My last Xmas present arrived yesterday and it was a box set of Hammer Horror films, so we watched this one, and I must say it pleasantly surprised me. We were a little disappointed with the
Mummy (see last year) but this one was a tightly structured, well-written little number, with excellent performances from stalwart British character actors. I only recognized Michael Ripper
(who is apparently in more Hammer films even than uncle Pete) although I
should have recognized Jacqueline "
Servalan in Blake's Seven" Pearce, although in my defense, she was very young.
The true star was an actor called
André Morell, who anchored the film with a very serious and charismatic performance as the sort of Doctor Watson (whom he played in the excellent Hammer version of
The Hound of the Baskervilles, to Uncle Pete's Holmes) slash Van Helsing of the piece.
He is Sir James Forbes, a professor of Medicine at London University who is called down to a tiny Cornish village by his ex-pupil, now local doctor, to investigate a sudden spate of inexplicable deaths that have been preceded by symptoms of listlessness and torpor (something that his young wife (see above), a friend to Sir James' intrepid daughter (who is the one who chivvied him along to go and investigate, and comes along) Sylvia, is obviously suffering from when they arrive. As we quickly discover, the cause of the deaths is the young squire, played by James Mason soundalike (and, I think, Tom Waits look-similar) John Carson,
who returned from Haiti after his father's death, bringing with him a taste for Voodoo and a plan to re-populate the closed down tin mine with zombie workers, whose main advantage is that they will not be picky about health and safety standards. Carson is a very Dracula-like figure, whose MO is charming his victims, asking for a drink and then breaking the glass "by accident" and slicing them and collecting their blood for use with voodoo dolls later. A fairly ludicrous plot that is carried off with great verve by the cast (the only week link perhaps being the young doctor) and some genuinely shocking moments, including the beheading by spade of the young wife (very shortly after the second shot above) and a dream sequence of zombies rising from their graves that has been copied a million times since. Perhaps most shocking is a non-horror scene of the Squire's thuggish young red-jacketed droogs, whom Sylvia has misdirected on their foxhunt, and whom she and Sir James have witnessed overturn a carriage in a funeral parade, dumping out the corpse, who pick up Sylvia and carry her to the manor and are clearly about to assault her when the Squire intervenes.
Although the "zombies" of this piece are voodoo zombies, and not the flesh-eating Romero zombies that were launched a mere couple of years later in
Night of the Living Dead, they are effectively ghastly, particularly this fellow:
They take their revenge on their zombie master, however, just in time to save Sylvia from being the victim of a blood sacrifice,
after their dolls catch fire in a blaze started by Sir James, leading to the collapse of the tin mine and a rather abrupt ending. All in all, an excellent start to the box set!
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