White Zombie (1932)

"I'm too old to go all the way with you!"

Oh dear. I was all set to watch Brighton Rock with Richard Attenborough but, due to a disappointing lack of subtitles on behalf of Amazon Prime, I thought I'd watch this instead. Not my best decision; it's a plodding, dull, poorly shot melodrama that may only last 70 minutes but feels much, much longer. Not very good, to put it mildly, and you can sort of see the slide in Bela Lugosi's career starting here, in a performance that is just repeating Dracula.

Still, bad film though this is, it remains an interesting cultural artifact and not only because it was the name of Rob Zombie's band for a few years before he found himself having far more success with his solo career and sacked the band. It's set, like the later I Walked with a Zombie, in Haiti and sees the zombie entirely through the prism of Haitian voodoo legend. Even the title of the film suggests it was widely seen as a Haitian or, at most, West African thing. The zombie at this point owes very little to the post-Night of the Living Dead concept; here it is implied to be the result of a drug that mimics death, allowing the voodoo baddie to "resurrect" the body as his docile servant. No biting or brain munching here. Indeed, zombies are said to be worked for long hours in plantations and sugar factories, and it's impossible not to see this, in the Caribbean of all places, in the context of slavery. This isn't the apocalypse; it's abuse of workers' rights.

None of that makes this film worth seeing, though. You have been warned!