Pretty Good

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

This is a very scary movie. It is scarier then The Shinning and that is not easy to do. This movie has a great story line. It also has great acting. It also has great special effects. 5.3 is a good ratting. But this is such a great film that 5.3 is underrating. I give it a 9. I is very scary. This is scarier then A Nightmare on elm street and that is not easy to do. This is scarier then Friday the 13th V a new beginning and that is not easy to do. This is scarier then Halloween resurrection ever could be. This is scarier then Hellbound Hellrasier II and that is not easy to do. This about people trapped on an Island with zombies and a zombie cult the raised then. It is one of the scariest movies of all time see it.

I don't want to do it. It's talked about enough, but I feel like I have to address it. That giant elephant in the room of our culture anymore. Of course, I mean racism. It's such a touchy subject, but one that has become so implicit in our culture that it seems like you can't discuss any film anymore without defending or abusing it's portrayal of minority characters. The film should be judged, fairly, on its' comparison to other cheapie horror films of the era and how it stacks up, but there is so much discussion of the stereotyping of black characters in this movie that you almost have to discuss it. By not addressing at all, you run that risk of being labeled a racist yourself because you dared to embrace a film that has obvious stereotypes.I do not champion those stereotypes, nor approve of some of them, but I am also willing to say they are products of their age. That does not excuse them, but also does not mean that an audience looking at it with the benefit of 70 more years of racial understanding should judge it by today's standards. I'm already discussing this far more than I intended, so I will say this. Mantan Moreland is the star of this movie. He is hilarious. He is the entire reason that this movie is so enjoyable. It would be another 20 years before Hollywood really started giving starring roles to black actors, so I would say that Moreland is a pioneer here and should be appreciated for it. So, enough of my rant.The movie has a lot in common with the other Monogram Pictures of its time, cheap throwaway horror films, produced with a small budget, bad writing and bad acting and pushed out. Most of them had ridiculous plots with people acting in ridiculous ways and this movie is no exception. What it doesn't have, that a lot of Monogram's best known pictures have, is Bela Lugosi, but they got Henry Victor to do his best Lugosi impersonation.Two guys are on a mission to find a missing admiral who has crash landed in the Caribbean. Naturally, they bring their servant along because you can't go on a trip without your valet, now can you? They end up crash landing on an island that seems to be mostly jungle except for a creepy European guy who has a big, Gothic mansion in the middle of the jungle. It's filled with his sleepwalking wife, his young niece and a house full of zombie servants. It is, actually, one of the last films that I can think of where Hollywood used the old style zombie, the idea of the Caribbean style mindless minion that became popular horror fodder in movies like WHITE ZOMBIE and I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE. The movie is full of jungle drums, mindless walkers, hidden passageways and a big voodoo ceremony in the finale. On the surface, the Nazi type character is doing research on hypnosis and mind control. Ultimately, he is using it as a plot to help his allies with a nefarious plot against the Americans they are at war with.The two main characters are really just window dressing. We have the secret agent man, young and dashing, out to win the girl and save the day, but he's completely generic and forgettable. His buddy, the pilot, is along for some comic relief and to become the plot device as he is brainwashed by the evil scientist. It is Moreland who is the star. He has a majority of the screen time. He gets all of the best jokes. He is, also, the hero. Moreland is the one who realizes that something is afoot. He uses the other servants of the house to dig up information on what is really going on in this plantation. In the end, it is Moreland that saves the day. His sense of humor is fantastic. Yes, typical of the day there are a lot of one-liners and witty comebacks, but his facial expressions and use of body language is, also, just spot on.The humor makes this movie shine, but there is plenty of Saturday matinée monster goodness to satisfy my cravings. Watch this in a dark room on a Saturday night and it's perfect. The zombies go perfectly with the jungle drums, setting an exotic scene of scariness. The main villain plays his role well. Yes, he's clearly aping Lugosi, but he does it well. The creepy voodoo witch adds a nice touch, leading up to a finale, complete with voodoo masks that reminded me of something straight out of a Scooby Doo cartoon, which is what this whole movie feels like to me.

Bewitching, hypnosis, voodoo, rites of transmigration: a lowbrow comedy made in an epoch when some people, at least, thought these things made a comedy be more intriguing, more quirky, more over the top; like many others, they aren't humorous horrors, or over the top horrors, but comedies taking Gothic pretexts and spoofing them, 'King …' is a pure spoof, and a kind of a B favorite for people who don't really know or enjoy B cinema, and who believe this is what B cinema ought have been. Budget-wise, the show was neat, and its sets and cinematography look good.Joan Woodbury and Moreland are the walking trailers of this comedy, and he has a handful of funny one-liners.She has 2nd billing, and him, 3rd. For some reason, Archer got 5th billing, while Purcell got the … 1st.Tahama, the eerie cook, is also the priestess of the cult, and Sangre's hypnosis works as a complementary method, with the same results. Since war was at hand, the Austrian refugee is shown despising the black people, while the Yankees care for the manservant almost brotherly, when they descend some stairs one of them puts his hand protectively on the black man's shoulder. On their way to smashing the unbelievers, during the transmigration rituals, the zombies are switched to another target. If the recasting of the zombies' urge looks casual, provoked by Archer's shout, some significance is given to the religious nature of the gathering: apart from the ministers (the priestess, Sangre who blends voodoo with Irish bewitching), there is a congregation of black people, for whom the living dead have a religious meaning, legitimacy and value, the storyline reveals this social understructure, the religious side of the slavery (presumably not because of the scriptwriter's awareness, but because the trope was still such); when the Viennese refugee visits the priestess while she bewitches the seaman, he looks convinced by the theoretic efficiency of her ritual, though scoffing at the result.One of the tropes is the colonial _bewitcher and mastermind: a creepy foreigner who establishes a kingdom in a remote land. Both classic zombie tales and colonial manhunts recycle this trope, who must of been as much socio-historical as literary.Two actors aside, the rest of the cast isn't so likable. The cast and the script are the two main drawbacks; suspense isn't as much as attempted, nor any unholy feel, and, for a story supposed to be playful, it's _univentive, uninspired and trite. Archer, Purcell as the _zombified Irishman, Henry Victor as the insipid Sangre (played as a gentleman or a butler), Patricia Stacey as his mindless wife, and Guy Usher as the folksy seaman, weren't really a nice comic team. Given that they wished to have Lugosi or (at least) Lorre for the Sangre role, their other pick seems _unobvious, with a mostly bland and placid replacement.'King …' looks neat, but is bland, not very lively, as atmospheric or scary as any 5th rate sitcom, perhaps unconvinced, as if the crew didn't believe much in it, and it has an also bland, mediocre cast and a very bland script; there are cretins who hail it as a B classic.The line about Sangre's wife having tried to warn the guests alludes to her mysterious visit.

The snickers outnumber the screams in "Devil Bat" director Jean Yarbrough's comic chiller "King of the Zombies." The only reason to watch this lightweight, low-budget, 67-minute, black and white hokum is Mantan Moreland. Mantan delivers the best lines, while our heroes tangle with a well-dressed gentleman from Vienna and zombies on a remote island in the Caribbean. Zombies in this movie are nothing like those in a George Romero flick. They don't munch on people and drink their blood. They merely shuffle about and they don't take salt in their food.James "Mac" McCarthy (Dick Purcell of "Captain America") is flying a propeller-driven plane through a nocturnal storm somewhere between Cuba and Puerto Rico. McCarthy's friend Bill Summers (John Archer of "White Heat") and Summers' African-American butler, Jefferson Jackson (Mantan Moreland of "Gang Smashers"), are on board when McCarthy flies them into an area roughly equivalent to the Bermuda Triangle. McCarthy cannot establish contact with anybody. He catches some gibberish on the radio. Ultimately, McCarthy has to crash their aircraft on the island in--of all places--a graveyard! No sooner have they regained their wits from the disaster than our heroes hear drums throbbing in the distance. Initially, Jeff believes that his heart is being when it is really the drums of jungle tribesmen. They wander through the jungle to an ominous mansion. Bill rings the door bell and they enter of the mansion without awaiting an invitation. Viennese Dr. Miklos Sangre (Henry Victor of "Freaks") descends by the stairs from the second story with a candle and welcomes them to his house. Candles are conspicuous in each room as if electricity doesn't exist. They explain that their aircraft crashed. Sangre already knows. "Very little happens on this island that I do not know about," he assures them and provides them with room and board for the evening. Sangre notices a large cut on Mac's scalp and treats it. "The slightest injury on this island often proves fatal," he observes. Sangre warns McCarthy that the island's climate and "evil spirits" prey on the injured. He ushers his guests upstairs to their rooms. Sangre makes an exception in the case of Jefferson. He sends Jefferson with his hatchet-faced butler Mumbo (Leigh Whipper) down to the kitchen. He informs Mac and Bill that it won't look proper to his servants if he lodged a servant in the same luxury that he installs his guests.In the kitchen, Jefferson meets not only an attractive maid from Alabama, Samantha (Marguerite Whitten), but also a hideous crone, Tahama (Madame Sul-Te-Wan), the Cook and High Priestess, who is stirring a concoction in a huge vat. They tell Jefferson that they are conjuring up a magic potion to scare away evil spirits. Samantha assures Jefferson the estate is crawling with evil spirits as well as zombies. When the ignorant Jefferson asks her what a zombie is, she replies, "Dead people what walks around." She claps her hands, and two zombies appear. Jefferson bugs out and scrambles back upstairs to warn his companions. Sangre assures our heroes than not only is there no radio transmitter on his island, but also he takes them downstairs to show them that zombies do not exist. Later, one evening when they are prowling the Sangre household, Bill meets Barbara Winslow and they agree to collaborate.As it turns out, an important American military official, U.S. General Wainwright (Guy Usher of "The Devil Bat"), has been captured by Sangre--who may be working for the Nazis--and Sangre wants to learn everything from the general about the defenses of the Panama Canal. Wainwright's plane crashed a week before McCarthy had to crash-land his own plane. During the short stay on the island, Jeff is tried into--or at least he imagines that he has been turned into--a zombie. Monogram Pictures released "King of the Zombies" on the eve of World War II. Like most pre-World War II movies, the Production Code Administration prohibited the studios from identifying the nationality of the enemies for fear that it might provoke controversy. Nevertheless, it is fairly obvious that Sangre works for Hitler. Not only is he Austrian, but he also speaks in German over a short-wave radio. Indeed, he has the radio removed from Mac's plane. Henry Victor looks sinister enough to be the villain. Meanwhile, Mantan has a field day, especially when he mistakenly believes that he has been turned into a zombie. Dr. Sangre is prepared to do anything to extract the information from Wainwright. At one point, Sangre calls on a voodoo priestess to try to get the information out of the reluctant Wainwright and into another person. Dick Purcell plays the rugged one of the two who tangles with Dr. Sangre and becomes a quasi-zombie. Expect racial stereotypes.