Shambling toward you from out of the jungle dark, it’s Burl,
here to review a tale of voo-doo zombification! Yes, I’m going to talk all
about Zombies of Mora Tau, an oldie
von moldie set in a studio-bound Africa so thoroughly colonialized that not a
single African person is ever seen! Ha ha!
The setup is this: Jan, a young lady who left Africa as a
girl, now returns to visit Granny, who has never budged from her coastal bungalow!
But there’s zombie trouble brewing again, a problem for which only the old lady
has the proper appreciation! At the same time some treasure hunters arrive to
dive for the legendary lost diamonds, and since the zombies are the guardians
of same, their restlessness is thereby accounted for!
These shamblers don’t bite, but prefer to give their victims a pretty
stiff neck twist! Ha ha, they’re super-strong too, these zombies, which is a nice
adjunct to the mythology! And this group of rotsmen, numbering about a dozen, was
created in the late nineteenth century and have just been hanging around ever
since, popping out of their oddly clean and spacious mausoleum when their
diamonds are under threat of discovery! Granny shows off an impressive array of
graves in which previous treasure hunters have been buried – it’s a pretty good
scene, ha ha!
There’s a lot of deep-sea diving and some underwater zombie
attacks – the divers are repeatedly pulled up from the depths covered in
zombies! The mean lady played by Allison “Gunslinger”
Hayes gets zombiefied somehow (the process, voo-doo based presumably, is never
explained) and must be imprisoned within a cage of lit candles, as the zombies’
only fear is fire! Ha ha, a nice image, that! Meanwhile, Jan and the diver hero
Jeff, played by Gregg “Billion Dollar Brain” Palmer, get their
mitts on the diamonds, and, at Granny’s behest, toss them to Davy Jones’ Locker
(in what looks like about three feet of water, ha ha!) so that the zombies,
among whom is Granny’s husband, may finally find eternal rest! Meanwhile a
professor played by Morris Ankrum, of Giant From the Unknown fame, stands around doing the same thing he’s done for the
whole picture, which is nothing!
It’s a cheap little picture, much of which makes no sense;
and it doesn’t have a fraction of the atmosphere found in a great movie like I Walked With A Zombie! (Ha ha, that one
is one of ol’ Burl’s stone favourites!) But Zombies
of Mora Tau looks moody enough, thanks to nice photography from Benjamin
Kline, who also apparently worked on Edgar Ulmer’s Detour and Strange Illusion!
I enjoy little programmers like this, and I’m going to give it two collapsing
suits!
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