The Plague of the Zombies (1966)

Doomed to Walk the Earth as Slaves to the Lord of the Living Dead!!

The Plague of the Zombies

Happy St. Patrick's Day everybody!  At least the poster for today's movie is green....  Today we continue Hammer Horror Week with a bit of a change from the usual vampire fare with The Plague of the Zombies.  But these are not the zombies that we think of when we think of zombies - for those are actually ghouls.  The shambling, rotting, flesh eating monsters that we are used to seeing on the silver screen are not zombies at all.  This idea became popular with Romero's Night of the Living Dead in 1968.

Traditionally, zombies were men and woman who had no will of their own but were undead servants of a sorcerer who had enslaved them with Voodoo magic.  The zombies in this 1966 film are of this traditional type.

A plague has taken the lives of twelve people in twelve months in a quaint village in the Cornish countryside.  Dr. James Forbes arrives with his outspoken daughter Sylvia in a town plagued by more than disease after being summoned by former student and local physician Dr. Peter Thompson.

Dr. Thompson's efforts to discover the the cause of these mysterious deaths has been hampered by the superstitious beliefs of the villagers and the meddling of the town's wealthy and controlling Squire, Clive Hamilton. Because autopsies have been forbidden by the locals, the two doctors decide to examine the most recently deceased in the graveyard under the full moon.  When they open the casket they discover that the body is gone. Soon after, Dr Thompson's wife turns up dead at an abandoned tin mine.

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Dr. Forbes begins to suspect Voodoo is behind all of this.  All the evidence points to the suave but sinister Squire as the cause of this plague and the fact that he spent a significant amount of time in Haiti does nothing to help his case.  It's up to the two doctors to take on the Squire and his undead henchmen and stop him before he turns Sylvia into one of his monsters.

The Plague of the Zombies is Hammer B-movie gold.  If you watch it as a low budget and quickly shot B-movie punctuated with comical acting and effects, I think you will be pleasantly surprised.  Remember, it's a mystery movie as much as it is a horror so don't expect it to be like a modern zombie film.  These old Hammer films were created to be spooky more than outright scary and I think this movie succeeds in that.  Watching it with a pint or two of Guinness couldn't hurt either.