Revolt of the Zombies [PG]

After WW1, a group representing the Allies is sent to Cambodia to stop the efforts of Count Mazovia to create an outbreak of further war through creation of a zombie army by means of ancient mystical practices. Amongst those in the group who travel through the jungle of Angkor despite many perils is Armand who has his own agenda and desire for obtaining the coveted ancient voodoo magic. 

So it seems that the zombie subgenre really didn’t get perfected until zombies were made into these flesh-eating threats that lumbered towards their victims at the speed of mud. Whilst this movie honours the traditional idea of what a zombie is: a mindless mass of human-shaped flesh, its fails to deliver a fright factor. The story is pretty lame and simultaneously a little confusing, the performances are wooden, and all in all it’s just not a very good film. 

After WW1, a group representing the Allies is sent to Cambodia to stop the efforts of Count Mazovia to create an outbreak of further war through creation of a zombie army by means of ancient mystical practices. Amongst those in the group who travel through the jungle of Angkor despite many perils is Armand who has his own agenda and desire for obtaining the coveted ancient voodoo magic. 

To be fair, the quality, in particular the sound quality of this movie wasn’t very good and this could be a fair contributing factor to the lack of any entertainment that I found within it. I seriously had to have my TV on maximum volume and still couldn’t work out what people were saying. For a start, the screenplay is pretty predictable: raw and amateurish. It just felt really boring and generic: all the exposition was in the right place, there were bits of clichéd poeticism, philosophy, and declarations of love, there were solid attempts at tension creation that felt flatter than the film that forms on cooling soup, and the only bit of special effects that came into the mix were over-screen images of eyes, which incidentally were Karloff’s eyes as used in White Zombie. I suppose it can be argued that there is some clever cinematic allusion or inside joke in there, but whatever it tried to achieve, it failed to get a grasp on. 

The performances are all pretty terrible, wooden and unfeeling with no chemistry between characters happening at all! And when drama does finally happen and people’s faces change or they even go for broke and tackle a gesture like the hand to the mouth in shock, it all becomes overdone and is very much reminiscent of the over-exaggerated actions in silent films such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. 

Starring Dorothy Stone, Dean Jagger, Roy D’Arcy, Robert Noland, George Cleveland, E. Alyn Warren, Carl Stockdale, William Crowell, Teru Shimada, and Adolph Milar, Revolt of the Zombies is a pretty boring and generic flick filled with not much substance at all aside from the odd bit of ‘drama’, tension, or romance. Yeah, it’s pretty terrible and if you go your entire life without seeing it, you’re not missing out on anything!