something went wrong, he seemingly left mere hours after his brother. I don't know if a scene explaining this quick move was cut from the print I watched or what. Whatever the case, the countess tells Franz his brother visited but abruptly left. She then asks him to stay the night and the creeping smiling guy brings some wine. Smiley guy turns into Lara, everyone starts cackling like mad, and Franz, Lara, and the countess possibly have a threesome, though this segment is so confusingly/artily edited that it may all be a hallucination in Franz's mind.

Unexpected brotherly visitations handled (sort of), the countess and her cohorts finally get the Virgin Moon ceremony underway, the important first step of which involves Lara ripping the tops off the virgins and rubbing their breasts. You may think this is gratuitous, but I believe in trusting the process. It's an important part of the ceremony and can't be skipped. Will the rest of the ceremony proceed as planned? What do you think?

As I mentioned earlier, there are too many minutes of one character or another walking through the dark castle in the second half of the film, but the rest of the pulpy, Gothy, vampy biz mostly makes up for the repetitive bits. The movie has so many of the '60s and '70s Euro-horror pleasures, and the cast know exactly what kind of movie they're in and pitch their performances accordingly. The ridiculous multiple-twist ending is pretty damn fun, too.

The Devil's Wedding Night credits list Paul Solvay as the director, though that name is an Americanized pseudonym for Luigi Batzella. Rosalba Neri said Batzella's direction seemed like two people "going different directions and rarely meeting." The producers must have reached the same conclusion, because wildly prolific Italian b-movie filmmaker Joe D'Amato (real name Aristide Massaccesi) was called in for extensive reshoots, which were extensive enough to see him credited as co-director years after the film's release. It doesn't hurt the movie much, and there are no wild clashes in visual style, though I'd like to know who to blame for the castle-wandering scenes. I have to mention this every time Joe D'Amato's name comes up, but he used dozens of pseudonyms over the course of his career, my favorite being his spaghetti western name: Arizona Massachuset.

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.