Welcome to Zombie Strains, the podcast where we watch all the zombie movies in chronological order. This episode, the Zombies of Mora Tau, starring none other than the 50-foot woman herself, Allison Hayes. You know, I've seen people act like that in pictures.

What do they call them?

Zombies or something?

Zombie.

What's a zombie? Just what is a zombie?

Well, a zombie is, Mr. Bill is. The living dead. They are the living dead. It's an army of zombies. Because a zombie has no will of his own. What is wrong? What is wrong?

Welcome back, everybody. Or if this is your first time, welcome to our zombie podcast. I'm John.

I'm Andy.

I'm Brad.

Hello, producer Brad. Who's excited about this movie? I have many, many thoughts and-

I'm so excited to talk about this one, guys.

Yeah. I should say that. I don't know how excited about the movie I am, but I am excited to talk about it. Let's be clear about that. Yeah. What do we got today, Andy?

Well, today, as you said, we're watching Zombies of Mora Tau. I usually take a second to note content or trigger warnings here up front. There's not a lot egregious that happens in this film, but I do want to mention that there is a scene in which a husband strikes his wife, and that will probably come up in our discussion. Other than that, I didn't flag a whole lot here to be concerned about, unless I missed something, guys.

No, though it is notable that this is nominally set in Africa and there are no people of color anywhere to be seen. So just that.

I want to talk about that once we get into it, because that really stands out about this film.

Brad, I can't wait to hear you talk about the cast and crew because there's some wild stuff in here. Why don't you lead us to it?

Sometimes when researching, I find fun trivia and sometimes I find just facts. Today is trivia, which is fun. All right.

Awesome.

I can't wait.

All right. Zombies of Mora Tau was released on February 19th, 1957, the same month as our last movie, Voodoo Island. The big movies from 57 were, as we said, The Bridge and the River Quiet, 12 Angry Men, An Affair to Remember, and Three Faces of Eve. Horror films from 57 included science fiction horror like The Incredible Shrinking Man and Attack of the Crab Monsters. Horror films targeted to the teen audience like I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, and one of the first box office successes from Hammer Productions in the US, The Curse of Frankenstein. Zombies of Mora Tau was produced by Sam Katzman and directed by Edward Kahn, the same production team that produced Creature with the Atom Brain, which we covered two episodes ago.

Oh, interesting.

And as you said, the film is set in Africa.

Hold on, hold on. One of the Zombies in this movie was the original Creature with the Atom Brain, weren't they? Like I'd have to check, but now that you say it, now I get a check. You keep going, I'm going to check this out.

You take a look. I see you don't have that in my list, but go, please look for it. The film, as you said, is set in Africa, but shot in Los Angeles. And one of the locations for the film is the Los Angeles Arboretum, which often used as a stand-in for exotic locations. It was also used in Jurassic Park, Lost World, Bridesmaids, and we've seen it most often, Fantasy Island, the original TV show.

Oh, hey. Oh, hey.

The screenplay is credited to Raymond T. Marcus, which is a pseudonym used by Bernard Gordon. Gordon had been a brief member of the Communist Party and was subpoenaed, but never actually met with the House Un-American Activities Committee. He worked under a pseudonym, or a producer's name was fronted for his, for a lot of his career. In the mid-1980s, the Writers Guild of America began to properly restore credits to blacklisted writers who worked under pseudonyms. And Gordon had more restored credits than any other writer with at least a dozen.

Oh, wow.

The screenplay for the Day of the Triffids was originally credited to the executive producer Philip Jordan, but it is now credited to Bernard Gordon.

Oh, hey, interesting.

Interesting. Well, the other writer here is listed as George Plimpton. That's not the George Plimpton.

This is George Plimpton, P-L-Y, not P-L-I.

Okay.

So it's not the paper lion, Plimpton.

All right.

And I didn't bring up stats for him, but he had nearly 300 credits. He started very early in film, like around the 20s, and during the silent era wrote, I think if I remember correctly, 100 to 200 scenarios and scripts between 1920 and 1930. But he wrote the story for this, not the screenplay.

Okay.

Greg Palmer plays the lead, Jeff. He appeared in a lot of Western movies and TV shows. His last role was in the TV miniseries from 1982, The Blue and the Gray.

I remember that.

Autumn Russell plays Jan, the love interest for Jeff. She has a short credit list of 13 roles, and her last credit was in 1960 on the Tab Hunter Show. And John, you stole my thunder with your opening. Allison Hayes plays Mona. She appeared in a lot of B movies in the 50s and TV shows in the 60s. She is most famous for the lead role of Nancy Archer in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. Sadly, she died young at the age of 46 from leukemia.

Yeah, that was a weird story. We could talk about it later, but her death is a little tragic.

Well, I can briefly go into it.

Yeah, please.

Did you read about it?

Well, what I read is that she was taking calcium supplements and that they were discovered to actually contain lead, and she was suffering from lead poisoning through the supplements she was taking.

Correct. And doctors didn't know what was going on and didn't believe her, and so she did her own research at the UCLA Medical Library, found symptoms of lead poisoning that matched hers, took samples of the calcium in her hair and sent it to a toxicologist who confirmed that both had toxic levels. But by then she was in a wheelchair walking with a cane and was an invalid. And then she later died from leukemia, which no one believes was from the lead poisoning. But one doctor suspected maybe it was from all the X-rays she had. During her diagnosis, she had over 300 X-rays trying to figure out what was going on.

Oh, wow.

And she had been lobbying the FDA to try and better label or I don't know if it's unclear what she's trying to ban or label these pills. And shortly after her death, the FDA changed regulations regarding these to warn people about them. And then if you go even further, the lead came from, the pills were bone meal, which was from horse bone, which was from England, and there was leaded gasoline, so the horses were inhaling the gas exhaust, the fumes, which got into the bone, which was then ground into the bone meal, which was made as part of the supplement.

Oh, wow. That's a little crazy. All right. I have to say, a brief look at IMDb does not list the actor being the same as the actor from The Creature from the Atom Brain. But if I find out anything else, I'll let you know.

Ray Corrigan plays one of the unnamed sailors that we see in the boat at the beginning. It's hard to tell which one, but I believe he's the one who makes it to the end of the film. He's one of those white sailor caps on the boat by the land. He had an interesting career. His first film was 1932 in Tarzan the Ape Man. He played the ape. In 1934, he was in both Tarzan and his mates and Hollywood Party. He played the gorilla in Tarzan and in Hollywood Party. He played Ping Pong the gorilla. In total, he was in an estimated 30 films as an ape or gorilla because he had a gorilla suit.

That's like getting cast in a movie in a western because you own a saddle. Like, that's amazing.

And I've seen it referenced as the Corrigan suit, so it was a well-known thing, but he never liked to get credit for it. He also starred in his own serial. He was in the Undersea Kingdom in 1936, which was followed by The Mesketeers, and then his last one was The Range Busters.

All right.

It was controversial that that version of the the Musketeers had an ape in it. Yeah. It was kind of a weird choice.

Well, not Musketeers. I'm sorry. I got to say this right. It's Mesketeers, M-E-S-Q-U-I-T-E-E-R-S.

What is that?

So it's a ripoff of the Musketeers.

Okay, gotcha.

I don't know. I didn't go that deep.

That's all right.

Okay, you guys sitting down for the last tidbit?

Yeah.

You mean, okay. I thought we had already gotten the cool ones.

No, no, no, no. Marjorie Eaton plays Grandmother Peters.

Yes.

Do you recognize her face?

She's not.

She is not the Wicked Witch from Wizard of Oz, if that's where you're going.

No, I was thinking she was Granny from the original Beverly Hillbillies.

Oh, bigger.

Who?

I'll give you a hint. Andy is dressed appropriately today.

She's in Star Wars? Who is she in Star Wars?

Two women in The Empire Strikes Back filmed the scenes of the emperor under heavy makeup. She is one of the women who was the emperor.

Oh my God. No way. You're kidding me.

But there's a dispute as to which one made it into the film. The other one was the wife of Rick Baker, the makeup artist.

Oh, wow. That is amazing.

That is your best surprise trivia.

I think so.

Yeah. The bar is getting really high now.

When I read that, I wanted to record right away. I've been sitting here for a while.

That's amazing.

I love it.

No reliable box office for this film as usual. John, you ready for history?

Yeah.

I sort of get the lucky version of the history because this movie is released a month after our last movie. But just to remind everybody, I mean, it's the 50s. It's a time of enormous change.

It's also a time of movies about enormous people and creatures.

Shrinking people, growing people, giant people. It's bizarre.

If it was the wrong size, this was your decade.

Yeah. So I think we think of the 60s as a time of radical change in the country, where feminist ideas come to the forefront. Stuff like that is happening. Real change in our country, civil rights come to the forefront. But all of that started here in the 50s, and I think we can see some of that. We all get into it as we talk about the movie, but I think female empowerment, there's all kinds of messages here which I was not expecting that I think are good, and we can talk about that more.

Hey, before we start, do you want to take a quick glance at the poster again?

Let us do that.

All right. John, why don't you just, I described the poster last time, so you take a crack at it this time.

Well, it's great, honestly. It says across the top, zombies of the ocean deeps, a tide of terror floods the screen. It's got a picture of a screaming woman who is Allison Hayes. There's a man lying on the beach clutching something. It looks like a chest. We now know what that is. It says zombies of Mora Tau in capital letters. It does show a horde of zombies on the poster too. I'm going to give this poster a thumbs up.

Good poster. All right, so let's dive into discussing this movie. Let me give the 60 second overview and then we'll go through the key stuff in more detail as is our usual practice. Zombies of Mora Tau takes place in Africa. If you Google this, people will say it takes place in South Africa or some people will say East Africa, but I don't think the film specifies. I have a feeling the South Africa is either because there's just a lot of white people in this movie, and people might just think that that suggests it takes place in South Africa. This movie is about a shipwreck, and I guess a lot of ships did. There was a major trade route around the South end of Africa, I assume. All right, I'm sorry, that was a really boring discursion. Boring for everyone except me. All right, a group, a sort of ragtag group of scoundrel treasure hunters has come to the coast of Africa in search of a cache of diamonds that was in a ship that went down decades earlier. And they, in the course of their pursuit, they run afoul of local zombies, essentially. The zombies, we're going to have a lot to say up of these zombies, but the zombies, in this case, are the undead crew of the original ship that went down. And they lurk off the coast of Africa underwater, although they can come onto land, protecting those sunken diamonds from decades worth of treasure seekers who have come. So we will find out if this group of treasure seekers is the one that is successfully able to get those diamonds or if they will fall victim to the zombies like their predecessors. Yes. How's that?

That sounds great.

So, John, opening shots of this movie, we get some text. And I just want to read this. I want to read the whole thing. It's kind of short.

Please.

Because I think this is a pretty good setup. There's some text of Scrolls that says, In the darkness of an ancient world, on a shore that time has forgotten, there is a twilight between life and death. Here dwell those nameless creatures who are condemned to prowl the land eternally. The walking dead. I want to pause right here up front, John. What was your reaction to this intro blurb?

I loved it. It was super cheesy and corny, which I love. I also was so reminiscent of the Twilight Zone. I'm like, did they steal this from the Twilight Zone? But just doing a quick check, no, the Twilight Zone came out two years later. I was a little surprised by that because it has that line, the Twilight Zone between life and death. I felt like, hold on a second. Is that just lifted? But it's not. I think this is great. There's great music over it too. However, sadly, no theremin. But you got to go with what you got.

We'll factor that into our final scoring of this film, for sure. I think that this intro text lays the groundwork that we are getting a different take on zombies than we have seen yet. I'll save some of those details for when these zombies actually appear, but this got my attention.

Yeah, for sure.

As the movie opens, we meet our hero protagonist, Ms. Jan. Jan is getting what I propose. I propose we start recording this as a trope, the chauffeur briefing or the chauffeur info dump.

Yeah. For every Caribbean movie from the 30s and 40s, not everyone, but most of them have the chauffeur misdirected position. Yeah, for sure.

So Jan is being driven. She has returned to Africa after having been away for 10 years. And so her chauffeur is saying, hey, welcome back. She is saying, I'm glad to see it looks just like I remember it. And then this movie does not hold its terrors till later in the movie. We get one like 30 seconds in. A man appears in the middle of the road and it looks like they're going to run right into him. Jan screams. But the driver, Sam, drives right through the guy.

And doesn't even slow down.

He doesn't even slow down. Jan is freaked out. But the chauffeur says, it wasn't a man. It was one of them.

Right.

And he does not explain this further. So John, this movie had me already. Like I was, I loved this opening two minutes.

For sure.

So why don't you talk about, I know spoilers here that the creature that appeared in the middle of the road is this movie's zombie, or one of this movie's zombies. So why don't you tell us what, tell us about the zombie.

So it appears very sort of normal and person like. However, it has this slow shambling gate of the classic original sort of Night of the Living Dead zombie, it walks towards you with its arms sticking out, but it has huge staring eyes, nothing seems to affect it. And yeah, this feels like the first, not the first, but the clearest example of like, like when you and I started this, we sort of had Night of the Living Dead on our roadmap as a target, and this feels like the first zombie that could be from that movie, just like you could pluck them out of one movie and put them in another, except there's not a lot of prosthetics or anything.

Yeah, exactly. I'll wait a little until we see a few more zombies. I want to talk a little bit more in more detail about what they look like and stuff, but I'm going to wait because we're going to get more of them. Yeah. Jan arrives at her grandmother's estate here. Her grandmother has lived here for decades, and a little bit later in the movie, we'll find out why she's lived here. Let's go ahead and play an audio clip. Jan is freaking out and trying to get an explanation for why her chauffeur just ran over slash threw a guy, and neither her grandmother or the driver seem particularly upset about it.

You're trembling.

We hit a man, ran over him.

Not a mile down the road. Sam wouldn't stop.

I saw him, ma'am, with the seaweed on him.

He stood in the middle of the road and tried to stop the car. Get Miss Jan's things up to her room. But that man, he's badly hurt or dead. There's no one on the road. Remember that.

I saw him.

Sam saw him. He admits it. Go inside now. I'm freshening up, Jan. So you still believe in this voodoo? I thought it was a nightmare for my childhood. I thought everything would be different now.

And there we have it. So we have a mention that this Zombie had seaweed on him. I would say this Zombie had a light accent of seaweed on him. It was not clearly visible.

A dusting perhaps, yeah.

They're going to insist through this movie that these are seaweed encrusted Zombies. But yeah, I don't know. Maybe one or two of them have a small, a few leaves of seaweed on them.

Correct, yeah.

Like scarves.

Yes.

Yes. Well, actually, I guess we could talk about it now. This movie made me think of a much more modern movie that has seaweed zombies, essentially. John, do you might know what I'm getting at here?

I don't.

Okay, it's Pirates of the Caribbean, the first one.

Of course.

With Johnny Depp, which has these skeletons slash zombie pirates that are super gruesome looking and they've got barnacles and shells encrusted in them. They look great, honestly. I realize this movie can't make these things super gross and decayed, but I wish they had at least glued a few shells onto their outfits or something like that to reinforce the theme.

They at least dress them like sailors, but that's about it.

We did get to mention a voodoo here. This movie, it teases voodoo a bit. It doesn't really make much sense that this would be voodoo-related because voodoo is a new world religion, but that's par for the course for these films, I think.

Also, you forgot something important. Grandma has a dog, and how many dogs have we seen so far? Like, I'm a sucker for a dog.

Okay. What kind of dog was it, John?

I don't know. It was a guard dog. It wasn't a great dean, but it was like a big dog, not quite that size that appears to protect grandma.

I was expecting it to be able to detect the zombies or ward them away, it'd be the first animal to do that, but I don't think it did that.

No, it does bark at them at one point, but.

Well, that's useful.

Yes. Okay. John, we're about to cut over to meet our other protagonists. Is there anything else you want to say about this intro scene, or grandma, or Jan, or anything like that?

Now, other than to say, grandma clearly is in charge here, over everybody in the movie. Not everybody listens to her, but she is the one who knows what's going on and what to do, and she tells people to do stuff. Sometimes they don't listen, but she's like the boss.

Yeah. She's very self-assured. She can handle herself. She's a tough cookie, I think you might say. All right. So then we switch over and we meet our other sensible heroes at least. We cut over to a boat off the coast and we meet the crew. The crew is a bunch of misfits, basically, who we see that they have some sort of scheme to get rich from diamonds. So you don't need to remember all of these people, but there are four of them that are important. There's Harrison, who's a rich guy who has financed this expedition to get the diamonds.

George Harrison, not the Beetle, but George Harrison.

It's George Harrison, but not the Beetle, and he's the captain of the boat as well.

Yes, and I'll get to his wife in a sec, and then we have Jeff Clark, who they've hired to be their diver. And so he is actually kind of an indispensable part of this team, because the diamonds are underwater and we're going to get a lot of vintage diving suit action later in this movie. And then Dr. Eggert, who seems like a kind of nice guy, but he kind of along for the ride to just write about the expedition no matter what happens. But lastly, and easily most importantly, we have, who else do we have here, John?

We have George Harrison, not the Beatles, wife, Mona Harrison. So we'll just call her Mona, and we'll call the Captain Harrison from now on.

And Mona is played by Allison Hayes in by far the most energetic performance in this film. It leaves a really big impression.

Yes, absolutely.

When we meet-

Really big, ha ha.

Yeah, okay. Yeah, just anytime a 50 foot related joke can be made, just pop right in. So when we meet Mona, she is this really over the top flirty sultry, has this flirty sultry routine going on. And guys, in the course of this podcast, we have identified a couple of great one-liners. I don't know if we've been tracking this in Brad's epic Zombie Strains spreadsheet or not. Maybe we should start doing it. But so we had Bob Hope who said the memorable sentence, shoot your chassis over to me, Lassie and Ghost Breakers. Which I will never forget. In Valley of the Zombies, we had the police chief's very insightful diagnosis, a forensic analysis that this particular party has a penchant for pickling. I want to add to that list. As we meet Mona, she is right in front of her husband flirting and trying to kiss Clark, the diver. Clark goes, you're listing to port, Mona.

I did enjoy that.

So these people, what do you want to say about these people, John? We're going to spend a lot of time with these four characters, and I would say they are a little different than the heroes we've seen in most of our movies.

I mean, it comes up several times throughout the movie, but I think the general impression we get and we keep getting is, they really are a sort of amoral adventurers. They're not friends with anybody. The only thing they're here is for money.

They don't like each other.

They don't like each other and they don't trust anybody. There's a lot of accusations they make of others, not being able to trust others later in the movie. But yeah, they're essentially like, bad guys isn't the right word, but they're not heroes, at least not yet.

This whole movie had a much more modern feel to it than even movies from a couple of years previous that we've watched. Part of that is, I think, the band of somewhat unlikable, in a likable sort of way, scoundrels, who are going to get picked off one by one. And you're okay with that because they're all kind of jerk, greedy jerks. It feels like a kind of a more modern trope you see all the time. But this is the first time, I mean, so we saw something similar to this in our last movie Voodoo Island, which also had a group of people that was picked off. But this one, they really lean into like how jerkish they are. I really enjoyed every scene in which this crew was like arguing and bickering with each other.

Yeah, they do not get along at all.

So, all right, I got to speed things up because we're still at the beginning of the movie. So, but there is one important thing that happens here as they're all arguing, a person, we recognize this as one of these seaweed zombies, swims up to the side of the boat and reaches up and basically snatches a crewman off of the boat. Kills him and they recover the crewman's body, but his neck has been broken and the zombie swims off. So, that's the inciting incident. So, the crew is like, well, we got to go bury this guy. So, they head to shore where they meet up with, I guess, Grandma and Jan, who I think are the only people that really live in the area.

Right. Grandma was expecting them. By the way, I don't think we see the chauffeur again.

No, he vanishes. Yeah, they had written to Grandma basically saying we're coming. Yeah. I think she wrote back saying, don't come, but they insisted.

I don't know. I get the sense that she wants somebody. I feel like she's lining people up to get killed by these zombies, but we can talk about that in a second.

Yes. So, okay. I'm looking to you guys to help me focus on the important stuff here and not get lost in the seaweed.

Yeah. I would like to jump to her showing them the graves of all the previous expeditions.

That's a great thing. Okay. So, there's a lot of scenes where the characters all interact. While this crew is on land, they're going to be staying at Grandma's estate. So, that's why they're all here. And there's early signs that Jan and Clark the Diver are going to fall in love and be our romantic leads. But at one point, Grandma is just really upfront that these people are all going to die. Yes. She just says, you're doomed. And to make this point, she takes them out to her backyard or to another place nearby. And she walks them through a cemetery. And everyone in this cemetery is from a past expedition that came looking for these diamonds. So, she's like, and here are the Germans from 1906, and here are the, and then the Spanish came.

There's signs with years on them next to the groups of graves.

Yeah. So, she leads them chronologically through this history of doomed expeditions. And she ends, and they wind up in front of a bunch of open, newly dug graves, which grandma has dug for this expedition. It's marvelous.

Yes.

Do you have any thoughts on this, John?

The graves are amazing, but the best part of the graves is while they're talking to grandma, Mona falls in and screams. And there's actually this kind of terrifying moment where she's trying to scramble her way out of her grave. And she says, that's my grave. I know it. But what I wanted to point out here in this scene, because it was sort of like the most delightfully cheesy thing, this feels like a horror movie in a way that our previous horror movies didn't. Do you know what I mean? Like, it's really ham-fisted. The whole thing is shot during the day, but it's meant to look at night. People are doing dangerous things. There's things stalking them in the woods. Like, don't get me wrong. This is a B movie. It's really slow moving. It's not perfect. But the elements of like a more modern, this feels like, I don't know about all the other horror movies happening right now, but this feels more like a horror movie than a lot of the stuff we've watched.

I had the exact same impression. And that impression only got stronger as the movie played out.

Yeah, for sure.

So I love that moment where Mona screams that she knows it's her grave. That's just great.

Yeah.

A little foreshadowing there, not very subtle. So after this, they all head in. And this is where we get the backstory from Grandma on why is she here? What's up with the diamonds and stuff like that? So this is kind of a longer clip, but let's hear Grandma explaining basically the legend that drew these both her and these treasure hunters to Africa.

You know the story. The Susan B put in here for trade in 1894. The sailors discovered a temple with a golden cask full of uncut diamonds. They stole the cask. There was a fight and ten of the sailors were presumed dead. The captain among them. The others returned to the ship with the cask. Then, surprisingly, the ten missing men appeared. Something happened. The rest of the crew was slaughtered and the ship scuttled in the bay.

You think that these ten men that had been killed returned to their ship?

They were dead then and they're dead now. But they're still guarding those cursed diamonds. One of them killed your sailor tonight. They've killed everyone who's come for the diamonds.

But they're murderers, your own husband.

They're dead, I tell you. They have no morality, no free will.

Yeah, I love that way that closes. They have no morality, they have no free will.

Yes. So, I want to pause here because we've learned a lot about these zombies that sets them apart from any of the zombies we've seen to date. So, I'll lead with one observation I have here. Is this the first time we have seen zombies as sort of a masterless, almost naturally occurring state? They are guardians. They were not created by a person, but sort of nature has bound them as guardians. What do you think?

See, I feel like these guys are bound to the treasure by a curse, a sort of mystical curse, not unlike the curse of King Tut, of Tutankhamun or whatever, a horror trope, and they're almost like ghosts, except for they're not ghosts. They're clearly zombies, and they're bound to this place until they can be released from the curse. That's how it felt to me.

Yes. I think they might be our first explicitly masterless zombies though.

I think you're right. They're not, nobody controls them. There's no nefarious force working in the background, though Mona and Harrison accused grandma of being behind it all. I didn't believe that. I think the whole time, yeah, they're autonomous, but have no free will. They're bound to do this thing, and they can't help themselves.

Yeah. Just to be clear, I don't know if it was clear from that clip, but one of the captain of that ship, one of the zombies was grandma's. This is actually Jan's great grandma, but I'm just going to keep calling her grandma, is grandma's husband. So she came out here hoping to find a way to put him to rest decades ago, but has since realized that that can't happen until the curse is removed from the diamonds. What she wants to do, what she thinks will fix it is destroying the diamonds.

Correct.

Yep, absolutely. Now, I have questions about how one would destroy a diamond, but that's a separate question with 1950s technology in the middle of Africa.

But it does make you wonder, this movie does not answer that question either. You can write some fan fiction about it, John, explaining the backstory.

Grandmother said that there were 10 sailors, so 10 zombies.

Yep.

Later in the film, we see 11.

Grandma.

Why? I don't know. You would think if it-

I feel like that's not that hard.

The producer go, we could save money. Let's only do 10. Why do we have 11th one? They only said 10 in the script.

I think the number can be a little bit variable, if you imagine that at least some of the past adventuring parties were zombified, which is what is going to happen to some of the people in this party.

That's fair. I'm interested in that. Now, you've left out a really important horrifying element in this scene, Andy, which is that Dr. Egger is wearing a striped seersucker jacket with a striped tie. What the hell? Anyway, sorry, carry on.

It's just part of the horror of this film. Yes. This is all interrupted by an exciting scene. We hear the screams of multiple women, Jan and Mona both, because a seaweed zombie has broken into their room. Yes. So this is where it became clear that this movie was going to be great with its buildup, but it was never going to be able to deliver with its actual zombie action sequences.

Yes. I think the big flaw in this movie, and keep in mind, I adore this movie, it's absolutely charming, but it is a B movie, and one of its flaws is all the action sequences. Because the zombies are slow moving and because it's shot almost like a play, the problem is that the action scenes involved with zombies are really slow.

Yeah.

You know what I mean? So, yeah.

So we do have a fight here, though. All the men rush in, because the girls are just screaming as they want to do in this era of film. The men rush in and try to fight the zombie to no avail. It shrugs off. Even bullets don't have any effect on it. And it's only when grandma rushes in and brandishes fire that she is able to, she forces them off. And I want to ask if this is the first time that we have seen a zombie bane weaponized like this. So we learn from this that they fear fire. Grandma says that's the only way to fight them. And in the action scenes later in this movie, people are going to take fire with them for the purpose of dealing with the zombies. Any thoughts on that?

No, I think that's cool. The only bane they've sort of mentioned otherwise is salt, but it was never really, it was sort of in passing and they never weaponized it, so to speak.

Yeah, that was more like an element in a ritual that might dispel a zombie. This is more like a tactical weakness of the zombie.

Yeah, exactly. Yes. Also, I think what's important here is their invulnerability. There is a prescription for killing them in a modern zombie movie, which is destroy their brain or their head. But besides that, modern zombies are also functionally invulnerable. They don't even get slowed down and these zombies are that way too.

Notably, nobody makes the logical step of like, what if we tried setting a zombie on fire instead of just waving a torch at it? I was waiting for someone to experiment with a new tactic, but it never happened. All right. Jan and Clark are flirting after this.

I hate to keep dragging this back. I do want to point out one thing. After this horrifying attack and after we've seen there's zombies just wandering around outside, Jan just goes outside to get some air. I just want to throw that out there. The choices characters make in this movie are not the worst, but they're not the best.

This is also another movie where as soon as the zombie leaves the door of the room, everyone like relaxes. No one's like, let's follow it, let's go deal with it. It's still roaming around the estate grounds. This movie does that kind of annoying horror thing where it makes us plod along with characters that don't, that have to be convinced that they're in a supernatural horror movie.

And until very late in the movie, like even Harrison is like, it's all a setup, like he just wants the diamonds.

I find this usually to be kind of a draggy element in horror movies, and I wish that we could all just make the agreement to skip past that. But Jan and Clark decide to go out and investigate where the zombie was hit by the car at the beginning. Right. And that's kind of a long scene. They don't really learn much that we don't already know. But we do have another zombie attack because a zombie grabs Jan and walks off with her. Right. And then we have another fight where it is again illustrated that the zombies are essentially invulnerable to conventional weapons because Clark stabs it a couple of times, has no effect.

Yeah. I want to point out here that Jan screams bloody murder in this scene. I feel like we finally have like scream queens. You know what I mean? We've seen people scream before, but like the concept of somebody with a good scream, sort of being the centerpiece of the movie, kind of, is I think we're seeing an early version of that. Does that make sense?

I do think that makes sense. And I think you're right. Yeah, I almost got a clip of the screaming because it's really quite loud. Yeah. But I'll spare you that. Listeners, you can imagine what it's like.

It was so loud that when I watch these films, my wife just passes through the room, ignores them. This one, she goes, what is going on in this film? She's all that screaming. It caught her attention.

This was kind of a funny scene. Jan does a ton of screaming, and then she goes silent for a long time, and then she starts screaming again. I wondered, did she lose consciousness? Then she woke back up and started screaming again. How hard could it really be to get away from this zombie's grip? This ends with kind of a cool sequence, because Clark follows the zombie that's carrying Jan to a hidden mausoleum on the island, or a temple. I don't know what this is. It has a temple-y look.

Yes. It's in a graveyard, so I think it's like a crypt.

Yeah. At first, I thought it was in that same graveyard that grandma took them to, which was in the backyard of the estate. I was like, does no one really know about this mausoleum that's next door?

Yeah. I had the same thought too, but no, it's a different location, just to be clear.

The zombie takes Jan in here, and this is a good creepy scene because Clark rushes into this mausoleum, and there's not one zombie, but there is a row of tombs that all the lids all open up, and about a dozen zombies or 10.

Well, you're giving this movie a little too much credit. I don't think they could afford lids because the zombies are just lying in coffins and they sit up. So again, it is effective, but I don't want you to overstate that.

My imagination was filling in some gaps, perhaps. But the... And so we now have what we have to call, John, a horde of zombies. Do you agree?

Absolutely. This is a horde of zombies, and it's... Well, we'll get to more action sequences, but it's the first horde we've seen that acts like a horde that we were expecting, that we've been expecting for 25 episodes. This is the first truly horde-like horde of zombies, if I can say.

Yes, agreed. Even if they mostly stand still in the scene, but...

Is this more of a horde than Creature with the Atom Brain?

Oh, that's a tough one.

There's more of them here. There's a few more of them.

And so the fight in Creature with the Atom Brain, they certainly felt like a horde, and it did feel zombie-esque, but here, they're like... In the later action sequence on the boat, they like swarm it, and they sort of feel more unstoppable. You're right, it's not a first, because the Creature with the Atom Brain did that, but this feels more like...

It's getting bigger and bigger.

It's getting bigger and bigger, yeah.

Yeah, it feels more like a modern horde than the Atom Brain one, where they were kind of like a clump of terminators in the way they behaved more than our shambling dead here. So we're going to find out later that the Zombies take victims back here to zombify them, and I think that was the intent with Jan. But Clark has brought along a flare gun, and he uses it to hold off the Zombies while he grabs Jan and escapes. And I thought the lack of special effects for this flare gun was pretty funny.

They show the gun going off, smoke coming out, and then there's like a bright flash that makes the zombies pause. But we never actually see the flare, which is kind of amazing. Plus, it's inside. Like, don't try this at home, kids. I think a flare gun going off inside would be a lot noisier and smokier than is shown here.

Yes. So they retreat back to the estate. And anything else on that before? Because now we're moving into really the second half of this movie, where things are starting to come together.

No, nothing else to say on that. I think we could jump right to the next day.

All right. I did want to say, I did want to say, I have a note, that the Zombies here, they show a mild amount of cleverness, I would say.

They do have a little bit of guile. Like when Clark is tracking the one that's kidnapped Jan, like it hides behind a tree and tries to hit him from behind. Like it seems to have some cleverness.

So we're back at the estate and it's basically time to go out and get the diamonds. And we have a good scene here. I don't have an audio clip of it, but this was a really enjoyable scene of the scoundrel adventurers all bickering with each other. Mona has the irrational belief that Jan and grandma have set this all up. I think it's pretty irrational because Jan almost got killed by the zombies.

Yeah.

It seems like.

I do kind of love it though because Mona's line is, I bet old sweetness and light was leading you into a trap, which is how she refers to Jan. I kind of love that.

Yeah. So, I mean, the highlight of this scene and this is where, I mean, I honestly just really fell in love with Allison Hayes on the basis of this performance.

For sure.

She is great. She's really hamming it up and they're all bickering. Clark is negotiating for more money. They're all just a bunch of greedy jerks and it's great. But they head out to sea and Clark, this is our much awaited diving scene and Clark gets into a big old school undersea suit. Is there a term for these, John or Brad?

Yeah, it's pre scuba, right? So they're not the tight fitting masks and breathing apparatus. It's the giant round helmet with portholes on it.

Yeah. And so he's got to be winched down from the boat. And so they winch him down and there's some very unconvincing underwater sequences. Yeah.

They're slow. They're unconvincing. However, I was absolutely delighted by the fact that what they is, it's basically like a little smoky veneer. And then they've set like a bubble machine for like for little blown bubbles to come out of the back of his helmet.

That was kind of delightful.

Except they pop.

They pop.

Yeah. Which is also delightful. Yeah.

Remember folks, we are praising this film in many ways, but the B is strong with this one in B movie.

Yeah. So he gets down there to the bottom of the ocean and they have, you know, it was my impression, it's kind of hard to locate underwater shipwrecks, but man, they parked right above the ship because he drops right down next to it. That's great. And he goes, he wanders in slow motion. It's, it is funny. We will have here and later in the movie, we'll have several sequences where people are trying to act like they're underwater and it, they're clearly just moving really slowly and it's kind of funny. We see, but Jeff, Clark does not, that a Zombie is sneaking up behind him while he's investigating this underwater shipwreck and he says basically, hey, I can see in the hold, I see where the diamonds are. I'm just going to try and get those now. So just in a little bit that tells you a little bit about these characters up at the boat, Harrison is like, well, I'm not letting him, I'm not letting him get those diamonds out of that wreck unless I'm there to see it. Because he doesn't trust him. So he starts suiting up to go down after. While Clark is trying to get at the diamonds, a seaweed zombie grabs him from behind and they have a fight. I actually thought that they killed Clark here for a minute.

I did too, actually.

They have to winch him back up, like complete with a zombie attached to his diving suit. But so they winch him back up to the surface, he knocks the zombie off, but he has been, something in the course of this fight has kind of rendered him comatose. So they have to go back to land to get him medical treatment. Anything, I enjoyed this. This is a good sequence. Do you have any thoughts on this diving scene?

No, I think if the only slow motion combat underwater had been this one, it would have been fine, but they do that over and over. So it's very slow and prolonged and they keep doing it. And it's okay, but yeah, they, you know.

Yeah, if you like the scene, I have good news for you because there's a lot more.

If you like slow motion boxing matches, we have a film for you.

Yeah. Yes. Okay, so then we are actually approaching this movie's final act. So they bring the unconscious Clark back to Grandma's estate. They put him bed to bed. The doctor is taking a look at him. The adventures are doing some more arguing and bickering. Mona has some really great just acting moments here, I think, with this role. It does end though, the tensions rise and Harrison slaps Mona.

Yes, and she's very upset about it and runs off.

Yes, Mona won't let up with this idea that Jan and Grandma are working against them. So she's making a big scene. Harrison slaps her and she runs off. When she doesn't come back, they basically realize they have a problem.

Yeah, there's a great line here. Grandma is like the philosopher queen of this place. At one point, they have a brief philosophical discussion about people being unsatisfied and she says something like, people could only find the peace of mind while they were alive. I'm like, whoa, grandma, you are the wise old woman here.

Yeah. I almost grabbed that clip and I should have because in that same conversation, grandma also says something about the zombies that is kind of interesting. And she suggests that they are, she's talking about how they're trapped and they're in torment, she says.

They're like restless ghosts. That's where the ghost angle felt to me. But again, they're not, they're zombies, but they have that tormented, can't find rest aspect.

Yeah, and this movie doesn't really go into it, but this does suggest that unlike some of our other zombies, they have some awareness of their plight. And these zombies are more threatening than other zombies we've seen, but still the main plight of the zombie is being a zombie. Like that's the horror of it. Right, right. So, Grandma kind of straightforwardly says, the zombies clearly got Mona. And I think she even says something like, if they've had her this long, she's dead already or something like that.

Yeah, they just tell her not to track, try to track her down.

It's too late. Harrison seems really unconcerned that his wife is dead. I wasn't sure. He is the worst husband possible. So I wasn't sure if this is a note on his character or just the script kind of forgetting that he should be having an emotional reaction to this. But what happens though is they gather flares and gasoline. And again, I like this planning, like gathering specific anti-zombie weapons. I like this. And they head out to find Mona when they realize she's not coming back. And they figure out that they're going to go check the mausoleum because that's where Jan had been taken earlier. We get in there, there's a bunch of zombies in there, and Jan is laying on the floor in what I would say in sort of like a ritual like position.

Yes.

And there's another one of these like not super exciting fight scenes with flare guns. We do see a flare or at least a sparkler in this scene, John.

Yes.

I was watching for it because I was laughing at how they were avoiding showing us any actual flares. Yeah. Most, yeah. And they recover Mona, but something is wrong. And let's hear, let's hear what happens when they bring a silent, unresponsive, but seemingly alive Mona back to grandma's estate.

She's dead. Your wife is dead, Mr. Harrison.

You saw her walk in here. You all saw her walk.

Look at her eyes. Not breathing. It's cold as death.

I won't listen to that crazy talk. You hear me? I'll know more of it.

I'm going to put her to bed. Not in this house.

I love that sequence.

Yeah, grandma's hard. She's a hard woman. She's like, sorry, tough luck and no, you can't keep her here.

Yeah. She is, but I like her character because she's not mean. She knows what's going on.

She's pragmatic.

Yeah, exactly.

It's very much like a scene that we saw in some of our modern movies, like the Dawn of the Dead remake or Shaun of the Dead, where there's a debate about how to treat somebody who's been turned. This feels like a precursor to that conversation.

Yeah. If we think about in our Last of Us discussion, we had that Joel and Ellie kind of clash over how to treat a person who's going to turn. Grandma would be the pragmatic, like, yeah, shoot them in the head.

Right now, just shoot them right now. Why are we having this conversation? Yeah, for sure.

Yes. But they won't listen to grandma, so they put Mona up in a bedroom, and not too surprisingly, that night, Mona, this whole movie takes place at night, what am I talking about? Later, Mona rises from her bed and grabs a knife, and she is walking in our classic zombie, slow motion, face totally blank. She stabs a guy, I didn't even know who he was, one of the red shirt crewmen, and kills him. It's a pretty good kill. He's laying in bed, and she just plunges the knife.

Yeah, and it's sort of, again, hindsight is 20-20, it presages the scene that we love to talk about in Night of the Living Dead. It's not the same, it doesn't look the same, where the child kills the mother with a knife in a gruesome fashion, right?

Yes, it's a good scene.

The one thing that made me laugh, though, there's all this tension, she stabs the guy, the other guy jumps out of bed, she's going towards him with a knife, he throws a candlestick, and it bounces right off her face. That was good acting, where she's like, she only pauses for a minute, she didn't even blink as the candlestick hits her in the face.

I rewatched that like three times, because there is a thunk as it hits her forehead.

Yeah, they're not playing around.

She does not break characters.

Yeah, when reading her history, there were a couple of times she got injured. She got injured in a western falling off a horse. Like, I don't think they cared as much about actor safety as they do today, is what I'll say.

So, they don't kill Mona, but they have to admit that she is a zombie now. They don't think she's a zombie, but that's obviously what she is. And John, how do they keep her out of trouble?

This was funny, but also surreal. They put candles all around her bed, so she can't go near the flame. So, she just sits in bed staring at all these little candles that surround her.

Yeah. I love the little touches she brings to this role, because she's just sort of looking around with this almost bewildered look on her face. And everywhere she looks, there's these candles. It's pretty funny. I enjoyed it, though, and that's how they captured her, too, with candlesticks, which...

Can we go back to the knife?

Yes.

Now, in terms of the kind of zombie she is, she picks up the knife and it's a switchblade. So she has to activate the blade to open. So even though she's an undead, she's a zombie, she has no autonomy. She knows to do that, which I find interesting.

Yeah. I feel like all the zombies in this have a little bit of sort of understanding of how things work. They have a little guile, they have a little, but they don't have any control over what they do. They're just driven to do it. Yeah. But they're not completely dumb.

Yeah. But it surprised me when she did that.

Yeah. I think eventually we get to zombies. I made this comment very early in this podcast, back in the first couple of episodes. I always find modern zombies confusing because they're the only creature that continues to attack to their own detriment. They're unstoppable in a way and they're dumb in that way. These zombies are not like that. They have a little more sense, I guess, is what I'd say.

That's a good way of putting it.

Self-preservation.

Yes.

Okay. So we are to kind of the climactic part of this movie because despite all of this and despite his wife being a zombie, Harrison insists that it's time to go get the diamonds. Clark is better enough that he can dive again. So they make a plan to go back and dive back down to get those diamonds for real this time. Now, help me understand, they built a bonfire. Did I understand correctly that they purposely built a big fire in the hopes that it would sort of keep the zombies away from the estate?

That's what I think, yeah.

They did the gasoline bonfire in front of the crypt, and they assumed that that would keep them in there. But one guy goes, unless there's another exit.

I missed that. That's great, though. Yes.

Of course, they all show up later, so there was another exit.

Yes.

Well, this is thinking about it way more than the movie does, but how are these zombies moving around? I think that's actually kind of an interesting, like how are they getting all the way under water and moving, whatever. Do they live in that mausoleum? Do they live under the water with the diamonds?

Yeah, I get the impression they lived in that mausoleum, but again, they also seem to spend a lot of time underwater. I think we're thinking too hard about this for sure.

That also means that someone made the mausoleum, asked them for them, because they're exact number coffins.

No, maybe, but they do say later that it was an old European graveyard. So, that's how they justify its existence, like during colonial times.

Well, at any rate, they boat out to the shipwreck, and this is where it's all going to come down. They dive down there again, Harrison and Clark both winch down in their diving suits, and this time a whole horde of zombies we can see is approaching them as they force their way into the cargo hold and get the diamonds. Harrison tries to hold off the zombie horde or swarm.

Yeah, they both have welding torches.

Yeah, he has a welding torch that works for a while, but Clark gets the diamonds, they winch them up, but the zombies are starting to swarm the boat, and I actually thought this was a pretty neat sequence.

This is really good, actually, because they're constantly fighting the zombies, their torches go out, they do try to create some tension about how they can escape these zombies.

Yeah. Imagine this horde of zombies swimming, surrounding the boat in the water, and then climbing over the boat rails. It's a disaster. I think some of the Red Shirt crew, one or two of them die here.

Yeah, for sure. A couple of them abandon ship because they realized all the zombies are on the ship, so two of them dive overboard and swim away, which those are the smartest two.

Yes. And the, our kind of heroes, and we're down, this is Harrison, Mona and Clark, take refuge in like the inner, whatever the inner chamber is called.

Yeah, Dr. Egert is there too.

Oh, right, right.

But what I love about this bit is, so they're trapped inside the cabin on the deck of the boat and the zombies are surrounding it and they're smacking the door, they're smashing windows. This also feels like a precursor to a modern zombie movie, trapped in the shed, trapped in the house kind of thing, with the zombies bursting through the windows and stuff. I feel like that we haven't seen a lot of either.

They're not safe. They can't wait out these zombies because the zombies are going to force their way in for sure. Right, for sure. In this scene, there is kind of a scuffle. They get into an argument that results in Clark knocking out Harrison and keeping the chest of diamonds for himself. Then I actually forget, how did he get off the boat?

So what Clark says he's doing is, I'm going to take the diamonds and lead them away, and the way I'm going to do that, he constructs a torch, waves it in front of them so he can get to the skiff that's on the side of the boat and drives off to lure the zombies away, which works.

That's right.

So now the zombies are underwater, so they bought themselves some time to figure out what to do with the diamonds.

But Harrison is going to, when he regains consciousness, is going to believe that Clark has just stolen the diamonds and double crossed it.

Yeah, that he can't see it any other way, for sure.

So were we to understand that Clark was doing a selfless, like, I'll lead them away move here?

I think he still has mixed motivations. I think what he would like to do is go be with Jan. He's discovered maybe this rascal lifestyle isn't for him. One last score, I can marry Jan or be with Jan. We'll get out of this place and we'll use the diamonds to fund our future. I think he is a little selfish.

Well, Clark makes it back to the estate. He returns to Jan. They declare their love for each other and Clark wants to take the diamonds and make a run for it. Right. Even when grandma says, like, well, the zombies will just come for you wherever you go. He's like, well, I'll cash in the diamonds and I guess we are left to wonder. Yeah. Will the zombies trace the financial transactions or do they just want the physical diamonds?

You know what they say, follow the money.

So I had a thought here. Grandma has a great line here when he's trying to figure out how to get the box open. He's trying to open it like it has a lid and she says, this artifact is older than the pyramids and it's a throwaway line as to why the box is weird. But I love the suggestion of ancient dark magic here. Does that make sense? It feels like the kind of horror I love with the great old ones and stuff, like these mystical diamonds stolen from a temple before man even had a memory kind of thing. You know what I mean?

I 100% agree and I love that this film does not explain the diamonds, the curse, the underwater, the temple where they were found originally. It doesn't explain any of that and I love it. So while they're arguing, Harrison shows up and he demands, he thinks Clark has double crossed him.

And then Clark double crosses him.

Yes, exactly. So they kind of get into a scuffle, but it turned and then Harrison takes the chest of diamonds. And then we...

He takes the chest, but the diamonds are removed.

Clark gives him the chest, not telling him that the diamonds have been removed.

Right, yeah. So that's our reveal. We think the bad guys got the diamonds, but actually Clark took them out before. And then Moan, okay, there's more scuffling. Maybe my attention was drifting during the scene, but in the course of this sequence, Harrison is trying to take a boat with what he thinks is the chest of diamonds.

But what he does first is he stops in Moana's room and blows out the candles so she can follow him. He thinks he can save her.

He still doesn't recognize the danger that Moana presents here.

Right.

So Moana follows him. I should note, it's suggested that the zombies are also fooled by this little sleight of hand where the box is empty, because at least for now, the zombies close in on Harrison, and then in his attempt to escape, Moana kills him by hitting his head with the box of diamonds. So that was also a pretty good moment, I would say.

It's a moment I've been waiting for because it's very clearly a loved one turning against you. No ifs, ands, or buts.

I can't wait till we get to those questions, which will be in just a minute because this is the end of the film. Clark proposes to Jan they're going to get married. The Zombies are returning for the Diamonds because they've figured out that that box is empty too. And at the end, Clark ends up giving the Diamonds to Grandma, who drops them into the water, and the Zombies disappear, departing this world for their true final fate.

Yes, they actually vanish, but their clothes remain. So there's a shot. So I just want to take a moment to talk about Grandma here because Grandma, the pragmatic, hard-assed, practical person, it's a little overblown. I'm not saying they even earned it, but she has a moment where she begs Jack for the Diamonds and is crying because the zombie that's right outside the boat is her ex-husband.

Yes.

And when she destroys them, he vanishes, like his clothes stay, but he disappears like a puff of smoke, but not as good special effects.

As she said earlier in the film, return to dust.

Return to dust, and then she just sobs. And so you get to see this incredibly tough character, like break down, having gotten what she always wanted. I don't know. It was not, again, it wasn't earned, but I love the effort.

I do too. I also need them to think, like those diamonds are like under four feet of water, right off the shore.

Now we know how to destroy diamonds, drop them in shallow water.

Yeah, just drop them. They were in the water before, they're now in the water again, but this time they're outside the chest. I don't know.

Maybe it was the act of willingly relinquishing them.

Let's go with that, because otherwise it makes no sense. So I like-

It breaks the curse.

Yeah, it breaks the curse, so.

Yeah. That's our movie. I have more I want to say about this movie, but let's just go into our wrap up questions.

Yeah, for sure. I have a lot I want to say about this movie.

Me too. All right, John, is there a hero party?

There for sure is a hero party, and it feels like a hero party we're going to come to expect more and more, like it feels like the group from the Treasure of the Sierra Madre or the Marines in Alien. You're starting to get, Aliens, you're starting to get a hero party where the individuals have character and agency, and you get to know them a little bit and love or hate them, you're rooting for them. You know what I mean?

They have just unique relationships with each other. They're not just all blandly part of the team. They all have a motivation that's pretty clearly set at the beginning of this film, and those motivations set them against each other to some extent. It's an alliance of convenience.

Yeah. Like take Zombies of the Strains, for example. The two hired henchmen, they're interchangeable. They don't seem to think at all anything about what they're doing. They're just taking orders and they act the same. And these sort of gruff adventurers all seem much more believable.

Yeah. How does the party do, John?

Not so great.

How many survive?

Well, Eger survives, Clark survives, Jan and Gramma survive. But Harrison, well, Mona Harrison gets turned into a zombie. And then she kills her husband, who's the other party member. And most of the sailors eat it too, but not all of them. I think a couple of them get away.

I don't think I'd include Gramma as a party member because they're not after her.

They're not after her, but yeah, we could exclude her, but everybody else in the party lives. But crucially, a couple of them die.

She's a little bit more like the Gandalf figure in this movie. But yes, this also, even though only a couple of them really die, the kill count is fairly low. Like Voodoo Island, this just had the vibe, had the feel of being picked off one by one, the party-sized dwindling. Is there a zombie horde?

100 percent. It's not gigantic, but it's substantial. You feel threatened by it, it does the zombie horde things that we've come to expect, but haven't really seen yet in this Dramatica fashion.

Absolutely. How are zombies destroyed or killed?

They're not. They're only destroyed by breaking the curse. You can protect yourself with fire, but no other physical harm will do anything to them.

Yeah. Is the world threatened?

I don't think so, because you don't get the sense that they can create more zombies, or if they get loose, the world is threatened. So again, this remains sort of a more personal story, in my opinion.

Yeah, and the zombies are content to sit and guard the diamonds, basically. Yeah, for sure.

Very specific, their purpose.

Yes.

Yeah, they have a really specific purpose, yeah. Okay. What type of zombie are we dealing with? Is this a... Are there any new strains of zombie in this film?

I'm not sure it's new. They're definitely mystical zombies, right? Yes.

Yep.

But I think you made a point earlier, they're not created by a zombie master, or at least not one we're aware of. They're created by a curse. So these feel a little different in that way.

And so how many of your pillars are we going to find in this movie? John? First, is there an apocalypse in this movie or the threat of one?

No, I don't think so. Again, it's a personal story, so we can't really have a world ending apocalypse.

Is there contagion in this movie?

Kind of, right? Because the zombies do turn Mona into a zombie without a zombie master. We don't see how that happens. It obviously takes more time. It's not an instant bite kind of thing. But clearly zombies can create other zombies and have. They're a little hand wavy about how it happens. But so I'd say yes, there is contagion.

I agree. In spirit, this counts as contagion. Because we have that threat that not only will the zombies kill you, but you will join their ranks.

Correct.

Or you might join their ranks. Are there tough moral choices?

Yeah, I think so. Previously we talked about movies that just had bad people making bad decisions, and that wasn't really the kind of tough moral choice we were talking about. Here we are. Should we go after Mona and save her? Once we save her, should we keep her alive? They do go through the tough moral choice process, I think.

Should we destroy the diamonds?

Should we destroy the diamonds? Yeah. Different people have different motivations, which makes, I think that's what make those tough moral choices interesting. If everybody, let's go back to the Last of Us case with Ellie and Joel, if they agreed, it's not really a tough moral choice. Exactly. So you have to have opposing sides on something.

Yeah. I think we got some great ones, I think, and you're exactly right. It's the fact that characters have sufficiently defined motivations to have different opinions about the choices, it makes all the difference in the world. Yeah, for sure. And we see the consequences of bad choices, like letting Mona into the house after she's been zombified.

Right. Or going to rescue her, which is another choice that the Captain make. That's a tough moral choice. It's, quote unquote, the right choice, ethically, but it's the wrong choice for his personal safety.

You should have listened to Grandma. Yeah. Do we have, lastly, loved ones turning against you?

Yeah, for sure, Mona kills her husband. And I want to talk more about that, but for sure, that is a loved one turning against you.

And it's saying that he turned against her as maybe a little too strong, but I did find Grandma's relationship to the Zombies in this little corner of the world. Pretty interesting.

Yeah, I agree.

Was this the first death caused by someone turning against you?

I think there have been threats of death, but I cannot remember an instance where a Zombie killed a close loved one after being turned. This movie?

Yes. There was one. What was the movie where Lila dragged her mad scientist husband into the swamp?

That's right. That's our first instance. Revenge. Yes. I will say, now Lila here had more agency, I think, than Mona, but you're right. That really is the first one. But this is maybe the best heartless example. I felt like Lila in Revenge of the Zombies was trying to get revenge. She was motivated by revenge. Despite the fact, so okay, let's talk about this now because I think this is a thing. Let's talk about the movies. What other movie was Allison Hayes in? Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. What we're getting here is a sense of female empowerment, because what does Harrison do to her early in the movie? He slaps her across the face, and she flees. This is unacceptable to her, and ultimately she kills him. This idea of empowerment, where you should have agency over who you are, I feel like it's ham-fisted. This is a B-movie. I don't even know if it's intentional, but I see it here glaring loudly at me. Am I wrong?

No, you're not wrong. Viewed at that level, it's really similar to the plot of Attack of the 50 Foot Woman too. A woman has a terrible husband, and she is empowered maybe in a way that, maybe in an uncomfortable way or a way she doesn't want. Yes. That becomes the tool by which she gets revenge or justice.

Yeah, absolutely. Anyway, but I think that has something to do with the emergence of the independent woman, is what I'm trying to say.

Yeah, it is, Mona and Jan are an interesting contrast, I think, in female movie kind of roles.

Yeah, for sure.

There's Jan kind of is the straight-laced good girl. Mona is this much more compelling kind of wild, kind of wild uninhibited presence. It makes for a good contrast.

And I think there's probably some moralizing here by punishing her, but that's another story that we can get into as we move along here.

But yeah, for sure.

The same way that Claire was punished in Voodoo Island, it's a sexist take on why, don't exert too much independence or bad things will happen to you.

Exactly. And that is going to be, that moralizing punishment is going to be with us in horror movies for a very long time.

Yeah, but just to contrast it with older movies, that was true too, but the people just stayed in line. Here we have people stepping out of line for the first time. You know what I mean? Culturally speaking, if that makes sense.

So John, you have some questions specifically about the 50s. That's what I usually ask.

So major themes from the 50s. Let's start with paranoia. Did you see it here? And where did you see it, if you did?

The scoundrels are paranoid that Jan and Grandma might be working against them.

And they don't really trust each other either.

They don't trust each other, and they are correct not to trust each other because they are all greedy jerks. That's right.

That's right.

So I would say that yes, there are some traces of paranoia. It's not quite the, your loved one might be a Soviet spy type of paranoia, but it definitely is present in the movie. What do you think?

I think so too. Now, what do you think about conformity? Like, I think you just noted the contrast between Jan and Mona, and I think there's a lesson in conformity about that. What do you think of that?

I think so. I doubt the movie was intentionally setting out to do this, but it does have a clear moral message that the right way to behave is to follow all the rules. Right. Exactly. And so Jan and Clark are going to go back to the US and they're going to get a house in Levittown and own the same car as their neighbors because he has gotten this out of his system, right? His ambition, his scoundrel-ness, he's going to settle down.

Yeah. Speaking of which, how have our movie heroes changed? We're starting to see a pattern here in the 50s. Is that pattern continuing in this movie?

I think so. Jan is a pretty familiar character, I think, in these zombie movies.

It reminds me of Mary from The Ghostbreakers or like she's somebody who's come to a strange part of the world.

Yeah. But she's like a sweet, good person. There's not really much complexity to her character at all. Right. But we have just a surprising complexity of character and motivation in these scoundrels. I don't know. It's different than what's come before. I would like to say that that feels of the time of the 50s, of just letting characters be a little bit more flawed. I want to say that we are seeing some 50s-ness here. Whatever the nature of the change, we have a much more interesting cast of characters than in any of our past movies.

Well, so Clark needs to be basically reformed by Jan. It's not until he gives Grandma the diamonds for her to destroy, quote unquote, that he becomes reformed enough for Jan to commit to him. You know what I mean?

That's a great point. Yes. Yep. Absolutely.

Is this the first film where they fall in love over the course of the movie, and at the end they say they want to marry each other?

I think so. I feel like Voodoo Island had a little bit of that with Palmer and Gunn.

They didn't say they're going to marry in Voodoo Island, but they did make out, which is a step towards marriage.

Yes. But I think you're right.

We see the whole relationship. We see the meat.

Yeah.

We see them fall in love, and then day and a half later, we're two nights worth, whatever.

Yeah. If you go back to something like The Walking Dead, our hero couple is engaged at the start.

Yeah. I think that's a good point.

Now, again, the genre has left the Caribbean. It has left the United States. We're transporting these trope of Zombies wherever we feel like we want to drop them. Is this what you had in mind when you're thinking about the genre leaving its roots, or is this a disappointing outcome of that?

This is maybe a small step towards that, but not quite what I had in mind. I mean, we are still stuck in, and maybe we'll be here for quite a while, in this idea of the white people going to a quote, exotic place, and falling afoul of the mystical terror that lurks there, but is not present in quote, civilized America. I enjoyed this movie a lot, but I found that a little tiresome, mostly just because we saw it so much in the 30s and 40s. I thought we were starting to move away from that based on our last couple of films, but maybe not. You mentioned at the beginning, like it is very weird that this takes place in Africa, and there is no Native African in this movie. I mean, in a way, I imagine these movies are trying to grapple with these questions of like treatment of Indigenous cultures in other places and in non-white people groups, but they're just not doing it correctly. Like in Voodoo Island, they did show us people that were supposedly Indigenous people, but it's just a white guy in a tribal costume, right? This movie kind of takes the opposite effect, which is, I mean, it doesn't show us any defensive caricatures of Indigenous people, but that's because there are no, like this is a world without Indigenous people in it. So I don't know what to think about it. Clearly, the correct thing to do is to incorporate ethnicities other than white people into these stories in a meaningful and authentic way and into the cast of these movies, but nobody is thought to do that yet, at least in B-movie Zombieland yet.

Correct. Yeah. We're not there.

All right. Any other questions, John?

No. Should we do our last wrap-ups here? You want to start?

Yeah. Would you and I survive in this zombie world?

Maybe not. Like again, I feel like, just like Voodoo Island, maybe this is one where we bite it. Like if we choose to stay, if we're one of the deckhands and we're following these guys around, their choices could get us killed.

Yeah. I had some thoughts along these lines watching this movie, that there is one thing I appreciated about this movie is that a lot of the danger is, you know how in a modern zombie movie, there's this trope of like they find a safe house or they set up a safe base or whatever, and then eventually somebody makes a mistake. Right. A door gets left open or some chain of events happens that causes disaster to fall. And I felt hints of that in this movie with the way that they're making decisions that solve the problem temporarily. Oh, we'll put Mona up in bed and try and keep her there. That later have kind of disastrous consequences. And that's what would kill me in the zombie world.

Right.

Is, you know, okay, I'm safe in the house, but I didn't lock the back door and a zombie got in and then I would die.

Right.

So I got a little bit of that vibe, which is an element of zombie films I really, really love, actually. I got a little bit of a vibe here. And I do think that means I might have been one of those red shirts that gets knifed by Mona.

For sure.

And lastly, John, oh no, we have two more questions. Is this a zombie movie or a movie with zombies?

This is a zombie movie. No question in my mind.

This is 100 percent a zombie movie.

For sure.

And John, do you recommend this movie generally, and do you recommend it to our legion of bloodthirsty zombie fans?

Yeah. So generally, the movie is charming, but let's be honest, it's a B movie. The special effects aren't as bad as, maybe they are, as bad as Voodoo Island. Like I'm not saying it's a five out of five here, right? But if you like old horror movies, old hokey horror movies, it's pretty charming and I recommend it on that basis. For zombie fans, it's 100 percent a recommendation, because this felt in a lot of ways like a bunch of pieces, again, are coming together to make what we originally thought a zombie movie would be. You know what I mean?

Yeah. I don't know if this is a hot take or not. I loved this movie. I unironically really enjoyed this movie, and I was excited to talk about this movie because this movie has more stuff that I came into this podcast loving about zombie movies than anything we've watched to date. Other movies have had the pieces. This one, I really feel like it is a step towards bringing those pieces toward the familiar form of the zombie movie that you and I loved enough to start this podcast. So for sure, this movie, I mean, is it a great movie with a capital G? It is not. But I really enjoyed it.

Yeah, it's not like I walked with a zombie where some auteur is slumming it and makes a great piece of art. It feels like the sort of hokey movies that we watched on UHF as a kid, it is one of those movies, right? And I love it for that. And I want to say it's competent, right? It has a structure. It pulls you in, the characters do things that make sense. I mean, it's not great, but it's also not like, you know, Voodoo Island is sort of ended, like the third act of Voodoo Island makes no sense. This movie at least makes sense throughout.

Agreed. This is a competent and confident B-movie. And you use the word charming. I think that's a great way to do it. I would give this, it's an absolute must see, I think, for Zombie fans. And if you just generally like horror movies, I still think it's worth your time.

Yeah, for sure. All right.

Let me ask you a question. You know, we ask these questions. Do you like it as a movie? Do you like it as a zombie movie? But what about in the context of having watched all these zombie movies before? How has that changed how you think you perceive these films?

I gotta say, I'll answer quickly. I'm falling in love with older movies in a way that I haven't been in a long time. And so that's part of it too, I think.

Yes. And yeah, 100% agreed. Watching, I mean, this podcast is so fun because it is exciting to see a movie like this one and to see something new entering the vocabulary of these films and being able to call it out specifically because we noticed that it wasn't there in past movies. And so that does, I think that does bias me to get really, really excited about a movie like this that that does bring a lot of cool stuff together that previous movies have not in is that is that making me maybe over over praise or over sell it? Yeah, sure.

But or properly appreciated.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think. Yeah, I will say I enjoy this movie too. And I think I think no, is it a modern movie? It is not. But while the other thing I'm learning about this podcast is I enjoy, I enjoy different experiences and this is like a different movie experience. So.

And when you see I wouldn't. Allison Hayes is performance is not like a Freddie Washington level, like this is a pro surrounded by amateurs. No. But performances like this are the are a huge part of what makes some of these zombie movies good and some of them tedious trudges. When you get a Mantan, a Moreland or a Freddie Washington or an Allison Hayes, just someone who is or a who's the guy I love so much who is in Valley of the Zombies. Oh, scenery chewing.

Yeah, shoot.

The bad guy, that guy, that guy. When you get someone that is just willing to put a little extra in their performance, it goes a long ways towards making me forgive the other flaws of the movie. In this case, I was so taken by Allison Hayes' performance. I mean, that by itself elevated this above, I don't know, what I might otherwise thought of it.

Yeah, and I guess I will say-

It was Ian Keith.

Ian Keith.

Ian Keith, that's right.

Yeah.

We should mention, you talked about Freddie Washington. She was in Wonga from 1936.

Yeah. I'll say one last thing. I also, I think, more, as you and I were having this conversation just now, I fell more and more in love with Grandma too and saw her character is really, also really super cool and important to this movie. So I agreed to that, you know, additional.

Well, she started very stilted.

Yes.

You couldn't tell if it was bad script, bad plotting, bad acting, or was it something more? And it turns out it was something more.

Yeah, for sure.

So yeah, that's a good way to put it.

All right.

So hey, guys, it's time for the scariest part of the episode. And that's where Brad reveals to us what is coming next.

And I feel like we're coming off a kind of good one, Andy. So I have a bad feeling.

We need to chart this out.

I know we had charted on a graph. All right. Let us have it.

We are going to 1958. And since you guys brought up feminism, I've not seen this film. So our next film is?

Woman Eater. Oh, no.

This has got to be one of our boldest movie posters yet.

First of all, it's a weird one sheet because it's sideways. Let me just put that down.

Yes, that is very strange, yes.

Would you like me to read the text or would you like to read the text?

Why don't you, I'll make you describe the lurid graphics on this and I will read the text. The text says, it moves, it breathes, it kills, the hideous devil tree. Then the title of the film is all one word, Woman Eater.

What's the interesting, what is the certification next to that word, Andy? X. Yes.

Oh, hey, okay. Brad, what's the context for that?

I believe this is a British poster and X in Britain men, people under 16 could not see it.

Okay. All right.

I'm a little disappointed. I thought it was going to be more extreme than that.

Yeah. So what we have is a bunch of people looking around, staring at a central woman who is being clawed or grappled by the hideous devil tree. There are people who maybe are supposed to be natives screaming, and then there's another couple of people. And then there's this weird guy with a floating head who may be George Kolororis. I can't even say his name. And Vera Day.

Koloris?

And then Vera Day, which is a name I feel like I should know.

Which of these women on this poster is Vera Day? Which of these scantily clad women?

I'm not certain, but we'll find out.

Yeah. That guy in the background is giving off big zombie master energy.

For sure. So I'm curious to see what any of this has to do with zombies, but that's why we do this podcast.

And John, this is, we just did a movie with sentient devil plants. So is this, maybe this will be the theme of the 50s we didn't expect.

Yeah.

Missing undead vegetation.

Call your shot right now. Special effects better or worse than Voodoo Island?

Oh, it has to be better, right?

I mean, it has to be.

We say that.

Let's set ourselves up.

I literally don't know how it could be worse than Voodoo Island.

They promised something here, whereas the poster for Voodoo Island seemed to be hiding.

Yes.

Yeah.

So, all right. Well, I'm in. See you next episode, everybody.

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 app of 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.