Zombie Movies

[Thecla]

One of my favorite Zombie movies is the 1966 Hammer flick The Plague of the Zombies. Needless to say, you have to like low budget Hammer/Corman type movies to enjoy it, but this one is actually on the well-produced side for a B-movie: The distinguished medical doctor, Sir James Forbes, goes to a Cornish tin mining village at the request of a former student to investigate a rash of mysterious deaths (bringing along his daughter, since that's what one does when investigating rashes of mysterious deaths). One of the little touches I like is that when Sir James eventually encounters his first zombie (coming out of a grave in the middle of the night, of course) he maintains his stiff upper lip and calmly slices its head off with a shovel. Yet later on when he's caught in a fire, he goes beserk with fear.

Also good, though neither a classic zombie movie nor a Hammer movie but morally both (strangely filmed in Spain as Pánico en el Transiberiano starring Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and Telly Savalas) is the 1973 movie Horror Express, involving the not-quite-dead fossil of a brain-draining ape on the trans-Siberian express.


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Dr. Wells (Cushing): "Are you telling me that an ape that lived two million years ago got out of that crate, killed the baggage man and put him in there then locked everything up neat and tidy and got away?"

Saxton (Lee): "That's exactly what I'm saying!"