The Plague of the Zombies (1966)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Plague of the Zombies (1966) – J. Gilling

By 1966, England’s Hammer Film Productions was already churning out Dracula, Frankenstein, and Mummy sequels but also producing other strange tales that echoed Universal’s glory days of the 1930s and ‘40s. The Plague of the Zombies shares a family resemblance to Bela Lugosi's White Zombie (1932) in that these zombies are virtual slaves working in a mine for the Squire/Master. And like that film, this feels much more like a voodoo movie (though not as pure as the Lewton-Tourneur I Walked with a Zombie, 1943) than what we have come to know as the zombie film. What differs here is that the zombies are reanimated corpses, reanimated by voodoo, rather than humans who have been zombified by magic but who might later return to human. As such, the film looks forward to George Romero’s classic series (beginning with Night of the Living Dead, 1968) where the dead rise and shuffle about, much as they do in this film (but with less explicit mayhem here). Andre Morrell stars as Sir James Forbes, a professor of medicine, called to Cornwall to assist his former star pupil who is now struggling in the remote town plagued with mysterious deaths. As always, Hammer’s film sports production values par excellence, with a perfectly realised Cornish village decked out in 1860s period fashion.  Beyond Morrell perhaps there is no actor as charismatic as a Lee or Cushing here (the Squire calls for one of them) to elevate the proceedings yet further but this is still a solid outing for the fabled studio.