Welcome to Zombie Strains, the podcast, where we watch every zombie movie ever produced. Yes, all of them. How many is that? The current total is more than 600, and we will try to watch them in order of release date, with a few flash forwards for fun. We look forward to watching zombie cinema evolve and become what it is today. I'm John, and I'm joined by my co-host Andy and our producer Brad. Join us for this journey to see which of us makes it to the end alive. Andy, Brad, hello. How are you guys doing today?

Hey, John.

Good morning. Hey, are you so glad to be back from the early 2000s and the glory of Shaun of the Dead back to the 1940s with King of the Zombies and Tubi?

You know, this is where my heart is, John.

I may have said this 10 times already. That's how my brain works. But watching Tubi, you know what it felt like? It felt like watching UAF stations in the 70s. Like, our local one, Channel 50, it didn't have like a Sir Graves Gassley or anything, but I had this guy who was like tangentially related to Hollywood. His name was Bill Kennedy, and he used to introduce movies. And one of the features on Saturday was the creature feature. They're all Godzilla movies on there. Anyway, watching a movie on Tubi feels very much like that to me.

I was distracted because the subtitles were often wrong. And even though in small ways, it would take me out of the engrossing masterpiece that is this film.

Yeah. I wonder if the... So this film, by the way, everybody, that we're already harshing on, is called King of the Zombies from 1941. And we'll get into all the details real quick. But yeah, I have a question about subtitles now. I still don't use them. But I wonder, A, if they're terrible because they're AI, or if they're terrible because some dreamer was like, I'll work in Hollywood, and their job ended up being subtitles for King of the Zombies. And so they're like, I hate this. And they just drop in horrible subtitles.

Well, if it's a poor intern somewhere cranking out these subtitles, all is forgiven. If it's just an AI slapdash job, then nothing is forgiven.

Exactly. Let's get to our actual movie, though. The movie is King of the Zombies. As I just said, it's from 1941. It's fairly short. So why don't I toss it to you, Andy, for any trigger warnings, and then we'll hear more about the details from Brad.

John, this movie, the main thing I think to be aware of when we are watching and discussing this movie is that it very much heavily features a racist trope common to movies like this. I suspect we have not seen the last of it, and we've certainly seen this in some of our previous films in this podcast. This is the trope where there is a black character, usually male, who is treated as a superstitious chatterbox, comic relief side character throughout the film.

Yeah. He provides a lot of humor by being really scared and then running away. It's a very negative portrayal stereotype, like all of these stereotypes, but this one in particular, it's just so hard on the modern brain.

It is. Yeah. It feels very cringey to watch today. Some of the humor is legitimately funny because these are, I think, he's a talented actor here. But this trope is a big deal in this movie because really, it's the central performance, in my opinion, of this movie is of this character. And so it's impossible to avoid. So apart from that, though, not a lot. Here I am giving a little preview of my opinion of this film, but not a lot of substance really happens in this film to be upset about beyond that.

So Brad, do you want to take us through the release notes, box office, actors, all that good stuff?

King of the Zombies was released on May 14th, 1941. The year had few horror movies and most were the mad scientist genre. Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff each had movies this year. The best remembered horror film was Universal's The Wolf Man, starring Lon Chaney. There were many great classic movies this year, including How Green Was My Valley, Sergeant York, Gone with the Wind was still in the theaters playing over a year after its release, Alfred Hitchcock's Suspicion, The Yank and the RAF, Abbot and Costello and Buck Private, and Walt Disney's Dumbo. Citizen Kane was also released this year, though it wasn't a financial success.

Well, looking at this list, I don't have the film background that you guys have, but it's interesting to me you have Gone with the Wind, Citizen Kane, Dumbo, kind of timeless classics, and then everything else on this list is something I've basically never heard of, although that might be me.

Yeah. I actually had never heard of Suspicion either. I think that's an early Hitchcock I've missed, so I might need to check that one out.

Well, and Buck Private is an Abbot and Costello film, so I know it very well. It's actually a war film where they enlist to avoid the police, so you can sense the country knows war is coming as this film is coming out.

Yeah, I want to talk about that. Three of the movies here, Sergeant York, a Yank in the RAF, and Buck Privates. This is before we're fighting Germany, just to be clear, or Japan. So, but anyway, that leads us, unless you have more bread.

Gene Yarbrough directed the film. He directed five Edmund Costello films, all 52 episodes of the Edmund Costello show. And then he ended up directing sitcoms in the 60s. Petticoat Junction, My Favorite Martian, Mikhail's Navy, and The Addams Family. So you can see that he has some comedic chops.

Yes.

The movie was written by Edmund Kelso. He also wrote Revenge of the Zombies, which we're going to watch in a few episodes. The cast isn't as stacked as the last few films we've seen. The Hollywood Reporter reported that both Bela Lugosi and Peter Lorry were considered for the cast, but neither made the film. Dick Purcell, who plays McCarthy, who I view sort of as the number two or three character in the film, is the lead on the credits. His other big role, he played Captain America at a 1944 film.

Oh, wow. He looks like Captain America. He's blonde and, yeah.

He's got that doughy huskiness that they liked in the 40s.

Yes.

Montan Morelin plays Jeff, the character Andy mentioned earlier. He's also known for playing Birmingham Brown, Charlie Chan, Chauffeur in 14 movies. Not having seen those films, I'm going to guess it's similar to this, where he's sort of a sidekick. Now, his career lasted into the 70s, and one of his last films was Watermelon Man by Melvin van Peebles.

Oh, wow.

And he plays the same type of role that he does here, but he's more satirizing this role. So it's really interesting to see 40 years later what happens.

That is interesting.

Henry Victor, who plays Sangre, played Hercules in the 1932 film Freaks.

He is a big fella. Like when you say Hercules, I initially was like, well, he's playing sort of a FAP, a charistocrat here. But then when I think about the movie, he's six inches taller than everybody else in this movie.

Now, this film reaches a milestone for us. It's the first film we've seen that had an Academy Award nomination.

Really?

The composer Edward Kay was nominated for Best Score of a Dramatic Picture. He lost to Bernard Herman, who won for All That Money Combined. Bernard Herman did Psycho and many other big films.

Interesting.

Kay actually had five Academy Award nominations in his career.

Oh, wow. One thing I wanted to comment on is, as we've been going along here from the 30s, we've been seeing Hollywood grow up really quick. The first couple of movies we watched, didn't they actually have people, there wasn't actually a named director or a named screenwriter. They all use stock movies. But these feel like more of the roles of making a film that we're used to, like a director, a producer, a screenwriter, a music composer. And that almost sounds silly in this day and age, but I think Hollywood is just figuring out how to assign these jobs.

Yeah. My first note on this film, not to get out of ourselves, is that this is the first film we've watched from this era where the film's score feels like it is like unique and memorable.

Yeah. I would say that the earlier films did have credited directors and writers, so it was often actors and the composer who wasn't listed.

Yeah.

I remember one of them. It might have just been Maniac, but it didn't even say screenplay by, it just said like story and dialogue by or something. It was, yeah.

If you told me Maniac did not have a screenplay or a script, I would leave you without hesitation.

I think, yeah, we don't need to go back to Maniac today, but you're probably right.

So hey, I think we've touched on this already, but let me give a little bit of the historical context that's going on in 1941 when this comes out. As we have discussed, war is probably the main thing everyone is talking about. The US is about six months away from Pearl Harbor, but a look at that list of other films that came out this year suggests that people are already the conversation about if and when the US should enter into World War II is clearly already taking place in American popular culture. That sort of dwarfs everything else from our perspective. But Joe DiMaggio is setting a hitting streak record. NBC Television starts up this year. And that's all I've got noted down here. Anything else, John, that you wanted to mention that's going on or that would have been in the Zeitgeist in 1941?

Well, I think this is going to be relevant to the film, and we can talk about it more as we get there. But I think the American story is that we're the heroes of World War II, which I think several other countries, I don't know, maybe the Soviet Union would disagree with. But the point is that Americans still at this point were still hesitant to enter. Because at this point, Czechoslovakia is gone, Austria is gone. It depends on when they shot the movie, but France may have been overrun. You know what I mean? So the war is on in a big way, and there's still people who were hesitant. I think Charles Lindbergh famously wanted us to be neutral at this time. This is 1941 just before the war starts. So the commitment to the war from a US perspective is not solid yet.

So do we want to turn to the movie and take a look at the poster?

Let's do it.

All right. We discussed the poster briefly.

It feels like a competent version of the white zombie poster. Or another version of the... I've been blanking on the Bob Hope zombie movie we watched. Ghostbreakers. It feels like that same poster is slightly different, with the things arranged differently.

I am looking forward to whenever we stop just showing a picture of a creepy guy staring at you. Is that scary at this point? I mean, so just to recap, the poster's got a picture of, I guess you would say, the two romantic leads, although we'll talk about in the movie how slight that element of the story actually is. And they are holding a camera and sort of looking terrified or in suspense of something. And then up in the corner, it's got this creepy looking, wizard looking, Bela Lugosi lookalike guy staring at you really intently with a sort of hypnotic stare. And I don't feel like this evokes with much specificity what this movie is going to be about. There's no zombies on this poster, despite the title of the film. And we can get into this when we start, but I mean, I would brand this as like a horror comedy based on the amount of screen time that the comic relief gets. And maybe you'll disagree, and I look forward to discussing this.

Yeah.

But it made me wonder, like, you know, would I have felt fooled by this movie going in expecting a horror film and getting kind of more of a Scooby-Doo type comic horror?

Right.

Or is the film genre of horror big enough at this time in the early 40s that going to one and finding that it has a lot of humor would have felt totally normal in what you expected? Do you have any thoughts on that?

I don't. I'm curious because again, this is the heyday of Bob Hope, also the Abbott and Costello horror comedies. I wonder if the grim horror movie is not, I mean, I think The Wolf Man, to my recollection, has been a long time since I saw it, but it doesn't feel like it has the same comic elements that this movie does. That seems a little scarier to me, and this one seems a little more leaning on the comic stereotypes.

Well, John, do you want to jump right into it?

Yeah, let's do it. I want to make one more comment about the poster because I am curious about people who reacted to it, because I have a distinct memory. When Dawn of the Dead came out in 1978, I remember going to the movie theater and seeing that poster, which is a very flat 2D poster. I won't describe it now because it'll distract us, but as a kid, finding that poster absolutely terrifying, even though it does not have any gore or blood or anything on the cover, if that makes any sense. I wonder, is this actually scarier to young people? Maybe they are the target audience. I'm not sure.

Yeah, I should also note this poster, I think, like Ghostbusters, does not have subtitles or text all over the place. Like some of the early ones were very verbose as to what you could expect. But this movie, just the title.

Yeah, I kind of miss it.

Yeah, me too. There's a certain charm to it.

Anyway, but no, let's jump into it. So we open in media res, actually. We're in the middle of the action. There's a plane, kind of. We're in the middle of an exposition. How about that? There's a plane flying in the Caribbean, and we're introduced to the main characters, which are James McCarthy. Mack. But he's not really the boss. The boss is Bill Summers, who is played by John Archer. And then we get Matan Moreland as Jeff, who later in the film, Bill describes as his valet, very explicitly. But when we talk about that stereotype at the beginning, we're talking about the character of Jeff.

So is it valet? This movie says valet and valet. Is that a British American thing? Is this like robot, robot?

So in French, it would be valet, right? The English are very proper about not saying it the French way. I guess is the point that I'm making, and we can't seem to decide what we want to do. So they do say both. I say valet.

John, can we back up? Because before even our characters show up on the screen, there is one thing I took note of. Two things, actually. First is this movie actually opens up with the sound of drums, which after a couple of these movies, that's like shorthand for watch out, there's creepy voodoo stuff going on. And then secondly, we already mentioned, but the score, it feels like it has an identity. It's not just filler. So I noted that immediately. I mean, I'm not adding it to my Spotify playlist to listen to every day, but it has a catchy score.

Yeah, it's not bad. So again, I think we're getting slightly more professional movies for zombie movies. So there's a lot of exposition on this plane. We're not going to go into super detail again, just like the Bob Hope movie. There's a lot of exposition, and I will tell it to you. But if you can't follow it, it's really okay. We're here to talk about the zombie parts of this movie. But they're in a plane. It's a small two-engine plane. It's just the three of them, Mac, Bill and Jeff. Jeff is scared, of course, because that's Jeff's job. They are running out of gas. They got lost somewhere around Puerto Rico. And on the radio, they hear a voice, a language that is unintelligible, but I immediately recognize it is German.

I did too. Someone even says, like, I've never heard this before.

What is this?

That's German, one of the top four languages. But, you know.

Exactly. They're running out of gas. So they pick this up on the radio. The plane special effect is really bad, but I appreciate the effort of the model making. And ultimately, their plane crashes in the jungle on this island. They find this uncharted island. The other piece of information they give us, which is plot information you don't need to remember, is another plane disappeared near here, and that is Admiral Wainwright, who is apparently some sort of big deal in the Navy. And then our plane crashes in the jungle. Kaboom.

I wondered if this was playing into the Bermuda Triangle mythology.

I was curious about that, too.

Yeah. When I read up, according to Wikipedia, the kind of mythology around the Bermuda Triangle didn't really start until the mid late 40s.

Okay.

Which makes sense because you would have had a lot more military aircraft around. But it does have that Bermuda Triangle vibe to it.

Yes. And so they find a place to crash. And I think it's Jeff that wakes up first and wondering if he's dead. And then he runs into Bill and Mac. And Mac has been injured on the head. He's got a small injury which will become important later. My favorite line in this whole sequence is Mac refers to the place where they've crashed as the Marble Orchard. Which is an expression I never heard before. But it's a euphemism very clearly for a graveyard because there's all these gravestones lying around. That's not weird at all.

I'm not going to harp on the special effects here, but I defy you to explain how all of them got out of the plane. They appeared to have been thrown out of the plane.

Yes.

But it's clearly not possible for this to happen if you look at the plane. And they're all just lying as if they're asleep, like out in the jungle, like 15 feet away from the plane.

As if they were tossed from a car that was slowing down from five miles an hour to zero miles an hour. Yeah.

Exactly. But whatever. It's okay. We're dealing, I get it.

Yeah. They're a little spooked. Now, the character of Bill is never spooked. That's his role, right? As he's to be the level-headed American tough guy. He's not even a tough guy. He just does, he's unflappable. Whereas, you know, Mac is a hothead and Jeff is always scared. Bill's role is to be that stereotypical, nothing ever unnerves him guy. They wander around for a little bit and then they find a house and they ring the doorbell like you would. And in the house, before they go in, a figure appears on the balcony with a candle. We don't know anything about this mysterious figure. But when the door opens, there is a servant there, I believe, and they are greeted by the, as yet unknown, but fairly obviously villain of the piece, Dr. Sangre, who's our friend here. And immediately, Jeff is suspicious. He's like, I don't like this, you know, but I think he's right. And I think we all know that. In some sense, he's like the voice of the audience saying, well, this is scary. I don't want to go here. So what do you think of this intro?

I really liked Jeff, the character. Although at the same time, at the same time you're cringing at the kind of demeaning role he has to play in this movie. He does a good job with the cards he's dealt, I would say.

He's the only one who has any energy. Even Mac, who's supposed to be the fiery hothead. Like he has some energy sometimes, but Bill is like, I think it's the way his character is supposed to be, but he's just like boring. He never raises his voice in the entire movie.

Yeah, when I said earlier that the Jefferson character is central, I really feel like he's the load-bearing role of this film.

Yeah, it's weird.

I think how powerfully dull this movie would be if he weren't in it.

I know, yeah.

Because you have this stoic white guy and slightly less stoic white guy leads. They're just oblivious and in denial throughout the film of everything supernatural that's happening. And Jefferson, well, he's overreacting in that stereotype way. He picks up immediately that something is off, and throughout the film, he's the one that keeps going to the main character saying, something's off, this is bad, get out of here.

Yeah. What I like about this is it has the feel, and I don't think they've quite figured out of yet, but of those Abbott and Costello horror comedies, whereas Jeff sees something and the second anybody else turns around to look at it, it's gone. And he's like, but the zombies were right here. Like nobody saw them. And that happens throughout the film. I think it's a humor tool from the 1940s that they lean on pretty heavily here. I mean, most of the humor in this film consists of something scary being there, Jeff reacting in a comical way because it's scary. And then when he goes to tell other people about it, it's gone. And they're like, Jeff, would you settle down, please? Like that's essentially the comic storyline of this movie.

Yes. I don't want to jump ahead of you, John, but there is a line in this scene that Jefferson says, and it gets repeated later, that I was wondering if it's a joke that went over my head. He is introducing himself. And the gag is that everybody else just says hi, but Jefferson goes to introduce himself, goes into this spiel about his father and grandfather.

Yes.

And he mentions that his grandfather was a member of the Knights of the Pink Goddess.

I have no idea what that is.

This is later mentioned. I googled this. I got no results. Is this like a... Is this a joke? Is this racist somehow? I don't realize it.

It could be. I don't know.

Okay. Well, fair enough.

Well, the other thing, in addition to my second favorite stupid saying in this movie after Marble Orchard is, Bahamas.

Yes.

Bill refers to this island chain as the Bahamas. And that's more like the robot robot thing. We haven't learned how to say Bahamas yet either.

Later in the movie, Jeff pronounces Bahamas correctly. And it made me wonder if he was doing that despite the Bill being a doctor or something.

But we do actually have some information here about the whore infesting the island. Clearly, we're creeped out. Mack has that bump on the noggin, as he says. And Dr. Sengar looks at it, and he says, oh, that may look like a minor injury, but any minor injury can be fatal here. And here's what that sounds like.

Ah, you have been hurt. Ah, it's nothing.

It's just a crack on my head.

Nothing, you say? The slightest injury on this island often proves fatal. What do you mean? The climate, and yet...

Yet what?

They say that evil spirits lurk here, waiting to prey on the injured.

Ha! That's a lot of bonk.

Maybe.

So, yeah, so that sort of sets up that there are evil spirits, that this place is in fact spooky. We get a couple other pieces of sort of information here that sort of drive the movie forward. There's a boat coming in two weeks, so just from a plot standpoint, they think they're going to be there for two weeks. They ask the doctor about the radio broadcast which brought them to the island, and he denies its existence. He just says, I don't know what you're talking about. And finally, they tell Jefferson he has to stay in the servants' quarters. He can't stay with Bill and Mac, which in addition to being horrible, is also a plot driver, because when he's down in the servants' quarters, he runs into all the spooky stuff, and that's why Mac and Bill don't see it.

Is this where we learn that Sangre is a refugee from Austria?

I believe so. He does give this spiel about how he's a refugee from Austria, and has moved here, but I don't think we move, we meet his wife at this point.

That's coming up.

Yeah. And then everybody goes to their rooms. So we get Bill and Mac have a scene, and Mac is like, I know where there was a radio broadcast. So immediately they're suspicious of Dr. Sangre, and then Jefferson goes to the kitchen and meets-

But before he does that, we've seen someone who I initially thought might be our first zombie of the film, but I think not. Maybe you can correct me.

He's just creepy.

There's a very taciturn servant named Mamba, who is milling about, and he's clearly played up to be creepy. There's a little thing where he seems to be able to get from one place in the house to the other with startling speed. And there's a funny line. So Mamba is going to take Jefferson down to the kitchen, like you said, and Jefferson is objecting. And Sangre says, Oh, don't worry, he, Mamba, he won't hurt you if he likes you. That kind of made me laugh.

Yes. So Jefferson goes down to the kitchen to meet the other servants. And the first two he meets, he meets the maid Samantha, who they have a very funny sort of rapport, and they tease each other a lot. That's probably, again, the most energetic relationship in the movie. And then there's also elderly cook there named Tahana. And at this point, Samantha says, oh, there's zombies everywhere on this island. If you clap your hands, they will show up and she claps her hands, and two zombies show up. Describe these zombies for me, Andy.

Well, they look a lot like the other zombies from this era we've seen. They're big, silent, hypnotized-looking men. They don't look... I think they've got some makeup on them to give them a slightly cadaverous look, but it's not egregious. It's not like a walking dead type of gory zombie. So, yeah, I mean, they're creepy. It is unclear to me if they are supposed to be alive, and we can talk about it as we learn more about them as the movie goes on. If these are corpses, you know, hauled out of the grave, or if they are living people reduced to that sort of zombie state, as we've seen in some of these other films.

Yeah, and it is interesting because I think we're still vacillating from the zombie standpoint, whether zombie is a form of mesmerism or hypnotism that is curable, or if it happens after death. And I think this movie kind of wants it both ways, but we can keep going on.

Yeah, I will say, John, my favorite bit from this is we learn a new term for zombies. So yeah, obviously movies throughout the decades have used all kinds of words to not say zombie. So we've got, you know, whatever Zed or Walkers or Shambler, you know, fill in the blank. I have never heard another film piece of media call them perishables.

Oh, I missed that. Oh, interesting. Wow.

I mean, it's just a one off comment, but it made me laugh. And I would love to see that. Hey, Walking Dead producers, you know, I think that term is due for a revival.

There you go. So anyway, Jefferson is scared, runs back up to the room where Bill and Mack are staying, starts to tell them about...

You know, we should say, you mentioned it, but, you know, Samantha down there is very open about the fact that song gray is creating zombies.

Yeah, she just sort of lays it out. And then later when she's asked about it by Bill and Mack, she'll deny it when song gray is present. So yeah, so Jackson, or excuse me, Jefferson comes running back, tells Bill and Mack about the zombies, the doctor, Dr. Song Gray comes in, and then they get into a conversation about what is a zombie. Bill, until the end of the movie, is skeptical that anything is going on. I think it's supposed to make him seem cool headed. From my perspective, it just makes him seem like an idiot, but I don't think that's what they're going for.

Well, this is, you know, this is an old horror movie problem, right?

Right.

If you want the characters to behave realistically, then yes, Bill would go to his death, not believing that something supernatural is going on, because that's the world we live in, right?

Right.

But to make it a fun movie, the characters at some point need to accept the rollercoaster ride they're on and go with it, right?

Well, and Dr. Sangre tries to tell them because Bill asks, what is a zombie? Or is it Mac? I can't remember. Mac asks, Bill asks.

It doesn't really matter.

You can choose whichever of those you want.

What's the matter, Jack?

I seen them. I seen them.

You saw what?

They're all over the place. They're everywhere. What's everywhere? Hands, big black ones with frozen faces, with eyes that looks at you and they don't see nothing. What's he talking about? Oh, zombies. Mr. Bill, let's get out of here. Why, this place is a walking cemetery. Wait a minute, Jeff. What's this all about? What's a zombie? Well, a zombie? There's- Mr. Bill, there's-

The living dead.

Dun, dun, dun.

Indeed.

Yes.

That's about as good a summary of the zombies in this film as any.

Yeah, exactly.

You know what's missing in this film?

What?

In Ghost Breakers, you have, I can't remember the Valley's name with Bob Hope, but they play off each other. They're both funny. And then in Costello, you have the straight man who mocks, who belittles the scared guy. And here you just have the scared funny guy, and it's like he's by himself.

Yeah.

It's like he's in a different movie from everyone else.

He's like one talented person desperately trying to drag this thing out of the doldrums or something.

Yeah. I mean, the energy level, whatever you want to say about the Jefferson character, I mean, like the energy level of his performance is very high. And it is the saving grace of this movie if it has one.

Yes, if it has one. So anyway, they go back down to the... They all go back down to the kitchen, and Samantha and Tejana deny that there were zombies. And Samantha's like, hey, stay out of our business. And I'm thinking, well, if you hadn't dragged him into it, he would be...

Yes, how much of this movie, John, involves traveling to and from the kitchen?

There's so much travel. My headings for my notes are like, to the bedroom, back to the kitchen, on the stairs, back to the kitchen. It's sort of like... Sort of like that's the secret. The whole movie, I think to note here, the other reason this feels really important is it's all shot indoors. And there's maybe three or four locations, right? There's the bedroom, the kitchen, there's the outdoor set with the plane and the gravestones, and then there's a crypt underneath that we run into later. But that's kind of it. They don't go a lot of places.

But we do get a new character in the scene, John.

So, yeah, so we go back upstairs. It's dinner time. And we get to meet Dr. Sangre's wife, Alice. Tell me about Alice.

Alice with a Y.

Alice with a Y. Tell me about Alice with a Y.

Alice with a Y looks like a... Well, she slowly descends the stairs in dramatic fashion. She is silent. She's got that zoned out, hypnotized look that the other hypnotized white ladies in the movies we've watched so far have.

Yes.

Something is clearly off about her as she doesn't speak or seem to react to her surroundings.

And we also meet the niece, Dr. Sangre's niece, who I believe is the daughter of Alice, if I'm understanding their relationship correctly. And her name is Barbara Winslow, though she sounds vaguely Austrian as well, which Barbara Winslow is not an Austrian name, but what do I know? Yeah.

And how does Sangre describe Alice's condition, John?

She isn't quite well, and he's brought her to this island to try to cure her, is what he says.

Or so he says.

So that's what he says, yes. And they make it clear they're all Austrian refugees here. And they do talk about that little plot bitlet from the beginning, which is Admiral Wainwright is missing. So they do remind us that that happens. Because at no point in this movie, until the very end, do we see or ever talk about Admiral Wainwright again. So, you know, we just want to keep it in our brains.

I don't know if Ellis is a zombie or not. She certainly acts like one. But I like the way she's described. Dr. Sangre is saying that she's got this strange melody that he's trying to cure. And he says, she lives yet walks in the land of those beyond. I don't know if he's describing the zombie state, but I thought that was kind of a poetic way to say it.

That is a nice turn of phrase. I like that quite a bit. And then the other thing is, the doctor shows off his collection of mystical, including voodoo artifacts to Mack, who's taken an interest. And there's a mask he claims is actually from Ireland, so that Mack will be interested in it. It's not like any other piece of Irish history that I've ever seen, but what do I know? Dr. Sangre is a doctor.

Leave this to the professionals, John. He does mention, though, a particular druid practice or so. That's what he claims it is. John, do you remember what this was?

I do not. Tell me.

If you pay close attention to the plot, this will be relevant later, but he says he's been kind of studying the druid practice of transmigration, the transfer of the soul. And I didn't know at this time, at this point, if he was kind of talking about how to create the zombie state, it turns out he's talking about something a little bit different, which we'll learn in the movie's finale. But I do like the way he refers to zombies. He says, the inconvenience of the material body, always demanding to be fed. And that gave off big vibes all the way back to White Zombie, where one of the motives for creating zombie servants is that you don't have to feed or take care of them. That also conflicts with what we later learn in this movie, where the zombies have to be fed. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Yes. So, hey, where do we go next, Andy?

Probably the kitchen.

That's right.

Okay, great.

We're back in the kitchen. Jeff reveals to Samantha that Bill is on some sort of secret mission. We don't really come up again, but that's a discussion. And then everybody's going to go to sleep. Jefferson is going to go to sleep in the kitchen with the servants. Bill and Mack are going to go to sleep.

Is it worth noting? So, Sangrei's got this Austrian or German accent. Are we supposed to be, and we've been getting occasional mentions of kind of war related stuff, right? We had that Admiral go missing. And then we've got this possibly secret radio broadcast in German. John, do you think we're supposed to be suspicious of Sangrei as maybe a Nazi or something?

I think we are. I think he is being coded. I don't, they never used the word Nazi in the movie, but I think he is being coded as a Nazi spy or saboteur who's using his evil powers. And I think that's why we brought up the Lindbergh thing earlier. Like even as patriotic propaganda is coming out, America's not in the war yet. There are a lot of people who want us in the war. And there are still some people in the United States who don't. So maybe they were afraid to outright call him a Nazi, but they're coding him as such to say, look at the sinister reach of Nazis. It can even reach us here in the US and kidnap our own citizens kind of thing. I mean, that's kind of how I took it, you know? So they go, everybody goes to bed. Now, my favorite, actually, I love this bit where Jefferson is sleeping. He's got these candles and this bell starts to ring. And as the bell rings, each time the bell rings, a candle goes out and you sort of get him like, what, what? Like he's scared. And then shortly after that happened, the two zombies we saw earlier come to get him. How scary are these zombies to you?

This plays entirely as a comic scene to me, because at no time did this feel like a scary scene. What did you think?

I didn't either. Clearly, it's intended to scare Jefferson. But I mean, I guess one thing they try to do, the zombies have ragged clothes, they're very large men, but they're not like gnarly. They're super slow moving. They didn't strike me as scary. Like, and I think they could be scary. I mean, you and I go back to White Zombie, where we had the zombies working in the sugar mill. We found that scene legitimately scary, even if not personally scary to us. You know what I mean? So they don't really do anything to make the zombies scarier other than sort of have them be tropey zombies.

Yeah, they lurch at Jefferson while he's in bed, like as if to grab him. He easily dodges them.

Yes.

So yeah, I don't know. The assumption was they were going to kill and eat him or what.

But I don't know. But so where do we go? Jeff runs back up to the bedroom to talk to Bill and back again. And then they all try to go to sleep in the same room. And as they're sleeping, of course, Jefferson once again sees something nobody else sees. It's Alice enters the room through a secret passage, hovers over McCarthy and then leaves. And Jeff tries to tell them this and they're like, you're making stuff up again. But they do find something. They find an earring left there by Alice. Did that make sense to you? Were you confused here for a minute?

I was confused. So I thought this was a ghost. I didn't...

I'm not... Now I'm not sure.

It is Alice. When I was watching it, I thought it was a ghost. And I thought this mansion they were in was being set up as a Scooby-Doo haunted mansion that has all kinds of ghosts and ghouls and zombies in it. So when this ghostly woman enters their room at night and appears to pass through the wall, we later learn it's just a secret door. Also very Scooby-Doo. But I thought at first that this was a legit supernatural thing and that they were in a haunted mansion. I didn't know a whole lot to make with it.

I guess I assumed it was Alice because they both wear long white dresses and they're the only character. She's the only character in the movie.

Later, it's definitely confirmed that it's Alice because we learned that the earring that was dropped was Alice's. And yeah, a ghost would not have a physical earring that they would drop. Right. Oh, and a doorknob rattles mysteriously.

Terrifyingly.

They throw in a number of things that screamed Disney haunted mansion to me at this part.

Yes. Yeah. But they look out in the hallway and there's nobody there. So what do they decide to do?

They decide to do the only thing you can do in this situation and that is split up.

Right. Can we go back to Scooby-Doo for a second? I did not realize how much Scooby-Doo was inspired by these movies.

Yes.

Because I didn't see these movies before I saw Scooby-Doo. Now it's obvious to me. Right? Totally. Shaggy is clearly the comical, over-the-top scared character. Fred is the voice of reason. Scooby always sees things that nobody else does and nobody believes him. Like the whole pace and plot of these last two movies were so Scooby-Doo, I was just shocked that I didn't know where this was coming from. Yes. So they decide to split up.

Specifically though, they go into the kitchen and then decide to split up.

So.

Right. Right. So I should say, they do have a little exchange here. They don't really believe Jefferson, but they all kind of declare their desire at this time that they need to get off the island, even if not all of them believe that there are zombies or other supernatural things.

Yeah. Max says, even if I have to swim. Yeah. You know, he wants, he wants.

And while this is happening, we do hear kind of a ghostly noise that they identify as the sound of a generator. And they surmise that you would only need a generator like that if you were trying to power a radio. I don't know if that's true or not, but that's what they.

Yeah. And so they do split up. And Bill goes into like a secret room and he finds somebody else there. Who does he find here?

He finds Barbara sneaking around very suspiciously.

Yeah. The niece is speaking on it. And what is she pulling off the shelf?

Yeah. So she pulls off the shelf a book about hypnotism.

Yes. Now, she does seem sincere that she is not the villain. And I never believed she was. But she does sort of explain to Bill what is happening and why she would want a book on hypnotism.

He assumes that he's just found the villain behind all of this and that she's been hypnotizing Alice and maybe the zombies. But she insists that she is doing research basically to try to figure out how to undo the condition that Alice is in.

Yeah. And this is what that sounds like.

Look, Mr. Summers, I've got to get my aunt off this island. She's been this way ever since she came here. I'm afraid if we don't do something soon, something dreadful is going to happen to all of us.

Well, I've got to trust somebody around here like the Sing.

But in order to help you, you've got to help us. I'll do anything.

Yep. And so she agrees to help them find the radio transmitter in exchange for help getting her and Alice off the island, right?

Correct. Well, Bill's off having a nightly encounter with the lovely heroine of this film. What's happening to Mac?

Before we jump to Mac, I have one comment on this bit. So we've seen hypnotism. Hypnotism is not a thing in basically any modern zombie movie, but it's been an awful lot of these old zombie movies.

Yes. I'm using the terms hypnotism and mesmerism interchangeably. I don't know if that's correct, but I think that for these purposes, I think that's interesting.

You should do that. I did a little bit of digging into hypnotism and it was around in the 20s that people started to try and apply more scientific rigor to the practice of hypnotism and to separate it out from the mesmerism occult vibe that it had. So that process would have been well underway by 1941. But I think hypnotism might have... You know how when we talked about maniac, we talked about how maniac which threw around these scientific terms for mental illness. And there might have been a certain thrill in seeing a modern scientific word to describe something that up until then had been a very nebulous, even occult concept. And I wonder if we're getting a little... We're writing the end of that hypnotism period, where hypnotism felt exciting and dangerous, I guess. But it was moving into the world of scientific, you know, quote, scientific practice. You know, like they... It was used in World War I to treat shell shock, you know. So it was moving out of that scary zone into mundane zone. So...

Right. And that could be, like, I assume this book was like a mystical text, but what you're saying is it's more like a science book. She's trying to solve her problem with her...

I think it was more of like a science text. Like, I could be wrong. I mean, the movie doesn't say one way or the other, but...

I'm glad you looked into that. That's really interesting. We should keep an eye on that as we go, because they're clearly not the same thing. Mesmerism is clearly an occult phenomenon, and hypnotism at this point is not, is what we're saying.

I think so, yes. But while that's going on, back down in our favorite place, the kitchen...

Yeah, poor Mac.

Mac's down there with Jefferson, and they get attacked by a zombie, just straight up attacked, right?

Yes.

And... I can't really deny it after this, I think, but Sangrey appears and tries to pass it off. And how does he do that, John? I don't remember, I'm sorry. He denies it as a zombie, but he says his servants get out of control sometimes. He specifically says, Oh, that's right. Servants, like, they play god at night or something. It's an unusual...

They play guard. I think he says they play guard at night.

My subtitles said god, but the subtitles are known to be faulty. So, but I like the subtitles in this case, so I'm sticking with it, so.

Yeah, yeah. So anyway, let's all go to bed after all that happens.

Let's all go back to bed again. The second time, they've all gone back to bed.

How anyone could sleep at this point, I have no idea. But then in the morning, Sangre shows up in the bedroom. They announce that they tell, you know, they talk about what's going on, and Mack is staring at Alice, his wife. And Dr. Sangre notices this and says...

You seem to admire my wife's hearings. Oh, I was just... But my wedding present to her. Very unique. Quite so. I dare say there's not another pair like them in the world. Really? They were among the few possessions which we were allowed to take out of the old country. Yet, I'll say.

So we get a clear indication that that was Alice's earring. That's what she left in their room, and she's trying to communicate with them in some way.

This is so weird. So she's obviously only wearing one earring, but Sangrei doesn't notice that she's only wearing one earring, because Bill or Mac or whoever have the second half of the pair.

Yeah. So she has two earrings, and then they have one earring, and I'm like, wait, now I don't know.

This is such a clumsy way of saying that was Alice last night in your room. Yes. Also, you talked about how could anyone sleep after all this. Sangrei asks everyone how they slept, and it's like, how do you think? We were woken up 800 times by Supernatural Events.

By your zombies attacking us.

We made 50 trips into the kitchen. We all got to sleep at like 5:20 a.m. Yes.

So anyway, there's a lot of incident or exposition that happens. We can gloss over this. But they go back to the plane to check the damage because it's morning now. What they realized is there is the one thing that I want to, the one sort of takeaway is that A, when examining the plane, that the radio is gone. Somebody has taken their radio. But two, they find a freshly dug grave that's open. And this is what creates confusion for me about whether the zombies are dead or not. So anyway, Mack notices the grave and Bill tries to dismiss it. It's a graveyard. Of course, there's going to be freshly dug graves. But Mack says, Bill, look there.

What about it? Ain't that a fresh grave? So what? You're in a cemetery where it's customary to bury people in fresh graves. Yeah, but that's been dug since the storm last night. Listen, are you getting those zombies on your mind too? You and Jeff make a great pair. You still don't get it. Take a look at that headstone. That guy was buried over a week ago and somebody must have dug him up.

I didn't understand this.

Not completely, and this is why I was confused. Are we talking about hypnotism, mesmerism? Are zombies actually dead? Are they alive people under Sangre's spell?

I think it's all of the above. I think the zombies in this film are just anyone who's been reduced to that state, living or dead. Was this grave supposed to have been Admiral Wainwright?

No, I don't think so. I think it was just supposed to be somebody.

So this is just like scene setting for someone's digging up corpses. Is that right?

Yeah, that's what I think.

Okay, that makes sense.

Yeah, this will get more confusing in a minute. But yeah, let's keep going.

Yeah, don't worry, we'll gloss over it. The details are not that important.

So they decide to split up again. Bill is going to go back to the house. Mac's going to go look for the generator.

We hear drums as they head out, which is always our cue for voodoo shenanigans or incoming.

Yes, Mac gets captured by zombies. Bill goes back to the house and finds another secret passage. And then we cut to Jeff in the kitchen again.

Yes.

And a lot happens very quickly here, but Samantha just offhandedly remarks that one of those two zombies you saw last night is actually my ex-husband. Bill tries to figure out where Mac has gone. And he sends Jeff up to his room, back up to the room, to get his gun out of his baggage. And when he goes there, he encounters Dr. Sangre, who takes him through a secret passage and then performs some sort of hypnotic ritual to turn Jeff into a zombie. What did I gloss over there that maybe...

I think that's about it. You didn't get the order exactly right, but it doesn't really matter. I mean, what we learned... I mean, there's some interesting stuff here. So we learned that down in the basement, Sangre has this dungeon where there's like a voodoo priestess and some other voodoo practitioners down there. And they are working voodoo magic on an unconscious person. Is that Admiral Wainwright?

Yes, I believe that is Admiral Wainwright.

So we learned that Sangre has Wainwright down in his voodoo dungeon. And then, like you said, then Sangre gets confronted by Jefferson and decides to hypnotize him into becoming a zombie.

That's right. And Jefferson takes his place in line, though he can talk. Yeah.

I mean, the joke here is that even as a zombie, Jeff still retains his kind of chatterbox quirky attitude, which is legitimately pretty funny, I think, at points. I don't know if we were meant to take from this that he didn't really turn into a zombie or if that turning him into a zombie just couldn't get rid of his irascible good humor.

I think that the commands he was given while being hypnotized were, you remember nothing, you don't know who you are, you haven't seen anything, and that's sort of it, but everything else he retains.

Yeah, it's a little weird. At this point, Bill also runs into Barbara, who's using that hypnotism book to de-hypnotize her aunt, and it's not working.

And Bill misinterprets the situation, thinking Barbara was hypnotizing Alice.

Right. And then they find Mac, they drag him back up to the bedroom, they put him in a bed, and they summon a doctor, who's like, oh, he's been dead since this morning. Bill takes it real hard.

A couple of funny things. First, Mac is laying in bed, and the doctor, after like three seconds of analysis, announces that there's nothing he can do, he's dead, which is kind of funny.

And that he's been dead since morning.

So nothing in this movie is scary, but I could envision this scene being creepy, this realization of this friend of yours has been dead this whole time. You've been walking around with them, maybe even interacting with them in some ways. That's a little creepy, right? In theory. It's not creepy in this film, but it's a little creepy. So as far as, again, we have a lot of different types of zombies. So we definitely have Jefferson, who's a living person, hypnotized into being a zombie. Correct. And now we have Mac, who is dead and has been raised as a zombie.

Or is he? This gets more and more confusing as we go.

I think he's dead. I think he's really dead, but we can discuss that when we get to the finale.

Yeah, yeah. So the plot really speeds up. So I'll sort of speed us up a little bit.

All of these movies do this, by the way. Have you noticed? You get to the point where there's seven minutes left in the movie, and then a huge amount of wrap up, a finale wrap up stuff happens.

Yeah. The only thing, the plot really speeds up. They summon Alessandra for some purpose. They all go down to the dungeon. The one thing I sort of wanted to mark here, and then we'll just sort of get them into the crypt all together. But the thing I wanted to note is, Samantha is assigned the task of feeding the zombies. And she is talking to Jefferson the zombie. The zombies all sit down to sort of eat this watery gruel, and Jeff starts to complain about it. And could I please have some salt?

It's very funny. He's being really picky about it.

It is very funny. Yeah. She's like, you're a zombie. Why are you picky about this food? So she puts a lot of salt on there. And he's like, what are you trying to poison me? So anyway, I thought this bit was funny about the salt. Plus, it ties back into something we've talked about.

Exactly, because she's putting all the salt on there to either to de-zombify them or to lay them to rest. Is that how you understood this?

I wasn't sure. Let's hear what she says. And then, yeah, and then we can discuss.

Take it easy there, woman. I ain't no heron.

Now eat.

What is you're trying to do, poison me?

How's you feeling?

How should I feel?

You ain't feeling dead, is you? Because if he is, then you're a zombie.

And if I ain't?

Then you ain't no zombie. The rule says if a zombie uses salt, he dries up and gets dead again.

So this goes back to the bane of salt in Wanga that we're introduced to that you talked about, which I thought was interesting.

Yes, there is another thing that she mentions here about zombies. So she's trying to prove to him that he's not a zombie? Is that the gist of the scene?

That's the way I took it. If you were a zombie, you wouldn't be able to... If you'd eaten all the salt I just put on your food, if you were a zombie, you would sort of dissolve back into the earth. You would go to rest.

And then he is looking into a mirror while she's trying to convince him of this. And she says, when a zombie looks in the mirror, you don't see nothing, which is an interesting... But that's obviously a vampire thing. And I've never... I've never... Outside of this film, I've never heard that applied to zombies. It does make me wonder, at this time, if zombies and vampires and other just types of walking dead have not really been divided into really clear, mutually exclusive types yet.

Probably not. It also just could be the screenwriter stealing an idea or a trope from another movie or another kind of story just to fit it in.

I'm sure that's the actual explanation, John. Yes.

Yes. So they hear some screams, they go down to the basement, they find some horrors, they find the aunt has been killed.

There is a comic scene when they get to get into the basement, they can't find their way through the secret door. And I think this felt like a very Indiana Jones moment to me, where Jefferson leans on the lever that opens the secret door.

It's total accident.

A little comic thing. I mean, you laughed at it when you saw Indiana Jones do it. I kind of laughed at it when it happened here, too.

And then we hear the drums. So we know there's voodoo magic going on, drums inside the house. Well, so what is going on is that Sangre is conducting some ritual. All the members of the house are here. The cook is a priestess and she's doing a dance. But there is Barbara and there is Admiral Wainwright, and they're facing each other. And I believe what they're trying to do is create some sort of form of transmigration so that Sangre can get whatever information he wants out of Wainwright. He's trying to put Wainwright's essence into Barbara, so that Barbara will tell him what he wants to know, because he can't get it out of Wainwright.

That's my understanding, yes.

Then Bill and Jeff show up to disrupt the ritual.

And Mack is there, Zombie Mack is there.

Zombified Mack is there. So all the zombies get sick on Bill and Jeff. However, Bill is a patriotic American, is simply able to talk his zombie friend out of attacking him.

I'm so excited about this because this is the first movie that is going to meet one of your zombie pillars.

I know, I saw that, I was very excited.

We'll talk about that when we get to it, yeah.

Yeah, but we're almost there. So Bill talks Mac out of killing him into killing Sangre instead, and Sangre takes out Bill's pistol and shoots them, but they don't stop and they shove him into a fire pit. And then we very quickly wrap up to just Wainwright telling us the plot.

Yeah, that fire pit made me laugh. I know it wasn't supposed to be funny, but are fire pits that deep? I mean, who am I to know how he set up his voodoo dungeon?

Yes, that was very strange.

You can start a fire with a small pit, not like a 50-foot chasm. But what do I know?

But why would you? Yeah. So just real quick, there's two funny things in the wrap up here. First of all, this is why I was confused about Mac being dead, because the Admiral asked, hey, how's Mac, Bill? And he says very nonchalantly, well, those bullets didn't help him any, but he should be okay.

Oh, right, right, right.

I'm like, was he dead? Was he not dead? Is he not dead now?

So he's been de-zombified then.

I guess, maybe it's sort of like Vampire Lore, but it's not clear. We don't see him again for sure. And then we get the entire plot explained to us in 30 seconds by Admiral Wainwright, and then the movie ends. So let's hear the whole plot, just because I know everybody wants to know.

Say, by the way, how did that insane doctor manage to get you on this island?

Well, he brought our plane down with a false radio beam, killed the crew, and tortured me to get information about our Canal Zone fortifications with his government. He didn't succeed at first, and then he decided to try this voodoo business.

Oh, you mean those rights of transmigration he talked about?

Yes, that's right. You see, he tried to transfer the Admiral's information to my brain. He was completely mad on the subject of hypnotism. Half the island was under his control.

So, that's it. That's the end.

Pretty devious plot.

Devious plot. In fact, it's so devious, I didn't see it coming, Andy.

I'm going to go need to check out a book on Hitler's voodoo operations in the Caribbean.

Yeah, right. Exactly. But I think there's a couple of interesting things here. First of all, this movie is clearly not staking a claim as to whether zombies are dead, hypnotized, mesmerized, or what. They suggest all of those things, but they don't make a clear statement. Would you agree that's true?

I would agree. This movie overall is very fuzzy with the concept of the zombie. Not just what their state is, but we have the salt reveal them, do mirrors reveal them, do they need to eat, or are they convenient because they don't need to eat? These are things we get contradictory answers to. Yeah.

And the other thing here is that clearly, there's allusions to his government, all this kind of stuff. This is us talking about Nazis without saying we're talking about Nazis. So, this is a propaganda film in that sense, but again, they never use the terms. I thought that was interesting too. Let's talk about how this stacks up, Andy. What do you think?

Before we talk about our zombie criteria, a couple of things. I noted already, this movie read to me as a horror comedy. Did you not take it as a comedy? I thought it was supposed to be a comedy.

I honestly didn't. I thought it was supposed to be serious and that Jeff was the comic relief, but it was supposed to be ultimately serious.

He is the comic relief, but he's got so much screen time, and it's good. I'm always glad he's on the screen. You know, it's like if, I don't know, C-3PO is funny, but he's not in every scene saying the important stuff in the scene.

Yes, you're right. You're right. Yeah, that's interesting, because there's no... It's like everybody else is a straight man to Jefferson's comic performance.

You know what I mean? Yeah. The other thing is this felt like an ancestor. So at a certain point, zombies will get linked up with Nazis, right? In kind of our modern era, there's a whole genre of pulp, supernatural World War II stuff.

I am excited to get to Nazi, a kind of zombie stuff. Yeah.

So even though this movie was being a little bit coy with it, yes, I felt like it was attaching zombies specifically to as being part of a Nazi plan. Yes.

And the plan was to get information out of a senior government official using mesmerism, but the zombies are involved, right? It's not the Nazis unleashing a zombie horde on the world. It's them doing whatever they can to get whatever they can. So it's a little different, but it feels like, right, it's the proto, it's the seed of that idea.

It feels like a first tiny step towards what we're going to get with Hellboy punching Nazi zombies in the 90s.

Yeah. You know what I'm curious about is, and we could probably find this out, but just off the top of my head, Germany did actually expend some amount of energy on researching the occult. That is a fact. It's probably not as much as the doctor says in Raiders of the Lost Ark when he says he's a nut on the subject, but did the world know that Hitler had done some of these investigations at this point? I don't think they did.

That I don't know. And I think the investigations were more by some of his henchmen than by him directly. I don't know to what extent that is true. I know it's true. I don't know if it's, but my main exposure to that idea is through pop culture, usually movies where the Nazis are trying to summon Satan.

Yeah. They've got spaceships on the moon or whatever. I like that this is the seed of this idea, though, because it's such a staple of a lot of our favorite movies, like Raiders of the Lost Ark or Hellboy or that Tim Powers novel, Declare, that we both love. Those have that Nazis are a cult thing going on.

As far as thinking about this as a zombie film, I guess I have a number of thoughts, and I want to go through... We have a set of questions I want us to go through, too. Do you want to do that now?

Yeah. Let's do that now. Let's first talk about our party here, because we talk about survivability here a little bit. I guess technically everybody survives, because I'm not sure if Mack dies or not.

Does this feel like a movie where we have a party of survivors?

No, not so much. I mean, yeah, kind of, but not really.

So Bill, Mack, and Jefferson, I mean, they are our party of heroes, I guess, and they all survive. No, wait, wait, wait.

Mack? Mack must survive. They make it sound like he survives. It's a little wishful thinking.

But he does get zombified.

And shot.

And then, and shot. So, yeah, okay. I will credit that as like a zombie kill, I think, even if it gets reversed at the end. Right. Is there a horde of zombies in this movie, John?

Is there a word for like a small horde? Like a gaggle?

A squad of zombies?

A squad of cops of zombies? I don't know.

Jefferson calls them his squad.

Yeah, his squad. It's Jefferson's squad. There are like half a dozen together at certain points. And there are about a half dozen, including Mack, who attack at the end. So I'm going to say yes, we have, it's horde-ish.

Okay, horde-ish. That sounds good. Is the world threatened?

Not directly by zombies. The world is threatened by Nazis, who are trying to use zombies to advance their nefarious plans, but the world is not ending because of the zombie plague.

I think so. I think we are still in that mode of zombie storytelling, where the zombies are really either a means to a different end, or kind of a byproduct of a different plot.

Yes, I think so. They are more central, I think, than they were in the Ghostbreakers, for example, right? The zombies are being used by the villain, clearly, whereas in Ghostbreakers, they are just like an add-on, you know? Like, clearly, but the plot revolves to a certain extent around zombies more than previous movies.

We try to identify what strain of zombies these are, and this is going to be tricky, I think, because we've already said this movie is all over the map on zombie types. But do you have a sense of, like, what is the type of zombie we're dealing with?

I feel like most of the zombies are undead, even though it gets hand wavy about it with Mac. Because if we take, for example, Samantha and her ex-husband, and the dug up graves that we find, I think without saying it directly, they're trying to say, these are revived bodies, these are the undead. So I think we are dealing with undead zombies. I want to sort of ask you a counter question, though. I would say that Sangre is sort of a mad scientist, but if you're right that hypnotism is more of a technology than magic, then is he a mad scientist or is he a mystic? I'm not sure.

I think that's the appeal of it, that there's a foot in both worlds, right? I think it's taking something that used to live entirely in the world of magic, and the world is trying to see, to apply scientific rigor to it. And I think that it lives in that liminal space. I think there's room for some good tension in that space.

Yeah, I think so.

It won't be there forever, but at this time when this movie was out, I think you could still milk that for some tension.

I think you're right. What do you say about the strain of the movie?

So, I agree with everything you said. I do think we get a couple of slight steps, new things. So this is the first that zombies have been shown needing to eat, right?

Yes, that's a good point.

And so, it's not, I don't, when they attack people, I don't think we're supposed to imagine that they're attacking those people to eat them.

No, I think they're doing it under orders from their master in this case.

I think so. The only exception is when Jefferson is attacked when he's trying to sleep.

Yes.

That felt to me like the zombies, because remember that was like the witching hour when the zombies, it felt like they maybe were a little out of control. Right. I couldn't tell. I don't know why they would have been ordered to murder Jefferson.

Yeah, but I could. Yeah, go ahead.

That made me wonder if we were seeing our first glimpse of like the zombie, of an uncontrolled zombie just ruled by its impulsive need to feed. I don't think that's what we have here.

No.

But it feels like a step in that direction.

I could see a young Romero, seeing this movie and be like, hey, wait a second, what if you couldn't control the zombies? I don't know that that's what happened. But what I'm saying is that seed is there. There's this scary moment where the zombies are acting on their own, we think.

Yeah.

And so, is that where that germ first gets set in the mind of future filmmakers, or at least the part along the path? You know what I mean?

Yeah. It reminded me a little bit of Dracula in that, so Dracula, you have this creature, this person who's in charge of all this horror movie stuff, but they have just enough independence that they can be a little scary. So think of, like, Jonathan Harker has these encounters with Dracula's vampire brides who, while under Dracula's control, have just enough autonomy that they are believably frightening when he confronts them. I got that vibe when The Witching Hour hit and Sangre's off asleep somewhere. I got a little bit of that thrill of, like, maybe the zombies are kind of acting on their own right now, and maybe Sangre can't protect our heroes even if he wanted to.

That's a great point, and I think you might be right.

So, hey, let's quickly go through your pillars of the zombie movie. As we've discussed, these are pillars that we anticipate will evolve, but let's nonetheless go through them and see how this movie weighs up.

Yeah, so just to start, is there an apocalypse here? Not really. I mean, the world's on the brink of war, but they don't know what that's going to look like. You know what I mean?

It's not like the revolt of the Zombies, where it's suggested that the Zombies might get out and become an existential threat.

Correct. I don't think that's here. Are the Zombies contagious? I don't think so. I don't know how Mac becomes a Zombie. I don't think it's because of the other Zombies. I think it's because of Dr. Sangre, I'm assuming.

It is very interesting to me. That is such a default type of Zombie today, but we have yet to see... We have seen numerous different ways that people become Zombies, but contagion has not been...

Still not yet. Now, here's one of the big ones that we've only seen, I think, once before in the old movies. We see it in the new movies all the time, which is why I picked it, which is loved ones turning against you, right? So Bill and Mac are best friends, and there's a moment where you think Mac is going to attack Bill, and Bill leverages their relationship to talk him out of it. But for sure, that is the person you've trusted all your life, is coming for you as a zombie. And that feels pretty new, except for the one scene in White Zombie where the woman as a zombie almost stabs her husband. But other than that... Yeah.

This is stronger, though, than that scene as far as fulfilling that trope. I think we have a 100 percent, this one meets that criteria.

I think so, too. And then there's tough moral choices. Maybe, I mean, Bill does convince Mac to attack Dr. Songre, which is kind of a tough moral choice, but not really. Yeah.

Yeah. Nobody's making excruciating moral choices in this movie the way that we think of this in modern zombie movies. So I'm going to say, I would say this movie does not pass that one.

No, I think not. And yeah, I wish... It tries to be scary, but we're not... Like, I found the zombie, the only zombie... There's been parts of these movies that I find scary. The only zombie I found... I didn't really find anything scary in this movie.

No.

And the only kind of gnarly zombie we've seen so far was in The Ghostbreakers, so that's not here either. They definitely look like dead, but well-preserved dead people. They're not decaying or anything.

So our last question we asked, John, is would you and me survive in the world of this zombie movie?

I think so.

I think so too.

I mean, if Bill can survive, essentially doing nothing, I think we can all survive.

As with most of the other movies we've watched, if you just don't let yourself get sucked into this little drama between three or four people, you're totally fine. Zombies are not a threat to anyone outside of this little play that we're acting.

Yes. I agree.

And then lastly, John, do you recommend this movie to zombie movie fans?

It's a tough one because I did find it a little dull, and it's problematic in the same way that all these as we've discussed. However, it does have a couple of bits here that do feel new. So, from a zombie standpoint, I think it's worth it. From a, as we say, if you want to watch a good movie, go watch Awanga, but if you want, but like this is not one of those good movies. It's a fairly like boilerplate 1940s movies that happens to have some good zombie bits in it.

Yeah. I mean, as a cinematic experience, it's pretty hard to recommend, so I would say no. As a zombie film, I still don't know that you need to run out and watch this on on to be or whatever. But I will say, so what is most interesting to me about this film zombie wise is that they haven't really figured out the hook for zombies. What really makes them scary? They haven't figured it out yet. And this movie doesn't figure it out. But I think this movie waffling all over the place on what is a zombie is I think we are seeing them kind of reaching around to find a hook on which to I don't know where this metaphor is going. A good hook for zombies. Right. We haven't found it yet. And this movie doesn't find it. But I think it is interesting to watch them like we have the zombie. There's surely something scary about this, right? So what is it that's scary? How do these things need to be used in a movie to make them scary?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think some of the things like the reference to vampire lore with the mirrors and everything is them sort of casting about to sort of say, what are the seams we can get in here to make them scary? There's a lot of that. That's a good point. I forgot to ask a question early on. To be ads for you guys. I got Danica Patrick selling extended car warranties.

What did you guys get? I got no ads.

What?

So I know. I don't pay for this or anything. I got no ads, but I did get bad subtitles.

Okay. Well, that's trade off, I guess. What did you get, Brad?

I watched on Amazon Prime, so no ads.

Please tell me you subscribe just for this film.

Alas, no. All right. Well, is there anything you want to show us for next week, Brad? That wraps up King of the Zombies.

This is the most suspenseful part of every episode. We're about to learn what movie we're watching next.

For our next episode, we are going to 1942. We are going to see the movie Bowery at Midnight. Here's the poster.

All right.

Oh, Bowery. Oh, Bela Lugosi.

Bela Lugosi is back.

They have packed a lot of people.

There's a lot of faces here.

Yeah. I love that they aren't naturalistically together. They've just cut out a bunch of pictures of these actors.

Yeah, and colorize them.

Style, slap them together.

Yeah, they colorize them and slap them together. It looks like there's a mobster here smoking a cigarette, a sinister looking green person, a damsel in distress.

Looks like Lon Chaney. Is that Lon Chaney? That can't be.

No.

The little guy, the little green guy. I don't know.

Okay. Bella Lugosi's name is featured prominently. I think one of the things that tells us is he's still a bit of a star. If you can put his name that big as the name. Hold on a second. John Archer. Is John Archer in our current movie? He's Bill. He's Bill. We get more Bill. We get more of the least interesting person in this movie. We get more of that in Bower at Midnight. I'm trying not to be prejudiced against the movie to start, but maybe he does it to Nero, and he gazed like 200 pounds, and is like a convincing drunk on the Bowery or something. You don't know.

So I will say the title of this movie is intriguing to me. I don't know what it means. And that is, I would love to be surprised by one of these. Okay.

All right. I'm excited. We'll see everybody on the next episode when we watch Bowery at Midnight. Thanks again for listening. You've been listening to Zombie Strains. We'll be back next episode to talk about another zombie movie. If you enjoyed our podcast, please take a moment to rate us in your podcast Apple Choice. Tell a friend, follow us on Instagram at Zombie Strains. All of this helps like-minded people find the show. See you next time.