The Plague Of The Zombies

When Push 
Comes To Shovel

The Plague Of The Zombies
UK 1966
Directed by John Gilling  
Hammer/Studio Canal 
Blu Ray Zone B

Well it’s been a while since I last watched this one and, yeah, it’s still a real cracker of a film, for sure.

I first saw The Plague Of The Zombies in my very early teens, projected at my school film club for all the kiddies to see (somehow, the janitor never got into any kind of trouble for showing 10 year olds films like Death Race 2000... a screening I sadly missed out on at the time). My earliest memories of this are that it was in black and white but, it’s obviously been shot in colour so my memories must have been more muddied than the print Studio Canal had to work with (to varying degrees of success... yeah, I’ll get into that in a minute).

The film, set in the 1860s, tells the story of distinguished medical professor Sir James Forbes, played with relish by the great André Morrell (who was, perhaps, my favourite of the TV incarnations of Professor Quatermass in the original, serialised version of Quatermass And The Pit, reviewed here) and his daughter Sylvia (played by Diane Clare). They are summoned from London to a small community in Cornwall to help out Forbes’ former medical student, Dr. Peter Thompson (played by Brook Williams), who has set up a practice there with his wife, a friend of Sylvia’s, named Alice (played by the great Jacqueline Pearce, who would of course grow up to be the scourge of the galaxy as Servalan in Blake’s 7). 

There is a curious disease, of sorts, sweeping the village and killing off people unexpectedly... but the audience has already been clued in that it’s good old proper Haitian voodoo zombies and, once you meet the local squire, Hamilton, played wonderfully by John Carson with his sideburns sharpened up into razor-like points, you know he is the one responsible for bringing this practice back to Cornwall, by the tell tale symbol on the ring on his finger. He lives in his old country home which also served as the grounds and headquarters for SPECTRE at the opening of the movie version of From Russia With Love (reviewed by me here). And if you were in any doubt as to his status as lead villain, he surrounds himself with some local thugs who assert their collective British villainy by going fox hunting and, at one point, trying to gang rape Sylvia. 

But Forbes is on the case and, once he knows that the squire has allowed no autopsies on the bodies of any of the strange victims, he finds that the bodies are no longer in their coffins and so he also enlists the aid of the local Police Sergeant Swift, played by Hammer favourite Michael Ripper (is it really a Hammer film if Michael Ripper isn’t in it?). After a few walking corpses have been sighted in the vicinity and Alice is killed (and flung at Sylvia by a cackling zombie), Forbes consults the local priest who seems to have a library full of books about witchcraft and voodoo (because, of course). His theories  are confirmed when Alice rises from her exhumed coffin and tries to kill him, prompting him to decapitate her with a shovel in one stroke (trimmed by the English censors at the time in, presumably, lost footage... when he originally took about four shovel strikes). It turns out, of course, that Squire Hamilton has been killing and reanimating people as zombies to use as cheap labour for his old, abandoned tin mines. Justice arrives in the form of Forbes and Thompson and we are left with a typical Hammer film ending from this period, no epilogue... just a sudden ending with the heroes glumly watching the tin mines burn and wallowing in their sudden, Pyrrhic victory. 

And it’s a great movie. The zombies themselves predate the modern zombies kickstarted by George A Romero two years later in Night Of The Living Dead and are almost a cross breed of the brainwashed victims of Haitian zombies in earlier films and the ones to come... being that these specimens, with their white contact lenses and greyed skin, do bear more than a passing resemblance to some of those in Romero’s later ground breaking movie. And, of course, it also destroys the notion that Romero invented the kind of zombie that would tear itself from the under the soil and up into the open. For my money, the first movie to actually do that may have been one of the 1940s Universal Mummy sequels (I forget which one) but, in a strangely placed dream sequence, we see the pasty faced, dark rimmed with blank eyes undead rising out from the earth in the local graveyard... so, yeah, I suspect Romero might well have seen and been influenced by this movie in particular. 

Perhaps my one slight criticism of the film is that it seems like it’s been trimmed a little, possibly at the script stage, in that Morrell’s character seems to be jumping to just the right deductions before he has the necessary knowledge to make a judgement call. I suspect a few minor scenes of expository dialogue, such as more knowledge about the circumstances in which his daughter cut her hand (thus allowing the squire to make off with some of her blood to use on a voodoo doll), would have helped curtail those kinds of leaps. But it doesn’t really spoil my appreciation of the movie, which is that it’s pretty well made and a darn good yarn at that. 

What did spoil my appreciation of it a little, is the restoration on this relatively recent Studio Canal Blu Ray, which seems to be more than a trifle enthusiastic in its treatment of the many ‘day for night’ scenes, which appear to be presented way too bright than they ever have before... but I won’t get in to that argument here because, I believe there have been a fair few feuds about this and a few of their other releases in regards to this aspect online before... I just wish that someone like the Indicator label (aka Powerhouse Films) had been allowed to do a proper restoration instead. I’ve come to think of Studio Canal more and more like they’re the bad guys in recent years, blocking UK releases of some nice restorations and then leaving certain films either unreleased or in less prestigious versions over here in the UK. Which is a sad state of affairs for lovers of film but, there you have it. 

All in all, though, if you’ve never seen The Plague Of The Zombies before and you are a lover of Hammer horror, this is definitely one of their better movies and it certainly won’t be the last time I revisit this one. Much to be recommended here.