FORMAT: DVD (REWATCH)
ORIGINAL REVIEW:
(As posted on November 13th, 2007)
Some thoroughly bland white dude (John Archer), his pilot (Dick Purcell), and his manservant (the hilarious Mantan Moreland) crash land on a jungle island where the evil Dr. Sangre (Henry Victor) dwells. He welcomes the trio into his home where unbeknownst to them; he keeps a cadre of zombies. Sangre also tries to turn a military VIP into a zombie so he can steal vital information for his vaguely Nazi government but is foiled at the last minute by the now zombified Purcell.
King of the Zombies offers no surprises whatsoever, but it also gives you exactly what you’re expecting, so you can’t say that you’re disappointed by it. Nobody will ever mistake this flick as the definitive zombie picture, but it’s a lot of fun and it moves pretty briskly.
Mantan Moreland’s performance is far and away the best thing about the movie. Some people frown upon his performances and say they are “politically incorrect”, “stereotypical”, and worst of all “racist”, but I say that the man is one of the most overlooked comedians of all time. Today, some snobs may look back at his work and say it was borderline offensive, but Moreland really had no choice in the matter. Hollywood only offered him the roles of stereotypical black porters, chauffeurs and servants, so what was the guy to do? He played what could have been insignificant, underwritten and one-note roles and made them his own, infusing them with a lot of warmth and humor. In King of the Zombies, he gives one of his best performances. You can say that his role in it is stereotypical if you will, but he’s actually the one who discovers the zombies; it’s just the stupid white people who don’t believe him.
Mantan gets all the best lines in the movie and easily steals the film from his boring (white) co-stars. When they first arrive on the island, he muses, “Harlem was never like this!” When he wakes up in a graveyard he hollers “We in someone’s marble orchard!” When he first encounters the zombies he yells, “They’s fugitives from the undertaker!” In short, Mantan is one funny son-of-a-gun and has a lot more chemistry than anyone else in the flick.
The only other person who comes close to matching Moreland’s performance is Henry Victor. A lot of you may recognize him as the strongman from Freaks. He gives a decent performance as the voodoo doctor obsessed with hypnotism. If he seems to be channeling Bela Lugosi in some scenes, it’s probably because the role was originally intended for Lugosi, but Victor was cast at the last minute when Bela proved to be unavailable.
The movie maybe kind of light when it comes to zombies (there’s only about four or five), but the climatic voodoo ceremony is pretty memorable and features a lot of extras screaming something that sounds approximately like, “Cocoa bean, cocoa bean! We love cocoa beans! Cocoa bean, cocoa bean! Zombie! I need cocoa, I need cocoa!”
If you happen to catch King of the Zombies on television (or in a bargain DVD bin) you’ll probably enjoy it. You’d probably think that it’s hardly Academy Award material, but you’d be WRONG! The musical score was actually nominated for an OSCAR, but it lost. (I’m not quite sure HOW it got nominated as the music is mostly jungle drums and comical suspense build-ups like “Doo-doo-doo-doo-DOOOOO!”)
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