Vengeance of the Zombies (1973)

Watching Vengeance of the Zombies really  does feel, at times, a surreal experience, as it happily mashes  together a multitude of cinematic, literary and cultural references and inspirations with little regard for logic, let alone coherent characterisation or plot development.  Even star Paul Naschy, who scripted the film under his real name of Jacinto Molina, later observed that he must have been under the influence of drugs when he wrote it.  That said, like most Spanish horror films from the seventies, it is also a lot of fun to watch and has its moments.  Like the contemporaneous Naschy-starring Spanish giallo Seven Murders for Scotland Yard, the film is set in the UK. Or rather a continental approximation of the UK, centering around a still-swinging London.  To be fair, Vengeance of the Zombies features  far more location shooting around early seventies London than Seven Murders.  Moreover, its star, Naschy, actually features in some of it, rather than the film makers using a double filmed in medium and long shot.  The rest of exterior scenes, representing some remote part of the UK countryside, however, were clearly shot in Spain.  As with Seven Murders, the film's makers show a shaky grasp of UK office interiors, particularly those of police stations, with senior police officers once more favouring some very garish wallpaper for their workplaces.

While clearly hoping to cash in on the renewed popularity of zombies, created by George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, (it even opens in a graveyard, like the Romero film), the walking dead of Vengeance of the Zombies are a throwback to the Voodoo animated zombies of thirties and forties films.  Rather than being flesh eaters who transmit their undead status via their bites, these zombies are the slaves of the Voodoo priest who raises them, silently doing his bidding and exhibiting no will or imperative of their own.  But Night of the Living Dead is only one of many sources which seem to have influenced Molinar's script: the opening, for instance, also features a pair of grave robbers, making it reminiscent of Frankenstein Meet the Wolfman, whose grave robbers are equally ill-fated.  A dream sequence part-way through the film, in which the heroine finds herself being dragged from her bed to the catacombs, where her blood is used in a ritual to raise the Devil, seems to be inspired by Lovecraft's Dreams in the Witch House by way of Curse of the Crimson Altar (which used elements of the Lovecraft story uncredited).  Naschy, as Satan, is even green skinned, like Barabara Steele in Crimson Altar's dream sequences.- which feature the hero apparently taken from his bed for Satanic rituals presided over by the witch Lavinia (Steele).  The key plot device of a pair of twin brothers (Naschy again), one of who keeps coming under the influence of his evil brother, seems to recall Dennis Wheatley's The Satanist, (a one-time project for Hammer Films, which was abandoned following the debacle of To The Devil a Daughter, to which it is a semi-sequel).

None of these apparent inspirations are at all surprising, as Naschy/Molina was a keen student of the horror classics.  Unfortunately, his script just can't accommodate them all into a single coherent plot.  Indeed, one of the film's biggest problems is that for much of its running time it just feels like a series of events which the audience fervently hopes might eventually be linked up and explained , (not unlike the fragmented narrative structure of another somewhat surreal seventies horror favourite: Scream and Scream Again).  The heroine is attacked in her house by a zombie which kills her father, (her sister has already been murdered), various other women are murdered by a masked killer, their bodies subsequently reanimated by him using Voodoo.  The heroine consults her Indian guru (Naschy) and eventually follows him to his remote country retreat, seeking refuge, while her doctor boyfriend and the police investigate the murders. Strange and suspicious characters appear, (a creepy rural station master, for instance, who never seems to notice that Spanish trains keep running through his British Rail station), behave weirdly, before, more often than not, being murdered.  Some of the murders are both inventive and gory - a mortuary attendant is stabbed to death with the jagged edge of an opened tin can, for example.  The Guru behaves suspiciously - could he and the evil twin brother he mentions actually be one and the same person. Actually, no.  The brother, who is horribly scarred, exists (and is also played by Naschy), and, of course, is the one behind the murders.

All the victims, (including the heroine's family), had been part of the British Raj pre-independence and were involved in some kind of curse involving a rape and subsequent murder of the alleged rapist on Independence Day 1947.  So, naturally, the evil brother (who is able to subvert his twin's will to do his bidding), a Hindu, has been using Voodoo (a religion created by black African slaves and their descendants), to wreak revenge for his people.  The sacrifice of the last victim, the heroine, will complete his revenge and allow the summoning of Satan himself in the form of Baron Samedi.  But at the last minute, it turns out that the maid is a representative of the Voodoo religion and accuses evil Naschy of having 'betrayed Voodoo', (not of cultural appropriation, though), killing him, before turning her attentions to the heroine - luckily, though, the police turn up on cue and rescue the girl, (after fighting some zombies in the garden).  At least, I think that's what it was all about.  The disjointed story-telling makes it difficult to tell.  Perhaps Molina was trying to make some serious point about colonialism and the exploitation of native populations - but if so, this is completely undermined by the fact that the film's main ethnic characters are played by a blacked up Spaniard.

But the plot isn't really the point.  The real pleasure in watching Vengeance of the Zombies comes from its occasionally striking imagery and some surprisingly effective  sequences such as the dream sequence and the tin can murder) which intersperse the film. At its best, Leon Klimovsky's direction, with its use of slow motion for the zombies, evokes a dream like feel.  On top of all that, it has some great footage of seventies London, a lounge musical score that seems to have come from another film entirely, peak seventies fashions, lots of beautiful (and sometimes naked) continental actresses and even some gore.  If you are in the right mood, Vengeance of the Zombies can be a lot of fun to watch.  While it is far from Naschy's best work, he is surprisingly effective in his triple roles.  Best of all, it is another film which gives a wonderfully off-kilter outsider's perspective of seventies Britain, something I always find fascinating.

The English-language version seems to be in the public domain, with the the film consequently widely - not mention freely - available on many streaming platforms, including YouTube, Daily Motion and the Internet Archive.