Credits

Director: John Gilling Starring: Andre Morell, Diane Clare, John Carson, Brook Williams, Michael Ripper Screenplay: Peter Bryan Country: UK

The Plague of the Zombies isn't what I'm sure most people are conjuring in their minds. Hordes of flesh eating cadavers walking the earth mindlessly will not be found within. The Plague of the Zombies takes the road far less travelled, utilizing the more reality based idea of Haitian mythology (or urban mythology depending on what you read). I'd been wanting to see this film for a long time, since viewing The World of Hammer documentary series on SBS every Saturday night all those years ago. When I finally got the chance to see it, I found myself considerably surprised at how different the story was to what I had been anticipating. I knew there was an element of voodoo to the film from the documentaries, and that (obviously) zombies were involved in a turn of the century English village. What I wasn't expecting was how very Sherlock Holmes the film was. Don't misread that either, this isn't a Sherlock Holmes film, though with a few tweaks here and there to some characters and plot points it very well could be. There's a Hound of the Baskervilles feel to it, and I really don't want to say too much to save from spoiling anything.

The Plague of the Zombies certainly isn't above any other Hammer film in terms of production design. It looks and feels just like every other period piece Hammer put out. You have your standard English village, your spooky graveyard, your upper-class mansion, your dirty tavern, the set piece that will inevitably burn down, everything on the Hammer List of Locations is here. The same can be said about the characters.

All the core characters are ones we've seen before. Admittedly Andre Morell's Sir James is far more British than any other Hammer protagonist I've seen, but his role is essentially the same. The acting jumps from terribly melodramatic, to just plain terrible, but this is another staple of Hammer horror (unless your name is Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee or Oliver Reed). Of course, no Hammer film is really complete without buxom women in tight Victorian dress, and rest assured, they are present and accounted for (though in nowhere near the supply as Hammer's Dracula titles).

Hammer's visuals for the zombies are definitely worth noting though. They're simplistic, sure, but they're definitely more intimidating than Dawn of the Dead's zombies. Where Dawn's looked like people with green make-up and some well applied gore prosthetics, Plague's zombies, though greener than gorier, have a far more foul look to them. They look like they're rotting, and the tonally different green combined with the heavy, filthy garments they wear make them far more imposing.

The Plague of the Zombies is likely to disappoint gorehounds who connect the word zombie with hard violence in a major way. The film is nowhere near as violent as the title may infer, and the body count is significantly low. What this film does deliver however are some genuinely creepy moments, which is hard for a film to do in this day and age. There's a moment towards the middle of the film where our two protagonists dig up the body of the younger's recently deceased fiancé, I'm pretty sure you can figure out the rest, but it really is a particularly chilling sequence.

You also get the theatrical trailer, which is some quality cheese.