Revolt of the Zombies (1936)

A lot of the reviews you'll read for this movie all agree on one point, it was a horrible movie.  I'm not going to spend a lot of time on that because I shouldn't waste any more space on the web detailing what made it so bad.  The Haleprin brothers, who directed White Zombie just 4 years before making Revolt, didn't have as talented a team to work with and that alone made it less entertaining.  I think it must have started off with a lot of potential and I can see it being remade for today's audience .

The Halperins took a lot of liberties in the zombie story considering their first movie stuck pretty closely to the Haitian Voodoo style.  We've got our next big step in zombie movie evolution here.  In Revolt, the lead character, Armand, finds out the ancient "Indo-Chinese" method of creating zombies (not Haitian at all).  This basically starts with a potion, a command and then he can turn whomever he likes into a zombie.  They don't even have to be near him, he just thinks about it, holds his hand to his forehead, Bela Lugosi's eyes flash on the screen, and you have a zombie (actually, the eyes were pretty creepy).  Armand ends up creating what seems to be hundreds of zombies which would be scary if they weren't all just standing around.  It goes on to explain that they will be used to achieve great things but they never get that far.  Once they're let out of the trance, they go after him for revenge.  It was very anti climatic.  I wanted to see scary zombies breaking the door down and ripping this evil sociopath to pieces (maybe not that would be really scary) but they seemed more interested in taking a coffee break to chit chat.

The movie itself was actually a love story and, strangely enough, I have an irrational fear of those as well. Though I definitely won't be watching every chick flick ever made in chronological order any time soon.  Being forced to live on a zombie farm, awaiting my turn to become zombie food is one thing, but watching a montage of Kate Hudson picking out wedding dresses may push me over the edge for good.

Zombie movies these days may have the social commentary but for the most part, they are about a group of people trying not to be eaten.  They don't often stray from that simple idea.  Back in the 30's the zombies all seem to be a secondary piece of the overall story.  White Zombie was about a guy trying to steal another guy's wife, The Ghoul is about a guy trying to steal a dead guy's jewel, and Revolt is about a guy trying to steal another guy's girlfriend.  These movies are about thieves!  Seriously, though, with so many other new and  interesting monster types to compete with in the 30's it would have been a difficult task to make zombies interesting.  They've always represented something else, some other social problem, and Hollywood just hadn't gotten the handle of the zombie just then. I'm glad Romero finally showed up to tell those guys how its done.

I may regret saying this later but I'm looking forward to watching scarier zombie movies. I thought the classics would be scarier based on my traumatizing experience with Night of the Living Dead  in a basement over 20 years ago.  They're likely to get a lot better in a few weeks after moving past the awful 30's, comedic horror 40s and the paranoia of the 50s. We'll see...I'm going to go make deviled eggs now...

Stats for Revolt of The Zombies...
Style of zombie: we'll call it classic although it wasn't Haitian Voodoo
Threat to humans: only when commanded
Dead or alive: alive
How they become zombies: hypnosis
Other:
How to kill them: any way a human can be killed