I've been watching horror films since before I could walk and this is the first time I have viewed this. Story is about a doctor named Sir John Forbes (Andre Morell) who receives a letter one day from a former pupil who is asking for help because people in his village are dying under strange circumstances. Sir John and his daughter Sylvia (Diane Clare) head to the village and they find his former pupil Peter Tompson (Brook Williams) and his wife Alice (Jacqueline Pearce) who explain the problem at hand. Alice looks pale and sick and has a bad cut on her arm but she insists that she is fine. Sir John asks what the autopsies revealed and Peter tells him that the village Squire would not allow any autopsies due to religious practices. The village Squire is Clive Hamilton (John Carson) and he has many men who work for him and are very obedient and one day he comes to visit Sylvia. A glass breaks and Sylvia ends up with a cut finger and when she isn't looking he takes some of her blood and keeps it. Then one night Alice leaves her home and ends up dead. Peter is heartbroken and Sir John suggests that they dig up some bodies in the cemetary and when they do they discover that all of the coffins are empty! Sir John figures out that Squire Hamilton has practiced black magic and can make the dead rise up as zombies and make them work in his underground mine. But he has to hurry because the Squire has put a spell on Sylvia and plans on using her next! This was directed by John Gilling who along with Terence Fisher was very popular especially with fans of these films by Hammer Studios. Gilling filmed this and then went right ahead a week later to direct "The Reptile" back to back and some of the sets can be seen in both films. I think one of the reasons that this doesn't get mentioned much when people speak of Hammer films is because it lacked real recognizable faces in the cast. The whole cast is good and veterans of these types of films but here in America how many people knew who John Carson was? I think most viewers were accustomed to seeing Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee in the leads and if they weren't than maybe they got pushed by the wayside over the years. The special effects are not bad and it was pretty eerie seeing Alice rise up out of her grave. But I did laugh at some of the scenes in the mine where some of the men were flogging the zombies with whips to make them work. I guess good workers are hard to find! What's the world coming to if you can't get a zombie to put in a decent days work? But this is an effective film and one of the few that Hammer made that dealt with Zombies. Creepy atmosphere and a good cast make this a fun film to view.
Review of The Plague of the Zombies
