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Tuesday, June 21, 2005 ( 6/21/2005 05:57:00 AM ) Bill S. "I DON'T THINK HE'S CRAZY, NOT VERY CRAZY, ANYWAY!" – After my viewing of the recent Dawn of the Dead, I decided to check out some more old-fashioned zombie fare, playing a tape of the Brown & Carney horror comedy, Zombies on Broadway, which Aaron Neathery had recently sent my way. I'd long heard that Zombies is one of the better flicks made by this largely forgotten comedy duo, and, after earlier seeing the weakly amusing Seven Days Ashore, I was hoping to get a better take on the boys. The flick appears to be RKO's attempt at cashing in on the trend started by Universal's Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein and Paramount's Bob Hope vehicle, Ghost Breakers. The studio'd had a hit with the low-budget Val Lewton flick, I Walked with A Zombie, so they still had the sets and some of the actors available for a funny take on the subject. (Darby Jones, an ultra-tall black actor, plays a menacing zombie in both movies.) Add Bela Lugosi as a mad professor, and you've got the raw material for a decent li'l B-comedy. Or rather you would if you had a real comedy duo in the leading roles: simply put, neither Wally Brown nor Allan Carney possess enough individual personality – or an instinct for the niceties of comic overplaying – to lift the lightweight jokes they've been written. Contrast a single sequence in Zombies where chubby Carney keeps seeing Jones' threatening zombie, who keeps ducking out of sight every time his disbelieving partner Brown turns to look, with any of a half dozen similar bits done by Lou Costello – and you can see the problem. Lou would've milked each sighting for all it was worth, growing progressively more frazzled each time, but Carney keeps it all at the same bland level of rote distress. The movie works best in its middle third when it behaves like a somewhat more straight-faced genre flick, and for that I credit Lugosi, who plays his mad doctor with a twinkle that belies his reputation as a humorless type who didn't get the jokes. The basic set-up offers B & C as a pair of New York press agents for a newly opening club called the Zombie Hut, run by gangster Sheldon Leonard (sadly misused here). The boys have come up with the idea of advertising that a real "zombie in person" will be part of the club's stage show. But when a Walter Winchell-style reporter threatens to blow the scam, Leonard's gangster sends the duo to the isle of San Sebastian to retrieve the real thing. On said island, Lugosi's Dr. Renault has been experimenting with a formula that'll temporarily transform living humans into the living dead. Also on the island is curvy Ann Jeffreys as a knife-throwing singer and a mischievous monkey in a circus suit. Mild hi-jinks ensue. The zombies, as I noted at the beginning, are more traditional creatures of their era, though unlike more serious entries like Lewton's flick or the Lugosi vehicle White Zombie, there are no colonial slave underpinnings affixed to the creatures. It's simply understood that San Sebastian is an exotic setting and that exotic settings are where you run across the walking dead. (Well, that and calypso singers, who can be plenty scary in their own right.) For a comic take on more contemporary flesh-eating zombies, we'd have to wait sixty years for Shawn of the Dead, which ends – like the Brown & Carney entry – with one of the flick's two funnyboys himself being transformed into a zombie. Unlike Broadway, though, the zombie state is not depicted as a short-term thing that can be cleared away by a glimpse of a shapely chorus girl's legs. Rather, it's a way of un-life. Here in the twenty-first century, we're much less naïve when it comes to considering the specifics of zombification. . . # | |
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