Zombies of Mora Tau

Arrow Limited Edition: The last of Sam Katzman's "big four" that I'm reviewing here after many years of delay. Quite an enjoyable zombie flick from the days when George A. Romero was still squeezing his zits. Nobody can take away the status of the first zombie film from the now forgotten White Zombie from 1932, but for a long time after that, with few exceptions, there was silence on the trail, and even in the 1950s you could count the number of films with the writhing dead on one hand. This one is one of them, and it is, how shall I put it, exactly what you'd expect from Katzman. It's far from the unintentional comedy of his The Giant Claw, after all, a giant toothed flying ostrich is a different scale, but there’s a lot of fun here, too. There are only three cheesy interiors, the funniest of which is the so-called "European burial ground in the middle of the African jungle", where zombies lie in clean backdrops, in bakelite coffins, identical and pillaged one after the other. They have the appearance of the beer-guzzling geezers you can see in down-at-heel train station bars. They walk slowly, don't make any sounds, they look like they just swallowed a large amount of endiarone. Occasionally they will threaten you with a fist bump or spread their arms as if to hug you, otherwise they are completely harmless. The underwater scenes are replaced by a greyed-out filter in front of the camera and a bubble blower attached to a diving helmet. That's how it's done, no CGI needed :) Otherwise Octavianus is right, Allison Hayes is great, before the script commands her in the 2nd half to stare dumbly ahead (like a "zombie") she has the animalistic sex appeal of Tura Satana in her prime – and the perfect make-up does help. In summary, it has no craftsmanship qualities, but I'll still slightly overrate it, because I actually enjoyed the – from today's perspective – pleasantly cute naivety. And a big thanks to publishing companies like Arrow for taking such good care of these forgotten B-movies, it looks fabulous on Blu-ray. (11.07.2022)