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 A disease is causing problems in the English countryside forcing Peter Thompson to contact his "mentor, Sir James Forbes" for help. This one has "walking corpses, voodoo dolls, and empty graves." 1966, 90 minutes, Widescreen DVD
You probably remember the tagline from this movie's poster: When there is no more room in hell, the dead will rise and work in an old abandoned tin mine in Cornwall. You can imagine the terror that strikes in the hearts of out of work miners everywhere. With increased automation, jobs going overseas, and lower wages and benefits, now we have to worry about competition from dead people! They don't even have to worry about black lung disease because they don't even breathe! Clearly, Hammer Films sought to tap into that fear of being elbowed out of an increasingly tight job market in the mid sixties by dramatizing what would happen if the ultimate work force was ever tapped.
At least that's what I'm hoping they were aiming for, because otherwise the movie won't exactly make a dead person sit up and take notice of it since it relies on a couple of ridiculous premises. The first one is that our hero is about a hundred years old! Don't misunderstand me, André Morell is a comforting presence in any movie (he played Dr. Watson in The Hound Of The Baskervilles), but I'm not comforted when it's up to my great grandpa to take on a bunch of zombies, even if they are just British ones. The role requires him to dig up and rebury graves at regular intervals. (One of the off-putting technical aspects of the film was that no matter what time of day this movie is supposedly taking place in, it's always broad daylight. Doesn't do much for atmosphere when it looks like you're grave robbing at high noon.) I kept waiting for the old coot to stroke out or drop over from a heart attack. That isn't the type of concern you're supposed to have for your hero's safety in these sorts of pictures.
Morell, who plays Sir James Forbes, eminent professor of medicine from London, also generates cheap suspense when he has to have a fight scene. Forbes, who's more creaky than the recently reanimated dead, gets attacked by one of the guys in the voodoo cult that's responsible for all these empty graves that Sir James keeps shoveling dirt in and out of. How are we supposed to believe that this geezer is going to be able to control his bladder long enough to move out of the way of a dagger, let alone brawl with this guy, set him on fire, and stab him to death? I guess the filmmakers would have us chalk it up to all the special forces training he received in medical school, but even that seems to be stretching it a bit.
Well, what the devil is a hoity-toity centenarian tough guy like Sir James doing all the way up (or is that down? Does anyone know where this Britain even is?) in Cornwall hanging out in some hick village that's gone and gotten themselves a bad case of the zombies? It all begins with a mysterious letter from one of his former students. Sir James would later claim that the guy was his cleverest student, but I think he was just trying to pump the guy up a little since he let his entire village get taken over by a voodoo cult of all things. Whoever heard of a voodoo cult in Cornwall? The embarrassment alone should have killed Sir James' pupil. Why, you may as well have let in a bunch of jungle cannibals and Godzilla to complete your humiliation.
His star student is Dr. Peter Johnson, a man characterized by his chronic whining and flop sweat reaction to any stressful situation. Sir James may have been classmates with Methuselah, but at least he had the guts to roll up his sleeves and do an autopsy on Dr. Peter's wife right in front of him: "Well, don't just stand there son! Lend me a hand and help me take out your old lady's gizzard, for Pete's sake!" (All quotes are made up for purposes of critical analysis.). Dr. Peter writes complaining that a strange malady has overtaken many members of his village. It's characterized by a loss of appetite, paleness of skin, and sudden death. P.S. Hey, you know that old abandoned tin mine just outside of town? It looks likes they're finally going to reopen it again. Must be a foreign company using their own workers though because they're all grey and lumber around and a bit musty smelling. (Hope that doesn't make me seem too provincial!). Hope to see you soon saving my bacon in all this. Love, Dr. Peter.
Sir James isn't too keen on having anything to do with any business up in Cornwall (he is a gentleman after all) but he has his great granddaughter Sylvia living with him. Dr. Peter is married to Sylvia's friend Alice and Sylvia thinks it would be a good chance to go and visit her. I mean, she hasn't seen since before Alice had that voodoo curse on her, so it would be nice to go see how that was coming along. Sir James agrees that Dr. Peter, though clever, probably doesn't have the manliness this zombie problem is going to take to tackle, so they pack their bags and head off to this village.
At the village, Dr. Peter is facing a crisis of confidence with the villagers since they want to know what is causing all these deaths and why it just seemed to start when he came to town. It actually has nothing to do with Dr. Peter. And I'm sure it has nothing to do with all the strange goings on at the town squire's residence. You know the chap. He traveled extensively abroad to places like Haiti, inherited everything once his dad croaked and came back home with a retinue of natives that pounded their drums in an entrancing rhythm that was loud enough to wake the dead. Even more suspiciously, when we meet Clive Hamilton, his evil theme music plays and most damning of all, he has these odd sideburns that say "if zombies can mine tin, why can't they give you a decent shave?"
Since this is one of those movies where the old guy investigating some supernatural problem is accompanied by his youngish daughter for no good reason (see also The Blood Beast Terror for example) she immediately gets herself mixed up in things, thus providing us with someone in jeopardy that our heroes can rush to save as the film draws to a close. Sylvia sees the sickly Alice out at night, calls after her and gets no response. Sylvia gets caught and terrorized by some of Hamilton's men who take her back to Hamilton's estate. After contriving to have her finger cut so that he can have her blood for his voodoo rites, he lets her go, but warns her to watch out for old abandoned mine shafts that are haunted by zombies and the like. So, near the old abandoned tin mine just outside town she encounters a zombie milling around with Alice's body. Sylvia flees in terror and the next morning Alice's body is recovered.
After checking out Alice's body, doing a bit of attempted body snatching at the local graveyard and consulting the local vicar's vast library on witchcraft, Sir James comes to the only logical conclusion: Clive Hamilton went to Haiti, got mixed up in voodoo, brought his knowledge and even some of the locals back with him, recruited a bunch of friends to be in on it with him, used victims' blood and some sacred voodoo dolls to reanimate them after they've been killed, puts them to work in the tin mine and then make a tidy profit selling his tin without the overhead of paid labor. Good God, man! That's positively stupid! Couldn't they at least have made it all a little more sexy by having it be a gold mine or a diamond mine? The only lamer mine would have been coal.
Sylvia eventually ends up under the spell of Hamilton and is taken to the mine where he is going to sacrifice her. (I'm guessing that's just so he can bring her back as a zombie, but it wasn't really clear.) Sir James is in Hamilton's house and finds the miniature coffins with the little voodoo dolls inside of them. This is when he has a titanic battle with one of Hamilton's henchmen. He survives that only to realize that he's gone and set the whole place on fire, without leaving himself a way out! You should see him as the flames lick at his old craggy face! Now, who's just a scared old man? But you don't get to be that old without a little luck and a servant appears and lets Sir James out and also gives up the information on where everyone is at. "What's that, Lassie? Sylvia is trapped down at the old abandoned tin mine and about to be turned into a zombie by the fiendish Clive Hamilton?"
Just as Sylvia is about to taste the blade, Dr. Peter arrives and saves the day. Though some of you may carp about his ineffectual and half-assed efforts on behalf of his wife, Sylvia was marginally better looking than Alice, but keep in mind both women were British so it's all relative. With the wittle itty-bitty coffins and voodoo dolls being torched back at the house, the zombies themselves begin to feel the effects. It's a bit comical to see them take a break from their mining operation to pat themselves as smoke begins to pour out of their clothes. It isn't long before a raging inferno claims the zombies, the bad guys, and destroys the mine as our three heroes escape in the mine elevator.
If you're looking for zombies, you have definitely come to the wrong place. First of all, these are voodoo zombies, not George Romero zombies. This means that they're easily kept in line by a gang of whip-wielding supervisors and though they can apparently kill you if they are told to, they aren't about to go running amok and taking bites out of your arms or face (or breast if it's an Umberto Lenzi film). The fact of the matter is, they don't do a whole lot, but that's okay, because you don't get to see them a whole lot.
Most of the action is centered around Sir James trying to figure all this business out. He has to do it all himself because the other two main nominal protagonists, Dr. Peter and Sylvia don't do anything but stand around agog at everything transpiring or get themselves into danger. Likewise, the villain, Clive Hamilton is a uninteresting cipher. All we know about him is that he knows how to do voodoo and uses zombies in the mine. Why? What's he going to get by using zombies in the mine? If it was about power and money, couldn't he raise the dead to do something, I don't know, a little more ambitious perhaps? Too much old guy, not enough zombies, and a villainous scheme that no one even considered explaining. Just like Sir James did to Alice when she turned into zombie, this one needs a good whacking across the head with a shovel.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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