White Zombie (1932)
Last Watch Date - October 30, 2022
Total Times Watched - Once
Comments
You'd think that being a fan of the band White Zombie since the early-mid 90s, I'd have bothered to watch this movie at some point. You would think WRONG, good sir. When I was younger, I'm sure I would've loved to have watched it, but in the 90s and early 00s, movies weren't just available everywhere! I was broke too. These things fell out of favor over the years and became increasingly hard to find until the internet made them so easy to get. If you think about people in the late 90s and early 00s, they want movies like Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, or even that Texas Chainsaw reboot with Jessica Biel. [Side note: how have I not put these ones up here yet?!]
Good ol' Tubi has a bunch of old horror. I initially tried to watch The Cabinet of Dr Caligari but that one wasn't a Talkie, see? And the music they put in for the Tubi version was.. uhh.. bad. I'm sorry but I can't listen to an hour of ... whatever that was. Lucky for me White Zombie WAS a Talkie. One of the older examples of horror Talkies! The voice recordings are quite good for the time. There are some issues with ambient sound in places, but the dialogue sounds quite nice overall.
Being as old as it is, the camera has some jank to it as well. A sort of flickery effect in places, but also general movement like the dude holding it was tweaking. It's particularly bad in the later scenes. In one particular part, it was giving me a bit of a headache from jumping around so much.
The musical score is quite good I think. The story itself is mediocre and really not that horrifying, but I'm sure in the 30s it was a hit. Visually most of the sets are good. Effects aren't too shabby, though there is a body falling off a cliff into some water that is hilariously fake. MY MANNEQUIN!!!!
This take on zombies is interesting because it's more of a spell they fall under than a reanimation of the dead. If I recall correctly, that is the original way they came about in folklore? I'm not going to fact check that, but it seems like something I heard before. Bet your life savings on that being true.
This movie is short at just over an hour, but it works. I kind of like these shorter movies myself. I see people talk about how they like hour-long episodes of shows now like Game of Thrones etc because it's like a movie.. but then a lot of movies we get now are three hours. THAT'S TOO MUCH. Give me 60-90 minutes for a movie!
Recommended?
Yeah, check it out. It's film history! It's also not too shabby