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. Hello, Andy. Hello, producer Brad. How are we doing today?

Hi, John.

Doing well.

Everybody watched this last night. Have we recovered from the nightmarish horrors of Bob Hope?

Pretty disturbing stuff, yes.

In Ghostbreakers, 1940. Andy, our first funny movie. Yes.

Well, okay.

Maniac was funny, but not on purpose. This is actually supposed to be funny. Yeah. That's kind of exciting.

I don't want to get ahead of ourselves here, but I think we might be onto a new strain of zombie.

Yes. I think so. It's interesting because there's not a ton of zombie going on here, but there's definitely a zombie and that actually pushes the zombie genre further. Though I have a question about the zombie at the end, but we'll save that for the end.

Okay.

Yes. We watched The Ghost Breakers from 1940, starring Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard. Do you want to throw in some trigger warnings before Brad does the rundown?

Yeah. This is for the most part a pretty lighthearted comedy movie. There's no real violence or gore or anything like that of note. Really the main thing that adds an element of discomfort to watching this movie is the racism. We'll be talking about that as we go through it. But like a lot of films from this period, the black characters in the film are treated with a lot of condescension.

Brad, can you walk us through the release? I think this is our biggest, highest profile movie yet. We haven't had a movie with a star like Bob Hope or Paulette Goddard yet. So walk us through the release and cast and all this stuff.

The Ghost Breakers was released on June 21st, 1940. It was based on a play written in 1909. There have been four adaptations of this play. The first film was by Cecil B. DeMille and Paramount in 1914. Paramount made a second adaptation in 1922. The 1940 version we watched is the third. All three were called the Ghost Breakers. The fourth and final version, titled Scared Stiff, was released in 1953 and starred Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. George Marshall directed both the 1940 and 53 versions. Prior to this film, Marshall's filmography included directing Tom Mix Westerns in the 20s and Laurel and Hardy films in the 30s. And he continued directing all the way into the 70s and he directed a couple of episodes of the odd couple, the sitcom.

Can I ask a question about the playwrights? One of the playwrights' last names is Goddard, and I wondered if he was the husband or some relation to Paulette, but maybe we don't know.

It didn't pop up in any of the research, and I think that would have shown that it was true.

Yeah, it could just be a coincidence, so.

And a question about... I have a question about the play, too. Do you know if the play in 1909 had the zombie elements in it?

It looks like the early versions were more horror ghost, and the zombie was added for this one. It was influenced by the films from the 30s.

Okay.

I think you're probably right. We'll get to the zombie presence here.

Continuing about Marshall, he was born in 1891, and it's interesting to me that all the films we've watched so far were written and directed by people born before 1900.

That is interesting, because the perspective is so different.

Yeah. So this movie is our third movie in a row with a notable cast. As you mentioned, it stars Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard. In addition, there's Anthony Quinn and Paul Lucas, and all four of them either received an Oscar or were nominated for Oscars. So we have an award-winning cast here.

Yeah, that's crazy. And a very young Bob Hope, I think we said at the end of last episode, I don't know that I've watched a movie starring Bob Hope, the actor, and he's a young, tall, thin man here, which is just weird from my 80s perspective.

Yeah, he's 37 in this film.

Wow, he's younger than me. It's never a thought I've had about Bob Hope.

And at this time, Bob Hope was a major radio star. He had his own show, The Pepsodent Show, starring Bob Hope. It ran from 1938 to 1948. He had been making movies since the early 30s, but it wasn't until the release of The Road to Singapore in 1940 that he became a successful movie star. Hope and Goddard first teamed up together in 1939 on The Cat and the Canary, which is a successful horror comedy, very similar to this one, but not Zombie. And they made three films together, the final being Nothing but the Truth. Paulette Goddard also was well known. She co-started with Charlie Chaplin in two classic films, Modern Times, released in 1936, and The Great Dictator, released a few months after The Ghost Breakers. She was also in the running for Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind.

I can see that. She's pretty great in this, but she's more funny. But anyway, sorry to interrupt.

No, no, it's okay. I mean, she's clearly she's a really good actress.

Yeah.

She won her Academy Award for best supporting actress in the 1943 film So Proudly We Hail. Paul Lucas, who plays Parada, won best actor for the 1943 movie Watch on the Rhine. His co-star in that film was Bette Davis.

Yep.

Anthony Quinn is in the cast, and he plays the twins Ramon and Francisco Medeiros. Quinn is famous for the film Zorba the Greek and Lawrence of Arabia. He was nominated four times for best supporting actor, and he won twice. He acted all the way into the 90s when he played Zeus in several Kevin Sorbo Hercules TV movies.

That's right. Oh my gosh. Crazy.

Now, there's some more genre fun here for genre fans. Richard Carlson, who plays Jeff, was in The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and It Came from Outer Space. He was also in my favorite Abba and Costello movie, Hold That Ghost, which is another classic horror comedy.

Yeah.

Noble Johnson plays the zombie. Johnson was in The Mummy, King Kong, and Son of Kong. Johnson had a very interesting career. He was a successful silent film actor, and then started his own film company, the Lincoln Motion Picture Company in 1916, to produce what were called race films, films made for the African-American audience. The goal of the company was to produce films, to battle the stereotypes of black people found in most other films.

Interesting. I love that. One of the things I love about this project that I didn't expect is, we're learning a lot of history about Hollywood, and with people like Noble Johnson and Freddie Washington, we're learning about early civil rights activists within Hollywood, which I think is really cool.

The last cast member to discuss is Willie Best. He plays Alex, Hope's valet. Willie Best's filmography is full of credits playing servants, butlers, porters, janitors, and so on. As Andy mentioned, he was born at a time when his talents were minimalized and he couldn't be properly appreciated.

Yeah. His character is treated in a condescending way, as Andy pointed out, which is too bad because this movie really is a comedy trio. It's Bob Hope working with Paulette Goddard and him alternatively to create a bunch of funny scenes. You know what I mean? He's as important to the bits as Hope is in a lot of ways.

He does get a highly placed credit in the film. In many of his filmography, his credits are uncredited. So that's at least a nice thing to happen in this film. Ghostbreakers receive positive reviews, and while there aren't reliable box office records, the fact that Hope and Goddard teamed up for another film indicates this was a moneymaker. And my last note about the film is Dan Ackroyd cites this movie along with the horror comedies of Abbe and Costello and the Bowery Boys as inspiring Ghostbusters.

That's amazing. I have two questions for you. One is you're an Abbe and Costello fan. I remember watching them. What is the, so the first, like, talkie, right? The spoken word movie with synchronized sound was like 1928. So we're not that far from that. When did the Abbe and Costello movies come out?

From memory, about 1940.

Okay. So they're, they're contemporaneous with this movie. They somehow seem older to me, but that just might be the bowler hats and stuff. So, yeah. I have another question. All right. So Andy and I don't like to throw around our huge Hollywood connections, but we do actually know somebody who met Bob Hope, and that person is producer Brad. So Brad, you have a story. I think you worked on a telethon in the 90s, and you met Bob Hope to film a segment. You were producing it, right?

So in the 90s, I worked on the John Ritter telethon for United Cerebral Palsy. And I don't remember which year it was, but we were sent, I was sent out with the executive producer of the show, the camera person, sound person, and me, I drove, we went out to Palm Springs to Bob Hope's lavish, mid-century modern home that's on a hill that overlooks the entire Coachella Valley. I mean, it looks like a bond there, that kind of architecture. And we were brought in, and the sound guy says, Mr. Hope walks in with his assistant, and the sound guy says, Mr. Hope, I need to wire you. And within two seconds, he had undone his belt and dropped his pants. For 70 years, he's used to people wiring him for sound, and sound guy took the cable, ran it under his shirt, clipped the mic at his lapel. Mr. Hope put his pants back on, and then he read the cue cards for us. And within 20 minutes, we were finished.

Yeah. The one thing I remember from you telling me that story a long time ago was, you were very nervous because he was very old and he was sort of slow. But as soon as you said action, he was like, bang. He was on it and read the cards and was sharp.

So, interacting with them, we were talking to him and I was telling him the movies I liked, and he didn't seem to really remember them. And his assistant sort of had to nudge his memory. And so, it was a little concerning. And then the cue cards popped up. You know, the light went on, the camera, they said action. And then he was Bob Hope. And he read them with his voice was what he sounded like to you and me, as you remember from all these events. And it was pretty amazing experience. And on the way out, his wife asked if he wanted some cookies or anything, any food from the kitchen. And the EP goes, no, no, ma'am, we need to go. And I was like, Bob Hope's wife just offered us cookies. And we said, no, I wanted to stay in the kitchen.

Amazing. So sorry for the diversion people, but I just love that story.

It was a highlight. I mean, because that is old, old Hollywood.

It is.

And I got lucky to meet him.

Yeah, yeah. So while we have some historical context to talk about here, Andy, we're in 1940. What do you want to bring up about that?

There's a lot going on. And one of the realms in which there's a lot going on is the box office, because this year was a powerhouse year for big movies. This year, Pinocchio, Gone with the Wind, Fantasia, and Rebecca all came out and were at the top of the box office. So a lot of competition for The Ghost Breakers, I would say. More generally, 1940, so World War II has kind of started in earnest. The Phoney War is over. Germany has invaded Denmark and Norway. The Blitz is about to begin. And FDR has won his third term. The Great Depression, I guess, is kind of wrapping up at John Steinbeck's classic novel, Grape to Wrath, got a Pulitzer this year. So as we often talk to on the historical context is especially interesting for horror films because horror films are so often channeling or reflecting societal fears. This is as a lighthearted comedy. I think it's maybe a little bit less evident, but maybe we can keep our eyes out as we talk for ways that the incredible tensions that are mounting around the globe might or might not be reflected in this lightweight film.

Yeah, I know that Bob Hope was a was legendarily did a lot of USO tours, but I don't know if he did it in the Second World War or if that was Korean and Vietnam.

And it's probably worth noting, you know, the US is not in the war at this time.

Correct, yeah, it's a little before we join.

So yeah, we'll see how that's reflected.

Andy and I could go off on a history tangent if you want, but we're not going to do that to you.

We'll save it for our Lyndon Johnson special episode, so.

That's right. Though I do have one piece of trivia that I'd like to just pull out of the list you just gave. FDR wins his third term. He's the only president ever to serve a third term for the United States of America.

All right, the more you know.

There's your little history book.

Real quick, Bob Hope performed his first USO show in 1941.

There you go. All right.

So, hey, before we start talking about the film proper, John, can we do a quick recap of the poster and what the poster promises or suggests that we are going to experience?

Yes, can we try to avoid laughing so hard?

You and I had a good laugh at this in our last episode because I was just taken aback by the poster. But for our listeners, so I'm looking at the Ghostbreakers poster. Unlike other posters of movies we've covered so far on this show, it doesn't have a lot of salacious taglines or promises for us.

Though Paulette Goddard's shoulder is bare, which I think at this time is barely she gets it.

Yes, she is thrusting her bare shoulder towards us, the viewers. So it has Paulette and Bob Hope there and looming behind them, which John and I had a hard time dealing with in the last episode, is a very goofy looking ghost.

A pink ghost and you described it as having googly eyes last time.

I mean, this effectively communicates that this is, despite the word ghost being prominent in the title, this is not going to be a dark exploration of fear and terror. It's going to be more of a Scooby-Doo style romp, although Scooby-Doo is not yet around.

Yes. The last thing I'll say is Bob Hope is wearing a double-breasted suit and a tie with a broad collar. He wears this throughout, without fail. It doesn't matter if he's climbing through a catacomb or sailing on a ship to Cuba. He is in this outfit.

Although there are a lot of white suits in this movie as well. I think white suits need to make a comeback, just to be totally honest.

You think so?

I was talking to my wife about this, and she mentioned that those probably weren't white suits, that they were probably blue or another color because they had to do a lot of careful work with colors to show up, to have them show up effectively on black and white.

Oh, interesting. I did not know that. So you want to go a little fantasy island though, is what you're thinking.

You guys bring up a good point about the costumes. This film, the designer was Edith Head, who is one of the most famous costume designers from this era.

Oh, interesting.

Oh, wow. All right. Well, let's get into it. The first thing I noticed is it's got an animated title sequence that includes like some ghostly figures moving around and changing into text. So my first impression, not only because of the sort of all-star cast, is that this movie has a way bigger budget than anything we've watched before.

That's also what hit me right out of the gate.

Yeah. I wrote down it has a director of photography and everything. Right? Like you couldn't make a modern movie without one of those, or you usually don't. But like our previous movies, sometimes there wasn't even a screenplay by, there was just like a story and dialogue by. I feel like we're entering the time where Hollywood has figured out what the jobs are to produce a bunch of movies.

Yeah. It's really noticeable throughout the film, so I guess we might as well mention it now. But this film, I mean, we're really only just a few years past the last movie we watched. This film exudes sort of a confidence in itself that none of the movies we've watched so far have had. There's just a level, I think they've figured out how to move from one scene to the next and how to make sure you have all the visual context you need to understand what's going on. And there are some elements of this movie that do get a little confusing, but generally speaking, it's pretty obvious to me that we've entered an era where Hollywood is figuring out how to tell a movie story.

Yeah, I agree completely. And the sort of last thing I'll say about that is it also increases the length. The movie is our longest movie.

I did get a little nervous when I saw that. Just thinking about some of the past ones we've watched.

Yeah. Well, let me say this. It's one hour and 24 minutes without, if you're not streaming it on Plex, if you are streaming on Plex, it's like three and a half hours of local car Cadillac dealership. I don't know what ads you got, Brad. I got all Cadillac dealerships all the time.

I kept getting a Bibb and Tucker whiskey one, and it was strange because it had Bibb and Tucker in the top right corner and then the left, it would have what looked like a live shot from a basketball game, which was earlier in the day. Every time it showed, it was at different points of the game going forwards and backwards.

I got non-stop ads for the Lion King movie in Spanish. All the ads I got were in Spanish, so it added to the experience, I think.

Yeah. I think the one thing that's jarring about modern advertising is previous planned advertising. Everybody gets the same ad all the time, and they're placed at strategic points in the movie. With modern on-demand advertising that is customized to you as an individual, it's just randomly in the middle of a sentence. An ad shows up for two and a half minutes, and then the sentence is finished. Plex, yeah, call us if you want to sponsor us. Let's get into it. So we start with a shot of the big city. They don't say it, but I think it's New York. There's a huge thunder and lightning storm, and we cut to one of our heroes or one of our protagonists, a woman named Mary Carter, who is played by Paulette Goddard, and she's in the hotel, and she's there talking with somebody we are told is the Cuban ambassador, and they're talking about her moving to Cuba. It jumps right into it, and there's a lightning storm, and the lights go out in the hotel. That's the first thing, and here's how you know it's a comedy. The first joke is that the hotel staff brings up candles for everybody, and as she's picking up her candle from the door, this guy with a raspy voice who is clearly a gangster pauses to ask if he can light a cigarette, and she just flips off a joke, nice night for a murder, and he says, how do you know about that? So that's our first joke. But in this scene, and I think that the important cue of this scene is the ambassador. So she has inherited a castle in Cuba on an island called literally Black Island, and the ambassador here gives her the following advice.

So you know the stories about Castillo Maldito?

Mother told me about it.

She also told me about Santa Claus, Snow White, and the Seven Dwarfs. Unfortunately, the legends about the castle are not bedtime stories. Mr. Aves, I believe you're trying to discourage me. Well, I suppose as a member of the Cuban consulate, I should paint the castle as a palm-fringe paradise. But privately, Miss Carter, I advise you to stay away from Black Island.

Yes, and the other thing we get from this scene is it's clearly established that Mary Carter is a working-class person who has... who's excited for this inheritance and a very independent person. I think she's modeling sort of a more modern type of woman who can survive and function on their own, which, you know, is not something we've seen before. And so that's interesting as well.

Yeah, she feels like a protagonist in a way that the female leads in the previous movies we watched have not felt. I wanted to ask, did you notice we didn't get something that has been in most of the movies we've watched so far? We did not get a long text scroll giving us background. I think that is a reflection of the film, people getting better at showing instead of telling. But that was a welcome change.

Yeah, it reminds me more of the competence in this movie. Because like in our last movie, Revolts of the Zombies, there were multiple scenes where it was considered to be a good idea to fade out on the scene, both the dialogue and the scene. While people are speaking as if it were like the end of a song or a record or something, you know what I mean? So yeah, it's more evidence that Hollywood is becoming more confident for sure. But then we meet our friend Lawrence L. Lawrence, who is a radio personality played by Bob Hope, and he is in his house. He's got to get to the studio to record, and we meet him and we meet his, we'll call him his, they refer to him as his man, but basically his chauffeur, butler, combo, servant.

We'll call him Valet.

Yeah, his Valet, played by Willie Best, who we're talking about, the black actor who had a ton of roles and is very funny in this movie, but is generally condescended to. We get a lot of that in this scene too, but it just establishes Bob Hope as a wise acre. He just cracks jokes. I think the first joke when the lights go out, he says, oh, Basil Rathbone must be having a party. That's his 1940 joke.

I think you need to explain why that's a joke. Not everyone knows who Basil Rathbone is.

Yeah, sorry. Yeah, you're right. I hadn't thought of that. Even before this movie, Basil Rathbone was playing Sherlock Holmes in British movies, and they were always horror movies. I don't know why the lights out in particular means Basil Rathbone is having a party, but I think it's a reference to just him being a horror movie actor in the Sherlock Holmes movie being scary. Like the Hound of the Baskets.

Can we talk for just a quick sec what we mean when we say that the character Alex is treated condescendingly? We don't need to go deep into it because we're not experts, but he is portrayed as a loyal and good hearted kind of companion, but who is maybe a little dim-witted and easily frightened. Yes. It's a stock character, and if you've seen other movies from this era, I think you've seen a lot of this. But that's what we mean when we say that the movie is condescending towards its character.

Yeah, I agree. I agree. The other connection we make here is the man who got his cigarette lit. His name is Raspy because of his voice, Raspy Kelly, played by Tom Dugan, comes in and talks to Bob Hope. He's a character in the movie, but what he does is he gives Bob Hope some information about some mobsters that Bob's going to talk about on his radio show.

This was really interesting to me. Do either of you guys know, was this a thing, was like underworld radio gossip a thing? Because I mean, it suggests that Bob Hope's character is sharing gossip about the mobsters in town, the way you would share news about like who Brad Pitt is dating. Is that, was that just a thing or is that just a movie?

I couldn't find any evidence of gangster gossip radio shows. I think it's a gag for this movie.

Yeah. So, we go back to Paulette's. Another person shows up and this is a character who's going to be around for most of the rest of the movie. His name is, I believe we call him Prada. He is from Cuba and he is the one who's going to execute the deed on this transfer of the castle.

He's a lawyer or solicitor or something.

Yes. Then what happens is he makes her an offer, just as he's about to sign and saying, hey, I have an offer for this castle if you want to sell it. Because obviously, a young woman like yourself should not be moving alone to Cuba, and she turns him down. Also during this scene, we get introduced to another character. This is Anthony Quinn's character who calls her, Ramon Medares, calls her from the lobby and says he needs to speak with her. The plot at this point gets really complicated, and I think more complicated than we're going to get into. But what's clearly set up here is that multiple people don't want her to go to the castle for a variety of reasons, and someone is trying to offer to buy it.

I would say that Parada is being cast here as a menacing figure, would you say?

I would say, yeah.

Later in the movie, they'll even joke that he looks too sinister to actually be the villain because it couldn't be that easy, right?

Yeah, exactly. We cut back to Bob Hope, and he appears on the radio. The one thing I thought was hilarious here is Bob, here's three of us recording a podcast. Bob Hope is recording a radio show just sitting at a desk in the middle of an office building with a microphone in front of him, and the guy reading the ads during the announcements is standing next to him with a different microphone.

In the same room behind him is a crowd of people chatting and going about their business.

Yeah, they're like working.

It makes me think about how much time we spend trying to make sure that we don't have background noise and that sort of stuff.

His character, by the way, is a radio host just like Bob Hope was, and they have a funny ad about this coffee, but the joke is that the coffee is actually terrible and you'll never actually open the can or use it because it's so bad. That's the joke. But what happens is as he's leaving, he gets a call from the gangster he's just about, Frenchy Duvall, and Frenchy is like, hey, I want you to come see me at my hotel. Bob Hope is obviously scared because a mobster wants to see him. We go back to the hotel, but let me pause here because again, there's a lot of stuff going on. We don't need to go into the details. The point here is that Bob Hope, and excuse me, I'll call him Larry. Larry, played by Bob Hope, and Mary Carter are now in the same hotel. This is the goal we're trying to get to. So Bob has his chauffeur, his valet, take him to the hotel, and they have this exchange outside the hotel, where they're considering whether or not you should take a gun into the hotel. They go back and forth, and he finally decides to take the gun.

Can we pause for a minute, John? Can we talk about the style of humor here? The humor in this movie is partly set like elaborate set up gags, which we're going to get one in a minute.

Yes. I can't say this is a great modern comedy, but there are a couple of good set piece comic. Yes.

We have some very meticulously set up gags, but most of it is this ongoing witty banter from Larry, right? How would you describe it?

Yes. Like you said, it's banter. It's almost like he's doing a stand-up routine, and he just sort of makes jokes about whatever is happening.

It's not like ha-ha hilarity. It's more like if you have someone who, like if you have a witty friend who is just constantly making little humorous asides about what's going on. Sometimes it's funny, sometimes it's annoying. Mostly, it's the sort of thing you react to with a, hmm, like that.

Yeah, exactly. I think you're right. It's mostly just like an opportunity. I think it also fits. I don't know if it's totally the style of the time, but it's certainly Bob Hope's style. He has this delivery where he quietly points out something in a very aloof voice like, oh, I hope I don't die here. He's very, that's his style.

Yeah, so we're obviously not going to call out all of his jokes, but you should know that throughout the movie, anytime he is in a scene, he is just going off on a string of these little crips.

Yeah, we're not going to do many of them at all, in fact, but just know that it's constant.

It's funny, John, I mean, yeah.

Occasionally, he got off a zinger that I found funny, but it was not like the hit and miss ratio wasn't, or the hit ratio wasn't super high for me, but again, that could just be cultural thing at the time.

Okay, but anyway, we just had this.

Hey Andy, to me, it was very similar to Abbot and Costello, which means it was probably very vaudeville, this sort of live performance, where they were used to these lines that they would use over and over, or these setups that they would use to deliver their lines.

That makes a lot of sense.

I gotcha.

All right, so John, we just had this scene where, it was kind of an entertaining scene where they're debating whether to take a gun in, and he decides, fatefully, to take a gun in.

To take the gun. So what happens is, the plot gets really intricate right here, and I'm not going to break it down in detail for you, but what happens is, the man who called Mary and said he needed to speak to her goes up to her floor. He runs into Parada. Parada shoots him, but Bob Hope thinks somebody's shooting at, or excuse me, Larry, played by Bob Hope, thinks somebody is shooting at him, so he shoots. So Larry is convinced that he has shot a man in the hallway outside of Mary's apartment, and he goes into Mary's apartment to run away. Now, we know as the audience that he hasn't done this, but he doesn't know, and Mary doesn't know. So this is the first time Bob Hope and Mary meet, and there's a physical gag where he's holding a gun, but he's shaking so much that he's actually more scared than she is, even though he busts into her room, and then Paulette makes this comment.

Say, you're terrified, aren't you? Yeah, a little sick, too.

I don't mind dying, but I hate the preliminaries.

Well, put down that gun the way you're shaking.

You might shoot somebody.

Yeah, it's a trouble. I just did. Oh. I feel the same way about it myself.

I think my blood is running the wrong way, if it's running.

Who'd you shoot?

I have no idea.

Is it murder to kill a perfect stranger? Why'd you shoot him?

He was shooting at me.

Isn't that self-defense?

Lady, when you kill one of Frenchy Deval's men, it's suicide.

Yeah, that's probably the best example of the humor that we have, right? It's a lot of that.

I like this gag where he thinks he's shot a man. It requires a lot of careful timing of who can see what. Yeah, I thought it was pretty funny. You didn't mention there's... I did laugh that on the way through the hotel, he encounters like four different shady characters and...

Yeah, it's almost like a horror movie on its own, but with mobsters instead of zombies. Yeah. And he's scared and trying to console himself. He's like, we're fine. We're fine.

It is amazing to me how un-upset Mary is when he bursts in with a gun. Like, she doesn't do... I really enjoyed their interaction in this scene.

Yeah, I can see why they made two more movies together, because they do have a genuine chemistry, and they're both good at physical comedy, right? Like, when he turns his back, she does this sort of leaping stride to get to the phone to call downstairs, and she is comically just funny as she moves and everything. So, here's what happens. Through a series of convoluted things, the cops come, find the body, and then they're going to search all the hotel rooms, and she tells him to hide under the bed, but when the cops come in, he's not there. What we've realized is that she's leaving for Cuba, she's packing, and he has hidden himself in her trunk, which is gigantic. It's a huge trunk, like an old travel trunk that nobody carries anymore.

I think they call those steamer trunks.

Steamer trunks. That's right, because you're going to ride on a steamboat with your trunk. So, Alex's valet comes up, he's looking for him too. There's some good physical comedy where she's trying to hide this scarf that he's left on the chair, because it will incriminate him. It's a fun scene, actually. I enjoy the hijinks in this scene. But the point is, he ends up on a steamer trunk, getting taken to the boat she's going to sail on to Cuba. The reason that's important is that's why the cops don't catch him. The cops are sweeping the building, and that's how he gets away.

This was a pretty funny scene. It's one of those scenes where the cops are looking under the bed, they're poking around, and you keep expecting them to find him. Then you slowly realize the only place you could be hiding is in this trunk in the middle of the room. It's pretty funny.

Yeah, it is pretty funny. Then the trunk ends up going to the ship. Alex the valet tries to get him out of the trunk. There's a comedy bit where Alex is trying to get Bob Hope out of the trunk, and Bob Hope has cut a hole in the trunk, and he's talking. And a drunk man thinks that it's Alex doing ventriloquism and insists that he do it more. What did you think of this scene?

This scene didn't really land for me. I mean, it was a little funny. It just sort of stretched on.

Well, I would say this scene reminds me of Aberdeen Castello scenes where you have your plot, and then suddenly they drop in their old Vaudeville gag that has nothing to do with the film, but they know that it gets laughed, so they're going to run it.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah, yeah. It's like a comedy bit that's not relevant to the plot.

There is a little visual gag that I will confess like made me laugh, and there is a sticker or a picture on the side of the steamer trunk he's in of like a woman, of a woman's head, and he has poked his finger through the mouth of the picture, so it looks like a tongue is waggling his finger around. There's no reason he would be doing this except for this gag, but it made me laugh. So John, can we pause for a second? Think about all of, at this point in the movie, we are almost halfway through the movie at this point.

Yeah. We haven't even, we've only heard about the Spooky Cats.

We haven't seen a thing. Just think about how much energy and effort the movie has put into getting the whole point of this, is that Mary and Larry are on a boat going to Cuba. That's it. I think the past couple of zombie movies we watched would have started with them on the boat, and there would have been a text crawl saying, they got into hijinks in New York and wound up on the same boat to Cuba. But here we've spent, I don't know, 40, 45 minutes setting this up. Like, did this feel like a big waste of time? Or were you enjoying this? Did you think it was setting something up interesting?

I wasn't sure, and I'm still not sure. I think it ended up being a little tedious, but they definitely went to very, like in none of the movies we've seen from the 30s, this movie goes into meticulous staging and blocking so that it's very clear how things happen. Ramon comes up, Ramon gets shot, Bob Hope thinks he shoots him. It creates a very convoluted story that we're kind of glossing over to get him on this boat. And I feel like I appreciate that, right? Because I think some of the weakness some of the early movies had were just like, we would be like, where are we now? Like, I don't know what's going on. So it's almost like a correction in the wrong direction.

I mean, you do feel like you know the character of both, characters of both Larry and Mary pretty well, I guess, by the time the-

Yeah, actually that's the big thing.

Because the plot is really going to start now on the boat to Cuba, right?

Yes. So they're on the boat to Cuba. We won't talk about it in detail. There's a few secret conversations and people are talking and more people urge Mary to sell the island. What I will bring up is that there is the one best comedy physical bit in the movie for me was when Alex finally gets him out of the trunk and he can't stand up. So he's walking around like squatting and walking around on his feet and he makes jokes about looking like an organ grinders monkey. There's this just wonderful physical bit where he can't stand up and that makes me laugh. But in this scene, we also discover, hey, Alex tells him that gun I gave you was a 32, and they figured out this guy was shot with a 38, so it couldn't have been you. Or as Bob Hope says, hey, that's six points in my favor.

As a historical note, Alex sees that in the evening newspaper. In theory, this is just a few hours after the murder, and it's already in the newspaper.

Yeah, isn't that crazy? Yeah, I'm not sure that's realistic. But suddenly, everybody's relieved that Bob Hope is fine, hasn't killed anybody. We're not worried about the police. The idea of being worried about police or being extradited to America, like that, all just goes away.

That was the point that made me think, so why did we watch the last 45 minutes?

Yeah. Was there a simpler way we could have gotten Bob Hope in a trunk and get him on this boat? I think those characters become important at the very end, Ramon and Parada. But yeah, they sure took a long time to get here. So they go in the boat, they make it to Havana.

Can I stop? It's worth noting, you alluded to it, but there's plenty of shenanigans going on on this boat, threatening shenanigans. We won't go into all of them, but like Mary is continuing to be kind of threatened and pressured to sell or not go to the castle. And she...

Yeah, a shadowy figure tries to drop a sand bucket on her.

So there's a number of different encounters. But there's maybe one important one. Perada, the creepy lawyer who's trying to get Mary to sell the castle, confronts her at one point and Bob Hope kind of springs to... I'm sorry, Larry, springs to her defense.

Oh, that's right. I missed an important one.

And Perada is saying, you know, what's your deal? Like, what are you doing here? This isn't your business. And Bob Hope says, actually, I am a ghostbreaker. I am a person that kind of investigates and debunks mysteries. And I am going with Mary to the castle on Black Island to debunk the legend of ghosts there.

This just comes out of nowhere. But it is the title of the movie. Like, we don't know that Bob Hope has any of these skills, but he's announced he is this thing.

I enjoyed the character moment here, because I think, you know, Larry is... He is just thinking on his feet, and he's just instinctively, like, trying to spin this story here without really thinking about it long term ahead. And it is a good little moment.

Yeah. I will actually make a comparison to an action, comedy action hero from the 80s, and that would be Axel Foley, played by Eddie Murphy. Like, he has a lot of that energy. Like, he's just going along, doing the next thing, and improv-ing his way out of it. You know what I mean? Like, he has no plan. He's not a super smart guy. He's a fast talker, and he's funnier than everybody else. So he's just navigating his way through, if that makes sense.

We also need to mention a third character who shows up here because he's important later, right? And that is Jeff Montgomery. Yeah. He's another American.

Yeah. So at one point, Mary goes into her stateroom when they're about to dock, right? They've come all the way. It's sunny outside. She closes the door, and there is a small knife and a charm hanging on the back of her door. And then we cut to the outside of her door, and somebody we haven't met before and we never meet again, is listening at her door. And across the hall, somebody comes out of his stateroom and says, Hey, you there, what do you think you're doing? And the man runs off, the guy listening runs off. And that man, a handsome American man, knocks on the door and says, Excuse me, ma'am, there was somebody listening at your door. And then they realized they recognized each other from another party. So this is our sort of last main character, Jeffrey. And when I first saw this, he was sort of dropping in out of nowhere and becoming, and joining this movie. What did you think about this?

I didn't know what to make of it. He's presented here as like a romantic rival to Larry, I think, is the main thing. And he serves kind of an exposition purpose too, because he explains he's been living in Cuba for a while. And so he actually is where we first start hearing about zombies and voodoo, right?

Yeah. And actually we'll play a clip of him doing that because he also, I don't know if they just lifted this from the movie or if it's a real thing, but we have a throwback to one of our previous movies. So yeah, here's what Jeffrey tells her about the charm.

You've lived in Havana for some time, haven't you?

Oh, practically a native. Perhaps you can tell me what that means. Hello.

What is it?

It's a voodoo awonga.

Of what?

An awonga, a charm prepared by a voodoo priest. Some of them are supposed to bring good luck.

But not that one.

No. This is a death awonga.

Yeah, so awonga, he actually says awonga.

He actually says all three vowels up front.

Yeah. Yes. But that's a throwback to... So this must have been... Like, I don't recall watching bad horror movies as a kid. I recall zombies and voodoo dolls and all that stuff. But I'd never heard of a awonga before, or awonga before our movies here.

Yeah, me neither. I think somewhere over the years, the awonga kind of drifted out of the vocabulary of horror movies.

Yeah. I don't wonder why. But then we get a quick scene of Bob Hope talking to Parata again, and then Bob Hope joins this scene, and we get some more exposition from Larry. I'm not sure why Bob Hope brings up the word zombie, but he does, and Jeffrey says this.

When a person dies and is buried, it seems a certain voodoo priest who have the power to bring him back to life. How horrible. It's worse than horrible because a zombie has no will of his own. You see them sometimes walking around blindly with dead eyes, following orders, not knowing what they do, not caring.

Yeah, so that firmly establishes the zombies still as controlled by a mystic or a beast.

Yes, and it does specify that they are dead. So they are zombies are not like some of the zombies in previous movies we've watched where they could be living people just stripped of their free will. They are corpses.

Yeah, I have more questions about this when we do run into the zombie, but we've landed on Cuba.

John, can I pause you for a minute? Because my favorite line of the movie is uttered, while they're on the boat trip. I guess we should mention that Larry and Mary are really flirting and romancing each other at this point. And at one point during a flirty scene where they're dancing, Bob Hope drops the line, shoot the chassis to me, lassie, to Mary. And I asked my wife who knows this time period better, is that a line? And she didn't know. I googled. I couldn't find any references to this outside of this movie. So I think maybe Bob Hope was just going with the flow, but I love it.

Nice.

And I also want to mention in one of our earlier sound clips, we heard a loud foghorn type thing in the background. And just like kind of a recurring gag in this movie that foghorn sounds at moments of tension and breaks the tension, whether it's romantic or otherwise. So I thought that was pretty funny.

Yeah, yeah, that is funny. What happens next is the convoluted plot returns. Mary goes to dinner with Jeffrey. It's the first time we see Anthony Quinn again, except for this time he has a mustache and we find out he is not Ramon, but Francisco.

Listeners, if you don't know what any of that means, I didn't really understand this either during the movie.

Yeah, that's fine. He is Ramon's twin brother. It's all fine. We're going to sort of brush past it. The point we're trying to make here is that Bob Hope and Alex have decided to go to Black Island to visit the castle without Mary. They want to investigate it first. And Mary is having dinner with Jeffrey, but she realizes that she wants to go there too. That's all she wants to do. But it's told that no one will take her all the way there. So all of this incident on Cuba is really to set those two things up. Would you agree? Is there anything you want to pull out of there that you think is super important?

No, just that there's continuing shenanigans of shady people lurking around and threatening messages sent to Mary. So the pressure is still on Mary, don't go to the castle.

She bumps into this guy multiple times who ends up not really being part of the solution or the end of the plot, but again, we're going to skip over them because they just create confusion, I think, for listeners.

They created confusion for me while I was watching this movie.

Yes, exactly. So Larry and Alex go to the island in a rowboat. Of course, Alex has to row and Bob Hope has to make comments about it. We'll skip through all of those. They land on a dock.

Mary is told that there's no way to get to the island because no one will row out at night. There's no one who will do that. Cut to Bob Hope is making Alex row him to the island.

Yeah, exactly. So they get on this dock. A spry young Bob Hope jumps out of the boat onto the dock and they tie it down. I will say one thing I observed here is I'm pretty sure this is a set. I'm pretty sure maybe one thing Hollywood has learned between the movies we watched before and this movie is they are not good at shooting stuff outside. So I think anything that looks like it's outside here is actually on a set. I don't think there's any actual outside change in this whole movie.

As they're doing this, looming in the background, when we get our first look at the castle on the island, it's a pretty good looking ruined castle, I would say, and it has a Spanish flair to the design. It's not just a Gothic castle implanted from Eastern Europe. I like the look that they've got going on in this part.

But here's the reason why we're here, Andy. They step off the boat, there's a shack on the dock, there's a light on in the shack, and in the shack lying in the bed is the zombie.

Here it is, folks, we made it. An hour into the movie.

We made an hour into the movie, there's the zombie.

He's credited as the zombie.

The zombie, and the woman who walks up is credited as the zombie mother, right? So there's a bunch of stuff we could talk about here, but as we're a zombie podcast, I think we have to dwell here for a moment. So this is our first, in my opinion, Andy, a zombie prosthetic effect. He clearly, he has this like augmented brow ridge. He does not look like a normal person. He looks like some sort of monster, which looks kind of funny. And the other thing I'll mention is, I wanted to mention this earlier. So when I look at him and his zombie mother, there's an episode of Scooby-Doo called Witch, Witch is Witch. And the zombie sort of with the big brow ridge and the witch together, really I think is a strong echo of this movie. So I also made me realize we are in, at this point, a Scooby-Doo episode because Larry's professed goal is to figure out, quote, what is really going on here, right? He doesn't believe there's really ghosts. He thinks this is all fake.

It is kind of funny when they appear in at the zombie, they're like, oh, that must be the zombie.

And then the zombie looks at them and then they like run into his zombie mother, I guess, and then they go into the castle. Like there's no incident. Now that the zombie does reappear, but it was just a little strange. They're like, yep, okay, let's keep going. Now, I believe, and if I've got my things in order here, they start investigating the castle, and then we cut back to dinner and Mary decides to leave. They go into the castle. You then see Mary getting dropped off by a rowboat, but the rowboat won't go to the island. So she's actually wearing a swimsuit with a bathing cap, and she has some sort of waterproof bag with her, and so she swims the rest of the way to the island, gets out, and in her waterproof bag, she has a robe. And she, of course, pulls out, and her... We didn't talk about it, because it was pretty inoffensive. There are a couple scenes where it's definitely supposed to be titillating cheesecake where she takes off her dress and is just wearing a slip or something.

In a few minutes, her robe is going to get torn off or whatever. Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous.

There's lots of that. I love that when she also pulls off the bathing cap, her hair is perfectly... It's curly and poofy and everything. So that's also awesome. But then she goes into the cat.

So the point here is that all three of the main characters are here on the island exploring the castle, but they don't know about each other. So Larry and Alex are already in there exploring, and unbeknownst to them, Mary has just landed as well.

I don't think we need to go beat by beat through the investigation in the castle.

Well, it's pure Scooby-Doo, like you said. So listeners, just imagine what happens in a Scooby-Doo movie, right? They move through creepy cobwebby rooms. They light candles. There's suits of armor. It's pure Scooby-Doo.

Now, they do witness a ghost.

It appears that they see a real ghost. So when the clock strikes a certain hour, they see a box or a coffin or something like that open, and a ghost emerges from it. And the ghost's special effect is, like, it's just a translucent image of a person walking around.

In sort of old-fashioned courtly garb, they look like a conquistador or something.

I mean, I would say at this point in the film, it seems like this can't possibly be just, like, a person dressed up in a costume, you know? It looks like this is an honest-to-goodness ghost.

When the ghost appears, also, there's a huge gust of wind and the lights go out. Like, they've lit candles and the candles go out. But then the ghost just sort of turns around and walks back and gets back.

Yeah, it doesn't menace them in any way. It just sort of roams around for a minute and returns to its coffin. And when they do look in the box after it has done, they see that there's a skeleton in there.

It never acknowledges them either.

Right.

No, no. The other thing we see here is that at the top of the stairs inside the great hall in the beginning of this castle is a painting of somebody named Maria Isabella Sebastian, who looks uncannily like Mary Carter, which will come into play a little later.

Do I understand correctly? This castle is like in her family, right? So she is inheriting it? Yes, that's my understanding. So she is looking at her like great-great-grandmother or something. Right.

So now here comes Mary. She is walking up to the castle. The zombie has started to follow her, right? Just the zombie. She goes into the castle and starts calling for Larry. And Larry and Alex hear this. And here is Alex points it out, and here is what they say about that.

That sound like Ms. Carter's voice. No, that's just what they are trying to make us believe. They can't fool us.

So Larry is convinced that this isn't real. But Alex is not, Mary is not, right? Like Alex saw the ghost and he was terrified. And then the zombie is really close on Mary's heels, and she runs away, her robe gets torn.

A number of different haunted house shenanigans are occurring at about this time. Like a suit of armor sort of parches and things like that happen.

Yeah. And she sees the painting of her ancestor that looks just like her. She wanders off somewhere. I don't remember exactly where we're not going to-

She's upstairs into a bedroom and finds the chest with all the old dresses, including the dress that's in the painting.

Right. Meanwhile, Alex and Larry come downstairs, and here's a scene that actually made me laugh quite a bit. They get attacked by a suit of armor and they rip the helmet off the suit of armor and it's the zombie. He's carrying a spiked morning star in there. But the combat is not serious deadly combat, it's like a goofy wrestling match like you'd see in an old Vaudeville routine. It's actually pretty funny. But the way they get out of it is, Mary dresses up like Maria Isabel from the painting and walks down the stairs, and that stuns the zombie long enough for Alex and Larry to lock it in a room. First of all, Larry almost locks Alex in the room with the zombie, but Alex comes out with the morning star and the zombie is locked away. I think that's the last we see of our zombie.

While this is all has been going on, again, in Scooby-Dee style, we've had numerous little cuts to some unknown person spying on them or peeking from behind a curtain on them as they go. Right. So there is whatever supernatural stuff is going on in this castle there. We know that there is a human enemy out there who is in here with them and spying on their progress.

Yeah. One thing I left out is Parada does get kidnapped by the zombie at one point, and we lose sight of him. Again, there's a whole subplot here that I'm not going to go too deeply into. So after they get the zombie trapped, Mary observes that her likeness, Maria Isabel, is pointing somewhere. So they follow the pointing and they end up down in a crypt. They're both investigating the crypt, but it's Mary that sees it first. Actually, I would like to go into this bit because it's very scooby-doo, but it's also a little Indiana Jones. So Mary points this out to Larry, and they sort of decipher this text on the wall above one of their sarcophagi.

Larry, look up there.

What does it say?

God's something.

Treasures. That word is treasures, isn't it?

Yes, God's treasures in abundance lie.

That's it.

Something, something heavenly, heavenly key before they die.

I did wonder why these words were carved in English, since I think we've established that this is a Spanish family, but what do I know?

Yeah, don't ask too many questions. Here's a clever bit that I like going through, Indiana Jones style. There are these figures carved into the wall. And what she figures out is that these figures are not soldiers. They're musical notes. And she takes a piece of chalk and draws like a musical stanza on it and then plays those notes on the, of course, mysterious organ that is down there. I just thought that was kind of a fun bit. And what they end up doing, yeah, they find-

John, doesn't your family have a big organ in the family crypt?

We don't. And in fact, we don't bury people in the house we live in either, which is another big difference to us in this family.

Or bury them in glass coffins.

In glass cases. Yeah. But what happens is, Parada, who was assaulted by the mummy, rises out of one of these glass cases and they think it's another undead rising, but it's not. And he tells them, it's here. I forget exactly what he says, but he gives them the next clue they need to make it underneath the crypt.

There's another sub-level. He gives them the clue they need to figure out that the carvings on the wall are musical notes. Yeah. And then Mary plays the chord that measure over and over, and it causes a secret passage to open up.

Right. And they go down there and the movie then races to a conclusion. And this is the most Scooby-Doo part. I'm just going to go over it, but if you want to pause to pull anything out of this, let me know. So they go downstairs. Francisco is behind them, the Anthony Quinn's character. They discover there's like, well, basically, it looks like a mine down here. There's like a mine cart and a train track. Francisco gets shot by a mysterious hiding person, and then that person jumps out, and it's Jeffrey.

This is our big villain reveal. I think the movie has been working hard with mixed effect to throwing lots of potential villains at us throughout the movie. I think they are really, really trying to not make us suspect Jeffrey. I don't know about you, John. I guessed pretty early on that Jeffrey was the villain, mostly because of this, but...

I'll be honest, I was confused. I was like, why are we even talking to this guy? And what I should have made, which I didn't, was the jump of, oh, we're talking to him because they've introduced him as the villain, and I just didn't catch it.

Well, he's been super nice and super kind. And in the language of films, that can often be a sign that there's something going on. So I wasn't too surprised when it turned out to be Jeffrey.

Then in true Scooby-Doo fashion, he dumps the whole plot right here.

I did everything I could to keep her away from here. I even tried to buy her out. The first your brother and then Pirata crossed me.

What's it all about?

Yeah, so that's it. The first time we've heard of it, the last time we've heard of it. Yes. At one point, the zombie mother comes in during the scene and screams and run away. I have a question about the zombies later, but let's just wrap this thing up.

To clear up, the treasure here is there is a silver mine underneath the castle.

A silver mine.

It's the big treasure. It's kind of the secret of all this.

How does Jeffrey get gotten?

I think he falls down a mine shaft. It's a funny visual gag. He is about to shoot them. He is like, close your eyes. And really abruptly, he falls into the floor underneath him, opens up and he falls into a pit. And he just, and that's the last we see of him.

No, I think the ceiling above him opens up and falls on him. Doesn't it crushes him and puts him down into a hole. In the hole above them, suddenly Alex appears. Like he's done something to create this hole.

Yeah. He says, did I?

That's what happens.

He says, boss, did I press the wrong button? So it's definitely played as a comic thing. Yeah.

As a comic bit. Yeah. There's no action despite all the guns and threats. There's no actual tension is going to be in that way, you know? So then she's saved and we just re-end there.

I don't know if anything else happens. They get engaged to be married and then the credits roll basically.

Yeah. So I have a number of questions about this movie. So I'd like to throw them at you. I don't know if you have any questions. But here's my first question because it's relative to the plot. So they reveal later that the ghost was actually real, right? But so Francisco, Alex, and Anthony Quinn tells him this, but they don't discuss the zombie. Is the zombie real or is the zombie just part of the plot?

The zombie thing felt very much tacked on to this, to me. I don't think that the basic set up, haunted castle, I don't really think that zombie fits really naturally into it, like a voodoo zombie. I mean, what we have here is like a classic Gothic haunted castle. And from the very beginning, the zombie stuff felt forced on, which made me wonder, I don't really know, are zombies a trendy type of horror at this time? And it was a marketing thing to add a zombie because, I mean, the zombie adds some like kind of shenanigans with its kind of comic, the comic fights they have to do to defeat it. But they don't really seem to reflect on it at all.

No, there's one great joke where it's behind the door and Alex goes, hey, you still in there? And you hear a, brr. Also, this zombie is interesting because it has more agency. Like, could you imagine a modern zombie putting on a suit of armor to hide and trick them? I wonder that.

I mean, doesn't it take a team of people to help you get an armor like that? I mean, so that was pretty funny.

Yeah, exactly. So, I think this movie more is, it's a vehicle for Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard just to be funny, right? And they throw in mobsters and they throw in mistaken identity and zombies and a ghost. I think they're just throwing everything but the kitchen sink in this movie to get a copy out of it.

It reminded me a little of like in the early 2000s, you had all those like parody horror movies that would just grab in a bunch of references and stuff from other horror movies and it was just funny at the time to have those references in the movie. It felt a little bit like that. I wondered, so did you have other questions about the plot or anything first before? Because I have a few thoughts about this.

No, the only other comment, we've talked about how is this movie is just so Scooby-Doo and maybe this is where Scooby-Doo I can add that the original film from 1914, it was a haunted house and all the ghosts and stuff were created by someone trying to scare off the potential heir.

All right. So this is the plot of this play and so maybe this is where Scooby-Doo got the entire idea for the show because every plot. But the other thing I'll say that's weird to modernize on top of everything else is, everybody smokes all the time, right? Like, I'm a former smoker, I will admit this, but it's been a long time and it's been a long time in Michigan since you could smoke inside a building. But here, everybody just smokes wherever, whenever they want. It's just nonstop, which is just weird.

Let's do a wrap up where we kind of talk about how this fits into the Zombie Strains timeline here. I wanted to throw something out and see if you agree. I have a couple of questions. Is this a zombie comedy movie in the way that like Shaun of the Dead is?

I think so because the comedy, the zombie, once the zombie is in the suit of armor and they have that wrestling match, like, I don't think that's intended to be scary. I think that's intended to be funny. So that though the zombie is scary at one point, it really just becomes a device for more slapstick comedy.

I think it makes total sense that this is shows up in lists of zombie, quote, zombie movies, but.

Right. They do explicitly have a zombie when they talk about zombies.

Yeah. But that said, the zombie feels tacked on. It's there for, I think, comedic value more than anything else. And it does pretty effectively at that. But this felt like a horror comedy movie to me that had a zombie in it rather than a zombie comedy, although it's possible we can trace a line from this all the way to Shaun of the Dead. But I don't know. What do you think about that?

Yeah, I think you're right. If we talk about either the original pillars we started with or the other things we've learned along the way, it doesn't really match with any of those things. This is, to me, a haunted house comedy, like you said, that has a zombie tacked onto it.

To me, the zombie in this movie, the zombie element, felt tired and uninteresting compared to the previous movies we've seen. And it just made me wonder, are we seeing zombies become kind of boring and lacking in a real compelling hook? I wonder, because at some point, by the night of The Living Dead, is going to make them scary again, is going to put a twist on this to make them scary. And I wonder if we are seeing zombies have been out in movies for like a decade at this point. And I wonder if we're seeing the zombie, the voodoo zombie sort of slump into the category of kind of a trope that is played out, that doesn't have anything very new or interesting to do with it. And thus is in a great place to be revitalized by someone who does come along with a twist on it. What do you think about that?

I'm curious to see if that happens. That would not surprise me because I feel like, I feel like, yeah, they're really just going through the motions of the previous movies that we've watched to, to execute this and that it really doesn't mean anything. And, and yeah, I wonder if that's the case. I'm curious to see over the next few 1940s movies, if they feel the same way.

You know, I think you can see signs in this movie that, you know, zombies have definitely entered the vocabulary of moviegoers. They have a really cursory explanation of what a zombie is. But, you know, I think at this point, I think people just get it. You know, you, you, we, we understand how zombies behave and what they are. And the movie isn't really all that interested in talking about it more than the bare minimum needed to say. But you should expect zombies to show up in this movie.

Yeah, yeah, I agree. So, are we recommending this one, Andy? Would you say if Zombie Die Hard is trying to understand the genre?

I don't think this is something I'd recommend to a zombie fan. I don't think that this movie has a lot that is of interest specifically to say about zombies. I do think it is an easy recommendation if you like Bob Hope or you follow his career. I don't think it all works today, partly because of the racism, partly because I don't think the humor all really lands anymore. But if you like the style of humor here, I think this is probably a pretty good movie to watch. But don't watch it to learn something about zombies, because I don't think that this movie has a lot of me in that respect.

No, it really doesn't. I think the thing we got out of it is, wait, wait, this does inspire a bunch of stuff that has nothing to do with zombies, right? Ghostbusters, Scooby-Doo. Like, I would argue that this maybe is an influential movie, but not for what we're...

Yeah, I mean, at this point, it's pulling in zombies and giving it the same weight that it gives the other well-trod horror tropes that it pulls in, like the Ghost and the Gothic Castle and that sort of thing. So...

Yeah, yeah.

But if John and Andy were on Black Island in this castle, could they survive against a zombie in a suit of armor?

I'd like to think I could, though I'm afraid I would be too scared by the ghost to fight.

The casualness with which they respond to the ghost. Like, it's very funny to me. I mean, they truly did see explicit evidence of the supernatural in this castle. I mean, it hasn't shaken their worldview or caused them to abandon their religion or anything like that. That kind of made me laugh. I think I would probably survive because it's just such a Scooby-Doo environment. It's not really very threatening. Getting away from the zombie is just a matter of going upstairs and it loses your trail, that sort of thing. So I think I would have made it.

Yeah. There is one person who dies. Parada does die killed by the zombie, but that's the only person.

And Ramon in the beginning. He gets shot.

Poor Anthony Quinn gets shot twice. He gets shot to death early and then as a twin, he gets shot in the hand later.

I know this is going into a plot that we said we would skip because it was confusing. I actually thought he had been shot by Jeff or someone. I didn't know that the zombie had shot him.

Was it Jeff or was it Parada?

So I would need to go back and re-watch, but I want to...

No, no. Anthony Quinn was never killed by a zombie. He was, his hand was shot by Jeff.

But it's unclear why Parada would shoot Ramon in the beginning.

Yeah, there's...

I think they're trying to say he's protecting her, but it's not clearly stated.

Yeah, it's not clear.

So that stuff was all confusing. And I don't really care too much.

It was confusing. The one thing that's clear is that Jeffrey was the person who was trying to buy her out through Parada. But I don't think that explains everything. I think the plot is... There's too many red herrings and confusing bits to really go through.

I think in conclusion, I would say this is maybe... It's not a new strain of zombie film exactly. But I think it is a film that is recognizing the comedic possibilities of the zombie trope in addition to just the scary fear horror possibilities. And...

Yeah, it's our first comedy.

The zombie is really sort of a side thing in this movie. I think that's probably an important moment in kind of the evolution of a horror thing, is when the initial fascination note that turns into something that can kind of appreciate its goofier aspects, which this movie definitely embraces.

Right.

Hey, Brad.

What do we have next?

Well, since you guys mentioned Shaun of the Dead, I think we should jump to 2004. And as a comparison, we should watch another comedy. And check the chat. You'll see your poster.

Yeah, I'm super excited.

Yeah, this is great. This is great. So Shaun of the Dead.

Can I describe the poster though? Because I never realized this was the poster. The poster that he's shown us is... So what's on the poster is, for those of you who don't know, this is a film directed by a very funny man named Edgar Wright. He also directed Hot Fuzz and The World's End and some other stuff with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost who are featured on the poster. But what we're looking at here in this image is a bunch of zombies holding up a movie poster for Shaun of the Dead, which I think is kind of perfect. I'm excited. I've seen this movie. I am going to try to get my son to watch this movie with me. I feel like we're being rewarded for slugging it out through the 1930s.

Yes, we made it. We made it, John. Okay. Looking forward to it.

All right. So yes, next episode. This is the easiest one for us to recommend and say people should watch before they join us for the next episode. Shaun of the Dead from 2004. You have been listening to Zombie Strains. We'll be back in two weeks to talk about another zombie movie. If you enjoyed our podcast, please take a moment to rate us in your podcast app of choice. Tell a friend. Post on your socials. This will help like-minded people find our show. See you next time.