When Charles and I got home April 13 we ultimately watched a DVD I'd picked up from a library sale not long ago: Revolt of the Zombies, a 1936 production of the Halperin brothers – director Victor and producer Edward – who had made the amazing film White Zombie, starring Bela Lugosi as zombie master “Murder” Legendre, in 1932 and followed it up with a major-studio production, the underrated Supernatural, in 1933, starrng Carole Lombard in a quite surprisingly effective role as a young woman whose body is possessed by the soul of an executed mass murderess (Vivienne Osborne). Despite its high quality – including a performance from Lombard, usually a comedienne, in a role that requires her to switch back and forth between separate personalities (something she does as well as Joanne Wodoward did in The Three Faces of Eve and Sally Field in Sybil) – Supernatural flopped at the box office and Victor Halperin never got a major-studio directing job again. He ended up at a really cheap independent studio called Academy Motion Pictures, where he made a non-horror melodrama called I Conquer the Sea! about a sea captain who loses an arm in an accident and is determined to continue his career, and then he got to make another zombie film.
Alas, instead of doing a straight-ahead sequel to White Zombie or something in a similar vein, the Halperins came up with a bizarre melodrama in which the zombies are not from Haiti but from Cambodia. The prologue is set during World War I, in which a high priest named Tsiang (William Crowell) is engaged by one of the warring countries to create an army of zombies who will keep marching in the face of certain death – the shot of a zombie soldier taking bullet after bullet in his chest and continuing to march as if nothing has happened is by far the most frightening image in this film. After that battle, the warring countries agree not to use zombie troops again for fear of the long-term consequences of zombie warriors, and after the war the French army sends out an expedition to Cambodia to learn the secret of making zombies and destroy it. The film then devolves into a dull romantic triangle between Claire Duval (Dorothy Stone), daughter of the expedition’s commander General Duval (George Cleveland), Clifford Grayson (Robert Noland) and Armand Louque (Dean Jagger, a highly competent character actor way out of his depth in a part that demands the cultured menace of Bela Lugosi).
Armand is obsessed with Claire but she has eyes only for Grayson, Armand visits the temple of Angkor (which suggests to me that the Halperin brothers located an old silent documentary about Cambodia and used it extensively for stock footage and process backgrounds) and learns the secret of zombie-making. Claire agrees to marry Armand if he’ll avoid turning Clifford into a zombie – though he does so anyway – but even after they’re married Claire won’t have sex woth Armand. In a last-ditch effort to get her to be more than a paper wife to him, Armand agrees to free the people he’s zombified – a big mistake, as the newly liberated ex-zombies turn on him, ravage his settlement and kill him. (The film should more accurately have been called Revolt of the Ex-Zombies.) The Halperins used Arthur Martinelli as their cinematographer, as they had on White Zombie and Supernatural, and even on an ultra-low budget he gets some striking images, but it’s all too obvious that the scenes that don’t use process shots from that old silent documentary are being filmed in an Oriental-style park somewhere in southern California. Charles and I had seen Revolt of the Zombies before on a VHS tape from Sinister Cinema, and as Charles said, “I’d forgotten how bad it was!” Anyone who’d seen Revolt of the Zombies when it was new and expected something on the level of White Zombie just four years earlier would have been sorely disappointed – as will anybody who sits through it today; it’s a film that seems to go on considerably longer than its actual 65-minute running time.
