THE PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES
Blu-ray. Studio Canal.

The second of Hammer’s Cornish horrors is, like The Reptile, one of the company’s great sleeper films, holding up considerably better than many of their better-known movies of the 1960s. It’s also an interesting bridging point between the voodoo-inspired zombie films of the past and the flesh eating shockers that would arise a couple of years later with Night of the Living Dead. While Hammer’s zombies remain more mindless slaves than dangerous threat, the film does at least allow them to take on a certain level of horror not previously seen.

Like The Reptile, The Plague of the Zombies sees exotic and sinister foreign cults transplanted in a small and insular Cornish location. In this case, local Squire Clive Hamilton (John Carson) is killing off and then resurrecting villagers to work as slave labour in his dangerous tin mine, using the knowledge he picked up living in Haiti. Local doctor Peter Tompson (Brook Williams) is helpless in the face of the mysterious deaths and the backward attitudes of the unfriendly villagers who refuse permission for post-mortems (Hammer probably didn’t win any awards from the Cornish tourist board for these two films!), and his wife Anna (Jacqueline Pearce) is sickening, about to become Hamilton’s next victim. It’s down to the solid Sir James Forbes (Andre Morrell) and his feisty daughter Sylvia (Diane Clare) to get to the bottom of the mystery.

Never slacking for a moment, Plague… is one of Hammer’s most impressive movies – atmospheric, sometimes gruesome and action-packed – even James Bernard, not the most subtle of composers at the best of times, seems to be pulling out all the stops here with a soundtrack that is almost combustible in its franticness. Carson and Morrell dominate the cast as two sides of Hammer’s upper classes – the dependable hero and the decadent, unsavoury villain. The politics of Hammer’s horrors are often fascinating, and never more so than here, where the rich really are exploiting the working classes and where ostentatious wealth is intimately connected to a more general decadence.

The ever-dependable John Gilling does a bang-up job here – a nightmare sequence is rightly remembered as one of the finest moments in any Hammer film and his sure hand means that you rarely stop to think about the weak juvenile leads (Diane Clare is just as one-dimensional as Jennifer Daniel was in The Reptile), the rather-too-obvious day-for-night shots and some ropey zombie masks glimpsed in the final sequences. None of that matters because The Plague of the Zombies is a first rate horror adventure.

The newly restored disc looks great – you can occasionally see the joins, but the colours are vivid and the whole movie looks fresh and astounding. There’s also a 35 minutes documentary that is considerably better than the one featured on The Reptile, including interviews with Pearce and Carson. Another must-have Hammer restoration.

DAVID FLINT

BUY IT NOW (UK)

PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES GALLERY