Another mad scientist, another zombie army. A one-hour programmer from Monogram Pictures, Revenge of the Zombies (1943) is redolent, not to say aromatic, of its wartime context. As directed with dollops of visual style by Steve Sekely and shown to its best effect on Kino Lorber’s new Blu-ray, the movie mixes Nazi spies with racial and sexual subtexts.
The dialogue-free opening sequence is a doozy of richly Expressionist photography. Although we don’t know who he is yet, the first person we see is Lazarus (James Baskett), an African-American with a cape and lantern, who emerges slowly from a mansion and marches over to the combination swamp-cemetery that’s ten paces away, convenient to the house. It’s a dark and stormy night, or at least there’s lots of wind and lightning. Lazarus emits a call halfway between an owl and a wolf, and the camera pans across the graveyard to a mausoleum.
Inside, beautifully shadowed as though by a giant spider or ribcage, a gaunt white man sits up in his coffin and pulls off his shroud to reveal a bony chest above his pants. The filmmakers wouldn’t know this, but he bears an unfortunate uncanny resemblance to someone liberated from a concentration camp. As he shambles outside, he’s so tall that he must bend to get through the door. He joins an equally stiff platoon of fellow grave-dwellers, all shirtless black and white males. Clearly, this cemetery isn’t segregated. Their goose-step march isn’t an accident, as the dialogue’s politics will make clear.
These victims have all been poisoned and controlled by Dr. Max Heinrich von Altermann (John Carradine), who lives in this mansion outside New Orleans. As he explains to a fellow spy of unknown name (cowboy star Bob Steele), he’s raising the ultimate indestructible army of already-dead zombie warriors for the benefit of what he calls “our country”, and we know what he means. He never says Germany, and he never says Nazi. The closest the dialogue comes is when he’s called “this Heinie” (a contemptuous term for a WWI German soldier).
The bad doctor has freshly poisoned his lovely wife, Lila (Veda Ann Borg), who lies picturesquely in her open coffin. Arriving to inspect the corpse are her brother Scott (Mauritz Hugo), an alleged detective and alleged hero named Larry Adams (Robert Lowery), and concerned Dr. Keating (Barry McCollum). At Altermann’s command, Lily opens her eyes and leaves the room, smirking. The others glimpse her retreat but are unable to find her. Still, they take it with relative calm.
When Altermann shows off his nightgowned Lila to his spy-minion, who turns out to be (ho-hum) an American secret agent, the mad doctor says, “What greater destiny could my wife have achieved than to serve me, and through me, our country? I shall take her there and demonstrate that zombies must obey their master.”
Suddenly, Lila says, “No! No!” All her dialogue has a weird echo-chamber effect. She smirks some more. Smirking is her number one quality, aside from allegedly being dead. “What’s this? Your brain works independently of mine?” says hubby in distress. He rapidly recalculates. “I must now paralyze certain portions of the brain so that my subjects can neither question nor reason but only hear and obey.”
Since the film is called Revenge of the Zombies, it hardly seems a spoiler that Lila will orchestrate the promised revenge, thus striking a blow for America and womanhood. Also disregarding Altermann’s designs is his secretary, Jennifer, played by Gale Storm years before she found fame in television’s My Little Margie (1952-55). Like Lila, she runs around a lot in a white-flowing nightgown.
On a metaphorical level, Revenge of the Zombies asserts that those who blindly follow Hitler are zombies and that fascists turn their countries into lands of the living dead, if not the dead dead. It’s also posited that women are more troublesome to control, perhaps especially the beautiful ones, and this could be an acknowledgment of women’s growing incursion into male domains during wartime, such as the factory workforce.
As genre historian Tom Weaver explains in one of his typically funny and informative commentary tracks, many of these elements are shaped by input Monogram received from the Office of War Information and the Bureau of Motion Pictures. These two wartime government agencies monitored scripts, as did the standard Motion Picture Administration.
Weaver’s excellent research shows that these forces complained about the original script’s racist and demeaning stereotypes, which led to changes like the multi-racial cast of zombies. They also warned that fantasies shouldn’t trivialize the Nazi threat, offend non-Caucasian audiences and allies (e.g., Haiti) during a time when unity was needed, nor involve the FBI without their approval. Thus, all kinds of details in the script by Edmund Kelso and Van Norcross ended up being dropped or going coy and unstated.
In other words, it wasn’t that Monogram or producer Lindsley Parsons set out to make a zombie movie more progressive than their previous example, King of the Zombies (1941), which has more or less the same plot and two of the same cast members. Wartime circumstances subjected their new project to greater scrutiny.
The two recurring actors are Mantan Moreland and Madame Sul-Te-Wan. Moreland plays his patented bug-eyed comic character, who sees the zombies before anyone else does. In an early scene, he does some very hep jitterbugging in his white shoes and snappy porkpie hat, and he’s clearly as delighted with himself as we are to watch him. It’s enough to make you wish Revenge of the Zombies was a musical starring him, as it would have been in a just world.
Weaver quotes a 1967 interview by actress Nichelle Nichols in which she opines that it’s fashionable to make fun of comic characters like Moreland and Stepin Fetchit, but they should be seen as having the talent that would have made them as big as Milton Berle or Bob Hope if their social context had allowed it. One has only to watch Moreland in his independent all-black “race movies” like Two Gun Man from Harlem (1938) to notice the difference; he brings warmth and joy to the seriousness, and since he’s one Black character among many, there’s no sense of stereotype.
In Revenge of the Zombies, Moreland’s Jeff is similarly aided by a galaxy of African-American all-stars. Madame Sul-Te-Wan, who debuted in D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1914), has a distinctive presence that makes the typical smallness of her roles frustrating. While her role in King of the Zombies was in collaboration with a villain who appropriates Haitian voodoo for his purposes, her housekeeper in Revenge of the Zombies actively works against her “master”, saying he’s working with the devil. She reveals that coffee is the convenient antidote to his poison.
James Baskett, who plays Lazarus with a Don King-like white-brush hairdo, became the first African-American man to receive an Oscar when he played Uncle Remus in Walt Disney’s Song of the South (1946). Not only does he command the beginning of Revenge of the Zombies, he gets a scene of dry humor when he says to Jeff, “Beautiful car. I drove car like this for master when I was alive.” One of the film’s revelations is that being a zombie makes you drop your articles, but it’s good to know you can still appreciate a fine machine.
The beautiful Sybil Lewis, who plays Moreland’s would-be girlfriend, starred in several 1940s all-Black indies. She gets the last line in Revenge of the Zombies when Jeff says he’ll get her a swell job in Harlem, and she can save her money so they can get married. She replies, “If I gets a swell job, honey, I don’t need to get married.” This movie’s full of uppity women who disregard the plans men make for them. Something was in the air, all right – or in the coffee.
These four actors are Black Hollywood royalty. Whenever Revenge of the Zombies shows them all interacting, it’s a livelier, more entertaining movie than when we sit through Caucasians standing in a room and explaining the plot. Even the commanding Carradine rather zombie-walks through his role as the resident megalomaniac.
At least we get those doses of visual panache from Sekely and photographer Mack Stengler. Aside from the opening scene, they provide many gratuitously graceful glides, like the dolly forward that introduces Altermann glowering above his surgical mask. Sekely, who had a serious career in Hungarian cinema of the 1930s, is among the myriad Jewish artists who fled the Nazis for Hollywood.
In the same year as Revenge of the Zombies, Sekely did another Monogram anti-Nazi film called Women in Bondage. In the 1950s, he directed many episodes of two syndicated series: an anthology called Orient Express (1953-54) and New York Confidential (1958-59) starring Lee Tracy as, what else, a pushy reporter. His most famous movie is The Day of the Triffids (1962), another film in which atmosphere triumphs over character.
If you think it would have made sense to combine Revenge of the Zombies in a double feature with King of the Zombies, it would have. King of the Zombies is planned as a January 2025 Blu-ray from another company, VCI, and that probably explains something. As for Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray of Revenge of the Zombies, it looks and sounds excellent, and added value is provided by the smart, entertaining commentary from Weaver, who compares it to other zombie movies, and his cohort Gary D. Rhodes, who compares it to other Nazi movies.
Of course, there would be countless more Nazi-zombie movies, as this device never stays dead and buried. At the high end, check out Herman J. Leder’s The Frozen Dead (1966), Ken Wiederhorn’s Shock Waves (1977), Tommy Wirkola’s Dead Snow (2009), and Julius Avery’s Overlord (2018). You can’t keep a good sociopolitical trope down.