I Watch Films: King Of The Zombies

 

King Of The Zombies

It’s 1941 and a white pilot, his white passenger and his black comedy sidekick manservant are blown off course in a storm and crash land on a mysterious Caribbean island. There they encounter Dr Miklos Sangre, who has a large house, his wife and another female relative, and a lot of black servants. They are stuck there due to being made stateless thanks to the war in Europe.

It turns out that Miklos has zombified many of the servants, in that they’ve been drugged and hypnotised into thinking they’re dead – a more traditional idea of the zombie than the walking dead of modern fiction. He’s also keeping other secrets, related to the war.

The comedy is a little heavy-handed, and in particular Jefferson the sidekick is the butt of jokes, being suspicious and superstitious, which is an oddly ironic way of looking at it when there’s actual plotting and zombification going on. Occasionally tense, it moves briskly, as it’s an old-school B-movie clocking in at under 70 minutes.

Watch This: A spy/zombie comedy horror with some interesting moments that peg it to the particular moment
Don’t Watch This: It treats black people as inherently either funny or threatening, even as they’re the ones who know what’s going on