The Valley of The Zombies (1946)

Its official, 1946 was the year the zombie officially joined the ranks among bloodthirsy monsters...finally!  I think, for this reason alone, I enjoyed this movie more than any others so far.  Although I didn't have to look away from the tv or hide behind a blanket, it still had some legitimately scary moments.  As the zombie walked towards the camera with a crazed look on his face, I got pretty creeped out.

The writing was good despite some really weird lines.  Ex: "Lets head over to Dr. Maynard's office and see if we can pick up a clue that will lead us to the peculiar party that has a passion for pickling" when a cop is talking about trying to find out who is embalming all the dead bodies that keep showing up.   One other piece of the movie I thought was great, and something I know I'll harp on over and over in this blog, is the music.  It was truly in the classic horror movie style and contributed to the scariness, as it should.  I really don't like to feel happy go lucky or bored to tears during a zombie movie and the music is mostly to blame in those situations. 

The directing also showed much improvement from earlier zombie movies.   During the Great Depression, an independent film production company called Republic Pictures gobbled us various other small companies including Monogram Pictures who brought us Revenge and King of The Zombies.  Thus allowing Monogram's people to continue their zombie movie work.  New in the Hollywood scene was director Philip Ford  who would go on to direct westerns, crime movies, and some episodes of Lassie.  His other genre specialties were pretty evident throughout the movie which included a car chase scene, shootouts, and mystery solving cops with very CSI-like one liners.  Unfortunately, though this was his only zombie movie.

The synopsis was pretty basic.  Theres a crazy guy, Ormond Murks (Ian Kieth), who somehow uses ancient voodoo to turn his own dead body into a zombie.  Or possibly just put himself into the trance-like state in order to reanimate himself later, it was a little confusing despite a very well executed flashback scene in the beginning to explain the plot.  Anyway, he keeps steeling bags of blood from a local doctor's office, gets caught, and is forced to go on a killing spree to get the blood he needs to sustain his zombie life. Then you've got your pretty standard, helpless, pretty nurse whos only role in the movie is to be the love interest to the brave and handsome doctor who is to eventually save the day.  Nurse Susan (Lorna Gray) and Dr. Evans (Robert Livingston) were just silly.  I could have gone for less nurse and doctor and more cops chasing the crazy zombie guy.

As for the zombies in the movie, well, there was only one.  He talks about a place called the Valley of The Zombies where he learned how to turn himself into a zombie using voodoo so he could "appear to be dead, but still be alive".  Why he wanted to do this wasn't explained well and I think he was just crazy.  Up to the late 40s, there hadn't been a zombie that acted on his own accord, they've all been under the control of a master of some sort.  So, when watching this movie all on its own, its not all that great as a zombie movie.  However, its contributed a lot to the evolution of the zombie story; the need for blood, the zombie operating without a master, (spoiler) the zombie actually kills people, and the scary flashes and music which provoked an adrenaline rush.  I'd say without a double this was one of the best, at least in my top two so far.  Definitely see this if you're into zombie movies, and whats better is its less than an hour comitment.

Stats for Valley of The Zombies...
Style of zombie: Classic
Threat to humans: yes
Dead or alive: alive
How they become zombies: voodoo
Other: first zombie movie with a zombie without a master
How to kill them: any way a human can be killed

The Face of Marble (1946)

Before I get started on The Face of Marble, which I had a good enough time watching, I'll explain why this post is so late.  This week I found out that there is a nightmare worse than a zombie apocalypse; the Atlanta Airport.  I was stranded there for a considerable part of my week and had a lot of time to contemplate whether I'd prefer to have my brains eaten by zombies or have an extended stay in the Atlanta Airport.  I decided on the zombies.  At least that death would be quick.

On to The Face of Marble...I must not have the best eye for good and bad film making yet because I was warned to expect something very awful out of director William Beudine but ended up liking the movie.  He was known throughout early Hollywood as One Shot Beudine for always using the first take of a scene, good or bad.  This efficient style gained him a lot of respect during the silent movie era when only one or two reels of film were used per movie.  However when "talkies" were introduced, directors started taking their time to improve the quality of the movie and stopped always using the first take.  In the name of profit, Beudine stuck with this method and it showed in most of his later movies.  This one was no exception but, up until the end when the story began to go haywire, I didn't have any complaints.

Similar to Voodoo Man, this is another zombie movie where the evil doctor is creating zombies for personal gain but he has a soft side that causes the audience to sympathize with him.  Now that I think of it, this movie was almost the exact same thing as Voodoo Man, for the record, I liked Voodoo Man a  lot better.  There is one advancement in zombie evolution when, at one point, the mad Doctor and his assistant experiment on the family dog and turn him into a zombie.  This zombie dog starts eating the neighbors' farm animals which suggests that maybe the human zombies needed to feast on flesh as well.  With no zombie features other than a slow pace and wide eyes, these zombies can also walk through walls in addition to craving farm animals.

John Carradine, who played the mad doctor, did an excellent job portraying an evil tyrant with the occasional soft side.  It was his obsessive love for his dead wife that caused him to experiment with bringing the dead back to life.  He was plagued with his own guilt over doing something immoral all through the movie.  Unlike Lugosi and Karloff, Carradine acted in more that just horror films.  The patriarch of a large Hollywood family (David Carradine's dad and Martha Plimpton's grandfather),  he was best known for playing in movies like The Grapes of Wrath.  He did go through a phase in the 40's-60's where he played in mostly horror films, acting in a grand total of 4 zombie films.

There was a small element of voodoo in the very end which contributed the the whole story falling apart.  It really wasn't necessary to add this when the story line was strong enough with just the mad doctor.  I guess the creators thought it would help get the zombie point across although the word zombie was never actually used in the movie.  It could have been One Shot Beudine just not thinking it completely through because he was trying to be efficient.  The movie wasn't all that bad and, despite it being the first with an animal zombie eating the living, I'd recommend watching Voodoo Man if you're after a mad doctor zombie movie from the late 1940's thats not too incredibly scary. 

Stats for Face of Marble...
Style of zombie: Classic
Threat to humans: yes, and farm animals
Dead or alive: both
How they become zombies: electrocution by a Mad Doctor
Other: first zombie movie with a zombie animal, zombies ate the living in this move as well
How to kill them: any way a human can be killed

Zombies On Broadway (1945)

This movie was just plain delightful!  I didn't imagine myself saying those words at any point during this process and by now you may realize that I have the world's worst taste in movies.  Give me the benefit of the doubt though.  I'm a bit of a sucker for slapstick and this movie had Bela Lugosi doing slapstick with a small monkey.  Hilarious! We're quickly coming to the end of the 1940's zombie movies and I think this one really tops them off.  After a half decade of really awful, horribly rated zombie movies, Hollywood squeezed in a a few more, including a spoof, before taking a long break from the genre that would last into the early 50's. 

Zombies on Broadway opens with a very cheerful scene in a soon to open night club "The Zombie Hut", with dancing girls and gangsters onlooking as ragtime music plays in the background.  During the 40's, gangsters made believable bad guys because prohibition had been repealed in the early 30's leaving gangs to seek out other sources of revenue.  Much of this business would be very likely to happen in the back rooms of nightclubs like The Zombie Hut.  Enter the main characters Jerry (Wally Brown) and Mike (Alan Carney) who have come up with a fabulous publicity stunt to have a real zombie at opening night.  They then introduce to the gangsters their "real zombie" who is a very recognizable actor in gray makeup.  Not buying it for a second, the gangsters threaten Jerry and Mike and send them out to find a real zombie...or else... 

The movie then starts to play like a combination of I Walked With a Zombie and Ghost Breakers because of the setting, actors, and hilarity that the two get into on their quest to find a real zombie.  They head to San Sebastian (RKO's go to zombie destination) to meet Dr. Renault (Bela Lugosi) who is working to create a zombie similar to the local voodoo zombies.  Once they arrive on the island, they're greeted by a local playing a song on a banjo that is exactly the same as I Walked With a Zombie, same actor, same message of eventual doom and all.  None of the locals will acknowledge the fact that there are zombies but, much to their luck, a pretty young singer promises to help them find one if they'll take her back to the states.  All the while, Dr. Renault, with the zombie making hobby, sets out to turn them all into zombies!  It was completely inexplicable how he even knew they were there.

Jerry and Mike, who'd been teamed up in 5 other RKO films to mimic the comedy of Abbot and Costello, get into all sort of shenanigans as they, and their lady friend, enter the jungle to find a zombie.  Unfortunately they're being followed by one of Dr. Renault's zombie slaves who successfully splits them up and kidnaps the girl.  Thankfully, that funny little monkey I mentioned earlier, is there to save the day.  Not too soon though, Mike gets the short end of the stick and becomes Dr. Renault's unwilling test subject and is turned into a zombie.  It was nice of him to take the fall for the girl though.  They eventually escape and, in a scene similar  to Shaun of the Dead, the now foursome, monkey included, need to get past a group of zombies before they can catch their ship.  They act like zombies so they're not spotted and the monkey, with his arms out and eyes wide open, is the very best part of the movie.

Speaking of wide eyes, the actor that played the zombie in I Walked with a Zombie, Darby Jones, is in this movie as well, wide eyes and all.  I hadn't noticed it before but the wide eyes are completely fake (see picture above).  They finally make it back to the states with their real zombie who is unfortunately Mike.  The climax has to get squeezed into the last  minutes of movie which could have been done a lot better.  It seemed like the only reason to have that last 5 minutes was to say there were actually zombies on Broadway.  Up to that point I kept wondering what the title was all about.  All ends well for the group of slapstick gangsters, God forbid we have a zombie movie that ends with zombies still in existence! 

Needless to say, there wasn't much scary happening in this movie but it wasn't really a horror. Though, the same can be said of Zombieland and I couldn't make it all the way through that one in the theater.  RKO, like the genre, was hitting hard times and was about to call it quits forever. All in all, they made many B horrors and just 2 zombie movies.  One of which is still considered among the best of all time.  Its too bad because I'd like to have seen how an RKO movie would turn out today.  Well, heres to you, RKO, for giving us the zombie movie spoof!  As for Zombies on Broadway, I highly recommend you watch this one for yourself.  Not many people would agree with me, but its one of the best so far. 

Stats for Zombies on Broadway...
Style of zombie: Classic
Threat to humans: only when commanded
Dead or alive: alive
How they become zombies: authentic voodoo and potions of a Mad Doctor
Other: first zombie movie to show people pretending to be zombies, first Zombie movie spoof
How to kill them: any way a human can be killed

Voodoo Man (1944)

I'd say this movie did the best job of making a suspensul thriller of any of the zombie movies so far.  However, despite the three big name actors that were in the movie playing the evil trio, it fell a little short of its potential in the end. Bela Lugosi plays Mad Dr. Marlowe (again...yawn) who employs a team of zombie makers, including John Carradine as Toby, the Igor like assistant, and George Zucco as Nicholas, the voodoo priest.  It was pretty clear that Toby was around becasue he was a few sandwiches short of a picnic and he liked to beat on the drums durning the voodoo ceremonies, but Nicholas seemed way too normal to put on a voodoo getup and take part in the madness.  I wasn't convinced they thought his role all the way through and it was probably just a way to get the three actors together in one movie. 

It starts out like any good horror film should; with a pretty girl trapped, all alone, out of gas, and in the middle of nowhere.  Then who should come along to pick her up...the bad guys.  It turns out that Dr. Marlowe is turning young women into zombies in order to transfer their life force over to his dead wife.  Its actually very sweet and Bela Lugosi did a good job making the audience feel sorry for Dr. Marlowe who just wants his wife back.  Too bad his experiment ends in failure and hes kidnapped enough women to make the local police suspicious.  The first victim, Stella, just happens to be a close friend of a Banner Productions screenwriter, Ralph, who is working on a story about the same string of kidnappings and hes determined to find out who took her.  Once this basic story line is out, the movie pushes forward revealing little clues to the characters at a good pace but the audience knows whats happening all along. This is much better than some of the other movies that dump all the information on you right at the beginning or end. 

The local cops were a bit of a joke. It may have just been bad writing though. They're just there to make you scream at the tv (in my case, the computer screen during my lunch break) in anger to try to help solve the mystery.  The sherrif complains at one point that the repeat kidnappings are making his job monotonous and his assistant says over and over that his wife is going to be upset if hes not home for dinner on time.  Yeah, thats exactly what I'd be complaing about if there were women being kidnapped in my jurisdiction!  Other than a last minute assist to the knight in shining armor, Ralph, they were pretty much worthless.  On top of that, the women all dissapear in the exact same location where Dr. Marlowe's house is the only one for miles...how hard is that to solve, guys? 

Although the movie was one of the better zombie movies, the actual voodoo ceremony strayed so far from zombie folklore that you can start to see how the zombie story already started evolving in the 40's.  First, it was a combination of hypnosis, which included close up shots of Bela Lugosi creepy eyes, and voodoo rituals.  The basement where the ceremonies were held also looked super cozy, like their little brother would be sitting on a big couch a few feet away telling them to keep the noise down becasue he was trying to watch tv.  Second, there was Nicholas in his wild voodoo headdress who kept calling out to Ramboona (apparently a voodoo god totally made up for this movie).  The chanting and drums go on and on in the background, especially during the hypnosis scenes and it becomes a bit irritating to the ears after a while.  The zombies, however, are very White Zombie like, with flowing white gowns, pale faces, and blank stares which is very true to the original folklore.   

Back to Banner Productions; they must have been hurting for marketing ideas because it was the weirdest thing that they plugged their name into the movie a good handful of times.  When the mystery is finally solved, Ralph hands his boss, an exec at Banner Productions, a screenplay for a zombie movie starring none other than Bela Lugosi.  wtf?  Hopefully that one would have a lot better music to help convey terror.  I suppose, either way it was worth watching.  Especially for the new ideas that start to play into the zombie story. 

Stats for Voodoo Man...
Style of zombie: Classic
Threat to humans: no
Dead or alive: both
How they become zombies: hypnosis and voodoo of a Mad Doctor
Other: first zombie movie to combine hypnosis and voodoo in the creation of zombies
How to kill them: any way a human can be killed