Vengeance of the Zombies

Vengeance of the Zombies (1973) aka La rebelión de las muertas

Dir. León Klimovsky

Written by Paul Naschy

Starring Paul Naschy, Rommy, Mirta Miller

            Paul Naschy (born Jacinto Molina Álvarez) seems like a good guy. He was the kind of dude who tried his hand at a lot of different things in his youth; he was a pro weightlifter, a comic book artist, a Western paperback novelist, an album cover designer, and was alternately working as a wrestler and actor well into his 30’s. But it was when he sold a script about an errant werewolf titled La Marca del Hombre Lobo (THE MARK OF THE WOLFMAN) and ended up getting cast in the title role (the Wolfman, not the Mark) when Lon Chaney Jr. turned the part down* that he saw his true destiny: he would become “The Spanish Lon Chaney,” a horror icon of many faces, and a genre icon in his native Spain and around the world. And so it was. He was a prolific worker; nearly always writing his own scripts, often producing and occasionally directing as well, over the course of a lengthy career he cranked out dozens of low-budget horror and action pictures, including no less than 16 werewolf movies. I like this guy.

            I like him so much that I wish I liked his movies better, especially since I spent something like a hundred bucks on his two available Blu-Ray anthologies and am now doomed to watch them all. Which is not to say that they’re completely worthless; there’s a lot to like about them! In keeping with his Lon Chaney image, they usually have Naschy himself in some kind of weird makeup or disguise, there’s almost always a couple scenes of nasty (though unconvincing) gore, and there’s never any shortage of pervy, leering nudity. In theory, all that should add up to fun, feisty little slices of Euro-sleaze, but in practice his movies tend to be oddly inert, somnambulant experiences, grinding in slow motion through deadening scenes of generic noncharacters sitting around in poorly-lit apartments droning on about nothing, only occasionally punctuated by a few minutes of weird, dreamy horror footage.

            Alas, that describes VENGEANCE OF THE ZOMBIES pretty much exactly. There’s enough effort being made that it doesn’t feel like a total insult, but not enough to ever add up to much. It’s the kind of movie that you finish, and then your girlfriend asks how it was, and you try to describe it but you just feel like you’re relating some kind of hazy, half-remembered dream, and the more you try to explain, the more confusing it becomes until now you’re not really confident about what you just saw, and she’s trying to be polite but it’s clear this is not interesting and so you just kinda peter out in embarrassed frustration.

            Speaking of which, the plot is pretty simple and easily explained, because basically there’s this woman Elvira (Romy [no last name, and amusingly misspelled “Rommy” here], THE KILLER WITH 1,000 EYES) who has a nightmare about her father being killed, and then he is killed, and then for some reason she goes to live with some kind of Indian guru (Naschy, in unfortunate Indianface), at his estate, run by his intimidating second-in-command (Mitra Miller, EYEBALL), but then there’s also some kind of giallo-esque killer going around wearing a cape and black fedora with his face obscured by variety of unfortunate ethnic stereotype masks, and sometimes he stabs or strangles people or just kind of lurks around various London locales, and sometimes he also seem to use Voodoo to command a couple of female zombies to kill people? And there’s some guy, (Victor Barrer, credited as “Vic Winner,” IN THE FOLDS OF THE FLESH and a Naschy regular) who’s always wearing suits, he’s definitely going to nondescript rooms and talking to people, I know that much, and then I think there’s like a scene in a morgue where the masked guy comes in and murders a guy eating a sandwich, and then all the corpses sit up and they’re all women wearing transparent gowns, and they run off with him, and um, let’s see, there’s this part where someone has a dream where Paul Naschy is a bare-chested goat-horned devil, that was cool. I think there’s a twist where he has an evil twin or something? There’s definitely at least one more Paul Naschy in there, I’ll tell you that much, and also an indeterminate number of pretty European women who sit or stand in sparsely furnished rooms and take their clothes off, or maybe it was just one and she does it a couple times? And I seem to remember they’re trying to do something with Voodoo, and wasn’t it because they wanted revenge on the British because of colonialism or something, it seems like it didn’t make a lot of sense but it struck me as probably pretty racist, I remember that much and... um, I think something else happens to, I’m not really sure. Yeah. Hmm. Anyway, did you have any dreams?

            There’s definitely a few highlights in there, but even on Blu-Ray, looking about as pristine as you’re ever going to see it, a lot of photography is way too dark for you to really make out what’s going on (and the rest is ugly), the sound mixing is a muddy mess, the music (by Juan Carlos Calderón, who has a song in TOMMY BOY?) is all wildly inappropriate funky jazz-fusion (it might even be a fun score in livelier movie, but in something this slow it just highlights how much fun you’re not having), the story is vague to the point of nonexistence, and even the subtitles have a bunch of grammatical errors which reduce the already incoherent dialogue into nonsensical gibberish. It’s not like we’re translating from Nepalese to Cherokee guys, you’re telling me it was too hard to find someone fluent in both Spanish and English? I don’t think that’s too much to ask here.

            In a lot of ways this is, then, a pretty objectively bad movie, and yet, there’s something there. Maybe it’s just because I’ve already invested so much in collecting Paul Naschy movies that I’m lying to myself, but Naschy himself remains a compelling presence, and the movie definitely picks up whenever he’s on-screen (in fact, a big part of the problem is that even with three roles, he’s not around nearly enough). And even if the direction fails to make much of it, I can’t fault his instincts for solid horror imagery. His masked giallo slasher is totally standard, but an effective design, his dream sequence devil is an inspired creation, and his treatment of the chalk-faced Voodoo zombies (while obvious deeply rooted in some very problematic straight-up racist tropes) is about as classic as horror iconography gets. It’s also kind of interesting in itself to see the ol’ Voodoo zombie model --a relic of a handful of astoundingly racist black-and-white cheapies from the 30’s and 40’s which were never particularly prevalent and had been almost entirely killed off by the advent of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD five years prior-- show up in swingin’ 1973 London. If nothing else, the addition of nudity adds a queasy psycho-sexual dimension to the otherwise decidedly old-fashioned images of glassy-eyed ghouls rising from their graves.

            Like many Paul Naschy movies, when you type all that out, it seems like you must have just described a good movie, or at least a fun one. Alas, everything good about the film is almost completely negated by its draggy, flat direction (by León Klimovsky, an Argentinian dentist who had emigrated to Spain in the early 50’s to become a director, and had become Naschy’s go-to guy since 1970’s La Noche de Walpurgis) and its aimless anti-narrative. This final complaint falls squarely on Naschy; from what I’ve seen of his work, his intuitive grasp of horror tropes was consistently hobbled by his total inability to craft even rudimentary narratives to showcase those horror tropes. The whammy is actually mostly there, but it desperately needs better structure for it to have the impact that it ought to. His movies tend to lack even crude, vestigial character arcs, completely neglecting any kind of framework that could meaningfully be called a “story.” In some cases, such as HORROR RISES FROM THE TOMB, this is taken to extreme, almost absurdist levels, where not a single character from the film’s first act appears in the climax. In this case, it just means that there's no identifiable protagonist of any kind, and even though the film begins and ends with Elvira, she never actually accomplishes anything or has any conflict, she's just sort of around being vaguely menaced by who-knows-what-exactly. Finely-tuned writing is a rarity in the horror genre, and seldom particularly germane to a film’s success, but without any story structure at all, films like VENGEANCE OF THE ZOMBIES struggle to build momentum, resulting in a ungainly string of largely disconnected moments which end up being less than a sum of their parts.

People often complain about the horror genre being too derivative, but frequently the ability to draw from a basic story template (slashers, for example, with their rigid story structure**) allows the genre faithful to focus on the monsters and murders that are their real interests and their real talents, without getting bogged down in reinventing a formula that works. Naschy largely abandons basic horror formulas; the result is some genuinely unique plots (can you think of another horror movie about a Hindu cult leader who may or may not moonlight as a Voodoo zombie avenger?) but, unfortunately, not too many that actually work.

But oh well. I’m still rooting for Naschy, and with 100+ movies in his filmography, there’s sure to be at least a few where it all comes together. Even Jesus Franco had a couple of good ones. This one’s more miss than hit, but it’s an interesting enough oddity to be worth my time, if not yours.  

* Or was passed over because of age, illness or infirmity; sources seem to differ

** See Vern’s “Blues Theory of Slashers” 

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TAGLINE	A Modern Day Gothic Tale Of Horror And Fear.
TITLE ACCURACY	If I understand the killer’s motivations correctly, Vengeance does have something to do with it, though the Zombies are just henchmen who aren’t really getting vengeance on their own behalf.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	Naschy made a handful of other movies with Zombies in them, but none seem directly related to this one.
REMAKE?	None
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	Spain, though shot in England
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Zombies (Voodoo variety), Slasher, Evil Cult
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Naschy.
NUDITY?	Yup
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	He impales two people while they’re doin’ it
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	None
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Zombies
POSSESSION?	Yeah
CREEPY DOLLS?	Voodoo dolls, though they’re more practical than creepy.
EVIL CULT?	Yes, though ironically if I understood this correctly (spoilers) the main cult guy is actually an innocent victim of a different cult.
MADNESS?	None
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	No
VOYEURISM?	Maybe, I dunno.
MORAL OF THE STORY	I think I’d have to understand the story better than I do to come up with a moral.