Director: Paul Maslansky
Year: 1974
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Zombie
Plot:
Following a nightclub opening, the murder of her boyfriend sends a woman deep into the realms of a local voodoo master, who soon sends a squad of zombies to do her bidding, forcing a police officer to stop her before she completes her vengeance-filled mission.
Review:
This here was a rather enjoyable entry with a lot to like about it. One of the best features of it is that it manages a fantastic mixture of zombies and voodoo here, as both are mixed together to provide a lot of fun. Although it's not entirely PC by today's standards, the attributes which are shown here to attract that audience manage to make for quite a solid showing, with the racial slurs and different setups to cater to that audience all giving this one a lot to like. What also helps is that the film has the voodoo ceremony occurs early in the film, which is a really fun approach to the film, with there being some really fun confrontations throughout. That there are a lot of gang members here who are involved with this are killed off at a rather nice clip here, and it does it at great intervals, which gives it a feeling of never being dull or boring at all. The confrontations themselves are incredibly fun, with the one in the cornfields being really creepy as there's the unknown factor of what's happening; there's a wonderful atmosphere to it and a fantastic payoff.
There's more fun from the other zombie attacks, including the one in the train yard and a later one in a bar, while the other great one is the only one without the use of the zombies, where one is forced to take his life through the use of voodoo as it winds toward the inevitable, where it becomes really tense and quite chilling. The zombies are really great-looking as well, with the dirt-covered rags that are effective in giving them a long-dead, decaying look, and with their memorable eyes and dead stare, they're quite impressive-looking. There's also the full-on fun of their resurrection sequence, which here is one of the better examples of this type of scene around. The image of the heaving ground giving way to a series of scenes with the heads coming out of the ground is simply spectacular. Combined with all the good, over the incredibly suspenseful and creepy location where it all takes place, these are what work for the film.
There wasn't a whole lot wrong with this one. The main one here is that the film has a really different view of zombies than most other films. This one has them as a gang of mindless assassins sent out to do whatever their master commands them to do, and that is such a major change from what's normally accepted in a zombie movie. That alone might be enough for some of the die-hard fans to cry foul, but then the fact that they manage to resort to using tools and weapons like any normal villain, albeit an indestructible one, really loses the distinctive touch of the zombie genre. The other issue here is that there's a really useless subplot in here about buying up the club, which takes up some time and is also wrong, which is where the middle section loses some ground compared to the other segments. Overall, though, it's not as bad as it could've been.
Overview: ****/5
A quite impressive Blaxploitation zombie effort, there's a lot to like here, which makes for one of the more effective entries in the style and holds this up against a few slight drawbacks presented here. Those with an interest in the style or who enjoy this era of the genre will have the most to like with this one, while most others out there might want to heed caution.
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