Review: White Zombie

A rich man (Robert Frazer) entices a young couple to come visit him in Haiti with the ulterior motive of stealing the man’s fiancé (Madge Bellamy, terrible). Bela Lugosi plays a man named Murder Legendre (!) who uses voodoo magic to get manual labour work done on his plantation by workers in a trance. You don’t have to be Einstein to see where this is going.

 

One of the earliest zombie movies, this 1932 film from director Victor Halperin (“Revolt of the Zombies”, “Torture Ship”) is a mostly tedious C-grade affair despite its reputation. The zombies are interesting, Bela Lugosi makes up for a lack of acting talent with sheer unique presence, and his character itself is frankly more interesting than his overrated interpretation of “Dracula”. He’s a real dastardly bastard in this one. Lugosi’s creepy stare is probably the most memorable thing about the film, which of course inspired the name of Rob Zombie’s band who gave us the hit ‘More Human than Human’ (I prefer Zombie’s solo hit ‘Dragula’ myself). Elsewhere the performances save for an OK Robert Frazer are pretty abysmal, and despite a short running time of just over an hour…there’s just not enough here to keep one engaged. Some of the imagery is nice, but since it’s not a silent film, you need more than that keeping you awake.

 

At first, you’re kind of intrigued by how these zombies seem less re-animated corpses being summoned by Lugosi, and more entranced living beings being controlled by Lugosi. Scripted by Garnett Weston (a couple of the “Bulldog Drummond” films), the central idea – if you remove the dated racial element at least – is one with merit, actually. It’s just that the execution is mostly tedious and static. At 60 minutes, it feels twice as long with scenes dragging on far too long, even the best scenes. In that 60 minutes, maybe 10 or 15 of it is worthy, the rest is sleep-inducing. I didn’t have that same problem with Murnau’s silent classic “Nosferatu”, let alone James Whale’s ‘talkie’ “Frankenstein”, so you can’t blame its age. The sound is particularly shoddy, again not something one can say about “Frankenstein”. I guess this one joins “I Walked With a Zombie” and “Carnival of Souls” as yet another supposed horror classic that I don’t quite see the appeal in.

 

A dated zombie outing that doesn’t have much going on beyond the creepy zombies and oddball Bela Lugosi. It’s not terrible, just not particularly interesting for the most part and most of the non-zombie cast seem stiffer than the supposed revived corpses. Culturally questionable at times too, looking at it from a 2020 perspective. Lugosi fans might want to bump the rating up a bit (especially considering how much worse the roles got for him over the years), I’m more of a Boris Karloff or Christopher Lee guy. The zombies sure are creepy, though.

 

Rating: C