REVOLT OF THE ZOMBIES (1936)
Article #117 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 7-11-2001
Posting date: 11-24-2001

A timid student of dead languages loses the woman he loves to a friend with a much more aggressive philosophy. When he discovers an ancient technique to turn men into zombies, he adopts his friend’s aggressive technique and uses the power to try to gain the woman back.

After seeing a few of the Halperin Brothers’ movies, I really have to admire their ambition; while most of the other low-budget horror movies of the time were content with an “old dark house” and a few murders, the Halperins really tried to fill their movies with wonderful ideas and concepts. Yet, despite the novel ideas and the occasional atmospheric moment, the sheer creakiness of their directorial style drags them down, and never so badly as it did in this one; it is shot so uninterestingly and unfolds so slowly that everything that was potentially good about it shrivels up to nothing. And we’ve seen the floating eyes of Bela Lugosi too many times; they add nothing to this movie. Dean Jagger (who plays the lead in this movie) definitely went on to better things.