“The plague of the zombies” – (1966, UK, 91 minutes – NR)
How about some cartoons before the main attraction? You can either rent or stream “Happy Tree Friends” cartoons before watching “the plague of the zombies”: short and oh-so-very-cute animations with cartoonish beavers, elks, hedgehogs, anteaters, bears and squirrels getting ‘dispatched’ in extremely gruesome ways…
In Jesse Jackson’s tone: enucleation, decapitation, immolation, evisceration, amputation, the list goes on.
So good it even makes me wince at times, and you have to love the little public service tips at the end of each short: “don’t forget to floss”, “a smile doesn’t cost anything”, etc.
And if you are familiar with the series, you ought to revisit it every so often. It will keep you sane in a mad world. Yes, really.
Now, onto our feature, “the plague of the zombies”: in late 19th century England, Sir James Forbes (Andre Morell) receives word from a former student practicing in a small village in Cornwall that strange deaths are occurring amongst the local population.
Watch the trailer here:
The former student, now Doctor Peter Tompson (Brook Williams), is relieved to see Sir James turn up to assist, but his wife Alice (Jacqueline Pearce), well not so much.
Alice is not sleeping well, repeating incantations recited by a mysterious voodoo priest in some subterranean cave at night. A bandage around her wrist covers a seeping wound and she appears to recoil from the outside world, as Sir James and his daughter Sylvia (Diane Clare) visit unexpectedly. Although Alice is clearly on her way out, her husband’s growing troubles with a superstitious population blind him to her condition.
The villagers refuse to let Peter perform autopsies and blame him for the macabre happenings.
One night, Sylvia follows Alice through the woods, to an abandoned mine owned by the County Squire’s family. Meanwhile at the cemetery, Sir James and Peter do a Burke and Hare routine, digging up a coffin to perform a post mortem only to find the box empty and get themselves busted by the local fuzz, Sergeant Swift (Michael Ripper).
However, since the coffin is inexplicably empty, the grave robbing charge wouldn’t stick and though Sergeant Jack Swift looks as though he has a popsicle up his arse, he’s a good egg after all and chooses to work with the two doctors, especially since one of them has a title in front of his name.
Back in the woods, Sylvia doesn’t fare as well, although Alice does worse: a zombie drops her bloodied corpse on the grounds of the abandoned mine. As Alice runs away, she is cornered by a bunch of Hell’s Angels (well okay: horse mounted ruffians, but they’re wearing red and white, so there) who rough her up a bit and take her to the Squire’s mansion.
Seemingly outraged, the Squire, Clive Hamilton (John Carson), bitchslaps the leader of the red & whites for this affront to the young lady and tries to smooth things out. Sylvia’s having none of it and hoofs it back to Peter’s house, which by the way is conveniently located 20 feet from the local pub.
After Alice comes back to a modicum of life as an undead, Sir James deftly takes her head off with a shovel with Peter in attendance, and borrows books about the dark arts from the otherwise useless priest about whom villagers mutter “tits on a bull”, sotto voce and all. In these books, Sir James finds a direct relation between the happenings in the village and voodoo practices pertaining to zombification of unwitting populations, practices performed today by Rupert Murdoch and Fox.
Are the mysterious Squire Hamilton and his (seemingly) abandoned mine at the center of it all..?
“The plague of the zombies” is probably one of the very best offerings from Hammer studios, with crisp cinematography, good acting and writing. The banter between Sir James and his daughter Sylvia is especially fun and does not come across as dated, we have a female character (Alice) getting her head chopped off with a shovel, and some villainous exploitation of the population by a Squire, a tyrant really, echoing to this day in several zombie flicks. With its ambling, gray skinned zombies with pinpricks for eyes, “the plague of the zombies” set the tone for “night of the living dead” which basically added only cannibalism to the mix.
As a fun and very well made seminal zombie flick, “the plague of the zombies” gets 5 jellybeans.
