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nTitle: King of the Zombies (1941)
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nDirector: Jean Yarbrough
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nCast: Henry Victor, Mantan Morland, Dick Purcell,nJoan Woddbury
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nReview:
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nIt’s interesting to see how the concept of a zombie hasnevolved through time. I mean, right now, you ask anybody what a zombie is andnthey’ll describe a walking corpse who feeds on human flesh or brains. They’llnsay “braaaains” and do their best imitation of a walking bag of pus. Butnzombies weren’t always this way and we have directors George Romero and Dan O’Bannonnto thank for re-defining what a zombie is. It’s thanks to their films that today’snidea of a zombie is the way it is. From Night of the Living Dead (1968) onward,nzombies were seen as flesh eaters. From Return of the Living Dead (1985)nonward, zombies cried out for brains and ran! These two films redefined thenconcept of what a zombie is and that vision has stuck in popular culture tonthis very day. But once upon a time, zombies were seen as something vastlyndifferent.
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nIn King of the Zombies we meet this trio of friendsnwho are on a plane on their way to the Bahamas when a storm knocks them offncourse and sends them to a mysterious island somewhere between “Puerto Rico andnCuba”, they never mention it, but I’m guessing they are talking about Haiti,ncause you know, that’s where voodoo and zombies were always from in these oldnmovies. Once down on the island, they meet a man by the name of Dr. MiklosnSangre, a rich landowner who welcomes the three men into his home. Like CountnDracula, Dr. Miklos seems like a friendly host, offering the three men refuge fornthe next two weeks, while the next boat that can take them off the islandnarrives, but there’s something slightly off about the mysterious host. There’sntalk of evil spirits and zombies roaming the island amongst the slavenpopulation and how is Dr. Miklos related to the undead?
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nKing of the Zombies is a film that plays out a lotnlike a remake of White Zombie (1931), the first true zombie movie ever made. Anlot of the situations are similar, we get strangers stranded on a zombie fillednisland, an apparently friendly host with an ulterior motive, and we get anzombie master controlling the zombies for his own purposes, using them asnslaves. The zombie master or ‘King of the Zombies’ as the title implies uses voodoonto control the undead. We get a woman, dressed in white walking aroundnzombified. Hell, even the actor playing Dr. Miklos Sangre (Henry Victor) was channelingnBela Lugosi’s Hungarian accent. That probably has a lot to do with the factnthat the producers of this film wanted Lugosi for the role but were unable tonget him. They even wanted Peter Lorre at one point; the role ultimately went to actor Henry Victor,nwho by the way has an imposing figure, he was a good choice to replace Lugosi,nthough of course, Lugosi would have been better. So what we got here my friendsnis a film extremely influenced by White Zombie, but with a completely differentntone. While White Zombie was a straight forward horror film, King of thenZombies is a horror-comedy; some consider it one of the best. By today’snstandards it isn’t har-har slap on the knee funny, but it does have that innocentnkind of comedy found in films of this time; I’d say something a kin to Abbottnand Costello meet Frankenstein (1948).
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nThe comedy of the film comes in the form of ancharacter called Jefferson ‘Jeff’ Jackson, a black comedian of his time. I havento admit, he does offer up some of the funniest lines in the film. He plays anman servant, a popular idea at the time. This film was made during those daysnwhen black people were seen as servants to the white; by the way this is annidea that if you ask me, hasn’t completely disappeared from the face of thenearth, even in this modern day and age. This is what I found most interestingnabout this movie, same as Night of the Living Dead, King of the Zombies (a film that appears to be a silly horror comedy)nhas a lot to say about the issue of racism. The King of the Zombies is a whitenman who controls black people to do his bidding, once under his hypnotic control;nthey become brainless zombies who don’t think for themselves, they insteadnfollow orders blindly. I just thought it was a bold statement that all thenzombies in this film are black people! And he who leads them is not only annevil white man who sees the blacks as inferior to him, but he is also a Nazi,ntrying to acquire military secrets from the Americans! So yeah, this film doesnhave some meat to it, I liked that about it. On the surface it might seem like annultra silly film, but deep inside, it has some ‘cojones’. Some see King of the Zombies as anracist film and while I wont deny that the film does display some terribly cliched stereotypes of blacks; I saw the film as a comment on racism; in the end it criticizes racism, it doesnt condone it.
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nI’ve been enjoying watching zombie films from allncountries and eras, with King of the Zombies I wanted to take a dip into thatnzombie era where zombies where something entirely different. It is interestingnto hear characters in this film defining what a zombie is. For example, at one momentnin the film we see how alien the idea of zombies was when a character asks whatna zombie is and they go into how zombies are the undead, yet they walk. At onenpoint someone complains that a zombie was trying to eat him and someone repliesn“zombies don’t eat human flesh!” And there my friends is where I noticed justnhow much the concept of a zombie has changed with time. The film also goes onnat one point about zombies not being able to talk and zombies not standingnsalt. They actually go on about how if zombies eat salt they shrivel up and dienall over again, which got to thinking of why they didn’t just use salt to killnall the zombies in the film, but whatever. That’s just me saying. Bottom linenwith this movie is, if you want to see a film that’s lighthearted yet oldnschool spooky, and to be honest a bit on the monotonous side, King of the Zombies is the way to go. Just don’t expect to seenwalking corpses or flesh eating, cause this are zombies from an entirelyndifferent era, a time when zombies did nothing but walk around mindlesslynwaiting to do as they are told.
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nRating 2 out of 5
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