VENGEANCE OF THE ZOMBIES (La Rebelion de las Muertas, 1973)

Paul Naschy's movies are to be appreciated as spectacle or not at all. Dedicated to making himself a horror man on the Anglo-American model, Naschy wrote and/or directed (under his real name of Jacinto Molina) a spree of films designed to establish him as a master character creator in the classical mode. Rebelion de las Muertas, which Leon Klimovsky directed from Molina's script, is a blatant display of his versatility as Naschy plays three roles -- though one (the Devil) appears only in a dream sequence. The point of the film -- though some may dispute whether it actually has one -- is to show off how different Naschy can look. That extends to the eye-blistering variety of costumes he wears in his principal role as the tragic Hindu mystic Krishna. Never mind that Naschy is about as convincing in this role as El Santo might be; the fashions of Paul Naschy are a spectacle in their own right.

The story is unapologetically preposterous. Someone is killing young English girls and turning them into zombies -- the slow, servile sort, not the brain eaters. One such zombie woman attacks Elvira Irving (the eyebrowless "Rommy") but can't finish her despite getting her hands around Elvira's throat. Elvira seeks refuge at the Welsh retreat of her friend Krishna, who we've already seen putting on a show of his spiritual detachment from the mortification of his flesh. Krishna has retreated to Llangfair to achieve further purity, but the house he's acquired has the reputation among the locals as a "devil house" whose erstwhile occupants, the Whatley family, were massacred by peasants for purported Satanic practices centuries earlier. The vivid tales -- dismissed by the otherwise utterly credulous Krishna -- inspire a nightmare of blood sacrifice to an admittedly impressive demon Naschy in Elvira's sleep. But her waking nightmares will prove much worse.

Elvira's friend Dr. Redgrave (Vic Winner) has been called in by New Scotland Yard to assist in the investigation of the murders of young women. The killer's m.o. is a strange melange of voodoo and thugee motifs, which is meant to remind us that Krishna has a collection of thugee weapons and had spent some time in Africa during his spiritual wanderings. We also eventually learn that the victims' families had all spent time in Benares, India, and were there when "something violent, like a killing," happened there -- around the same time when Krishna says he made a hasty departure from Benares for personal reasons to begin his world travels. But some other details of the killings, like the way a morgue security guard has his throat cut by an open beer can, are still more mysterious. And the fact that the real killer, the mastermind who commands the zombies, dresses sort of like Guy Fawkes (or "V for Vendetta," if you prefer), albeit with a different mask for nearly every outing and a familiar barrel-chested physique, makes you wonder even more.

These zombies may look friendly, but they're out for revenge and can turn anything into a weapon!

It turns out that Krishna isn't such a master as he tells folks. Despite convulsive fits that make you wonder whether he's going to break out in fur and fangs, he eventually explains to Elvira that he's under the voodoo control of his reckless brother Katanka, who raped and killed a British girl in Benares way back when. Even though "the death was made to look accidental," local Britons promptly attempted to lynch Katanka by burning his house down around him. He escaped with severe burns, an itch for revenge, and a scheme to achieve immortality through voodoo. Katanka means to kill the daughters of the British families who lynched him and attain eternal life by consuming Elvira's blood, with the assistance of some chicken-chopping apparent defector from the Mummenschanz troupe. But if Krishna can break his brother's mental control, Scotland Yard can intervene, and a representative of the international voodoo governing body (really!) can crack down on Katanka's "betrayal," the day might yet be saved....

The auteur theory has done much to enhance the bad movie viewing experience. If you accept Vengeance of the Zombies (which finally hit America around 1980 as Walk of the Dead) for what it is, a Paul Naschy star vehicle and an episode in Molina's creative life, it becomes more compelling precisely for (and not in spite of) the creative shortcomings that are practically an authorial stamp. Molina's quest was to recreate the thrill of his youthful viewing of Universal horror films while translating their archetypes into modern exploitation idiom. His writing often went well beyond the scope of Universal, encompassing more ambitious "history of cruelty" stories and sometimes achieving evocative, atmospheric effects that are sometimes timeless, sometimes indelibly of his own time. His challenge was to find out how many variations he could wring out of his essential theme of a charismatically doomed man, and the effort is often as interesting as the outcome. The point of any given Naschy picture isn't the story as much as Paul's performance, but confronting Naschy is kind of like waging war on terror -- you're either with him or against him. There's pretty much no reason to look at Vengeance if you aren't interested in seeing Naschy do his thing. And even if you "get" Naschy, this particular film is far from his finest hour and a half. Nevertheless, there's something compelling about it in all its tackiness and misplaced musical funkiness that I've found in nearly every Naschy film I've seen: that unselfconscious, practically uncritical ambition that drives the writer and actor to make a spectacle of himself. Some people may watch his films to laugh at him, but for many others Molina, through Naschy, was living their own dream, maybe even dying for their sins. That's how movie cults are made. I don't know if I count as a cultist, but no matter how bad a Naschy film may be on some objective level, I'm always ready to watch him try again.

And here's an English language trailer, uploaded to YouTube by freyacatoct.

BLACK MOON (1934)

Roy William Neill's voodoo-rama turned up again this week on TCM, so in the spirit of the month I decided to take a look. I remember reading an article about this movie in Films in Review magazine years ago and had been interested in it ever since. It pretty much lived up to expectations. Neill stages things quite nicely, uses props in the foreground to keep his sets well dressed, and the sets themselves are well designed so he can employ swish pans or move from one level to another. He did equally good work the following year in The Black Room, which boasts Boris Karloff in a dual role, and both these Columbia horrors strike me as better films than his contribution to the Universal mythos, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.

In bare outline, Black Moon anticipates I Walked With A Zombie in making the heroine an aide to a troubled woman under the spell of the Caribbean. But the Columbia film distinguishes itself by making its bewitched female an outright villain. She's Juanita Lane (Dorothy Burgess), who fell under the influence of voodoo when young and has never quite shaken it. The film opens with her playing ominous drums for the supposed entertainment of her young daughter, who'll be set up for her own initiation into voodoo later, or worse. Gail Hamilton (Fay Wray) reluctantly comes along to look after Juanita's daughter and increasingly becomes a surrogate mother figure, especially as she warms to Juanita's estranged husband Stephen (top-billed Jack Holt). The natives of the island of St. Christopher welcome Juanita back, but regard the other whites with suspicion. The only black ally Stephen Lane may have is "Lunch" McClaren (Clarence Muse), a Georgia-born boat captain who feels as superior to the native "monkey chasers" as the whites might. But he ends up stranded on the island with the Lane party as the local voodoo cult re-establishes ties with Juanita, who has an important role to play in an upcoming human sacrifice.

In fact, Juanita's sudden appearance in voodoo garb to perform a dance to the dark gods is a startling moment that drives home how far gone she is. Stephen and Lunch try to abort the sacrifice, the victim being Lunch's native girlfriend, but after Stephen plugs the high priest and both men flee, Juanita herself takes up the sword to finish the bloody work. While the priest is only wounded, it seems like the balance of power is shifting toward Juanita, who leads a siege of the Lane compound with the thought of sacrificing her own husband. But when the good guys manage to escape, the pressure's on Juanita to sacrifice one of her own blood -- her own daughter.

Black Moon is a horror movie that doesn't quite look like a horror film. Unlike The Black Room, this film from Neil does without the usual expressionistic effects or gothic tone we associate with vintage horror. Despite its bigotedly distorted view of voodoo, it aims for a more realistic visual and storytelling style than, say, White Zombie -- the film that most likely inspired Black Moon's production. By Universal standards, Dorothy Burgess probably looks like an underwhelming villain because, apart from the dance, she tends to underplay her part, as if selling that she's in a trancelike state throughout. But she ends up being one of the most troubling characters in pre-Code horror because she gets a moment when motherhood must vie with voodoo for her ultimate loyalty -- and motherhood loses. Skip the next paragraph to avoid a spoiler.

As Black Moon reaches its climax, I was expecting motherhood to win out, which given the situation would mean that the already irredeemable Juanita, having already murdered at least one person, would kill herself rather than sacrifice her daughter. But the spell of voodoo proves too strong, leaving Stephen only one way to save the child -- by killing his own wife. The script could actually have done more to sell how awful a moment this should have been for Stephen, but the writers had little more than an hour to fill, and I don't know if Jack Holt was enough of an actor to sell it. But the thought of how this all plays out is pretty chilling.

Strange to say, but Fay Wray is actually disappointing here; I don't recall whether she screams or not in the picture, but she's never really in individual peril, and that seems like a waste. If you have her in a horror flick it should be her facing sacrifice, but instead she's rather like a spare tire. You know she's going to take Juanita's place in the Lane family, but she has no chemistry with Holt and doesn't have enough conflict with Burgess to earn her second billing. On the other hand, Clarence Muse was a pleasant surprise as Lunch. He had a brief role as a dignified coachman in White Zombie, but here gets one of the more fleshed-out roles for a black actor in this period. Lunch is his own master and as an American is not in thrall to voodoo like the natives, though he rightly fears the pure evil of this film's concept of it. He speaks freely to white folks (though he shuts up when told to) and doesn't chicken out during the siege. Instead, announcing that "The time has come!" he takes a gun and fights alongside Stephen and the local doctor, and his shooting is just as effective as theirs. He's indisputably one of the heroes of the movie.

This isn't the first time I've seen a Columbia programmer on TCM and been impressed by it. It helps a lot that Black Moon looks terrific in a practically pristine print that flatters Joseph August's cinematography. August would go on to great things at RKO, and he really helps this film punch above its weight. Columbia was supposed to be close to Poverty Row in these years, apart from Frank Capra's films, but on the strength of Neill's movies it looks like they treated their experiments in horror as A productions -- or at least they look that way. It deserves a more prominent place in the Thirties horror canon.