Victor Halperin's WHITE ZOMBIE (1932) was a decent example of the undead movie, the first zombie film and featuring a great performance from Bela Lugosi as an evil black magician. This semi-sequel, blatantly cashing in on that movie's success, has neither Lugosi nor zombies, other than in a one-minute sequence at the film's opening. This scene, set during an unspecified war, sees foreign soldiers, under mind control, overwhelming their enemies. In one classic moment, bullets riddle a man's chest and don't even slow him down. I loved this moment when I saw it, and I was all ready to love the rest of the movie...but after a while I realised that was all the horror we were getting.Instead this film goes along the lines of melodrama, with a half-baked love triangle exacerbated by the lead's transformation from love-struck guy to total madman. Along the way he puts plenty of people under mind control; somehow clapping a fist to his forehead achieves this (pretty cheap, I know). Halperin desperately tries to add atmosphere to the proceedings by using close-up shots of Bela Lugosi's eyes, ripped from WHITE ZOMBIE, but this is nothing other than a cheap gimmick. The mildly exciting revolt of the title happens in the last couple of minutes but comes as too little, too late. Dean Jagger, familiar from his later turns in such fare as X THE UNKNOWN and GAME OF DEATH, appears here as the madman in what is a wooden performance. All talk and no action, REVOLT OF THE ZOMBIES is a real bore, a clichéd cash-in with little to recommend it.

From the director of White Zombie! I thought this one would be more of the same, and was all jazzed up by the opening sequence, where a bunch of Cambodian zombies take a trench from the Bosch during World War One. Ah, I thought, this is going to be a good one, what with the zombies and the war and the intrigue and the murder of the zombie master. How could it fail? Well, how about bringing the whole film to a crashing halt by introducing a boring love triangle? That's what they do here, and I swear I had trouble distinguishing the two guys and who was being made to be jealous by the other guy and who ended up with the girl. I was nodding off at this bit. Seems they've all headed out to Cambodia to find out the zombie ritual for some reason, but you get little of that and loads of this trio standing around talking about relationships. And no zombies.Seems like the jealous guy's gone a bit whacko too, as he heads out on his own to a temple and follows a zombie in a scene which did make me laugh. In order to cut costs, it looks like the actors are just acting in front of photographs and projected images of the temple (and a swamp). When our jilted guy is following a zombie through the swamp, he's merely walking on the spot with added watery noises. That was funny at least, but still, it's the only entertainment I managed to get from the remainder of the film.Our jilted guy get's the zombie ritual and starts zombifying everybody (and I mean everybody) in order to get his girl back, but by this point, you won't be caring. Let me point out here that the zombies only actually do any damage when they're not zombies anymore – that's how crap this one is! This film was a real let down (especially if you've already watched White Zombie)…You might get some cheese kicks from the cheapness of it, but it's a cheat anyway.

It really amazes me that only four years after the not quite perfect but still classic "White Zombie" (1932), Edward Halperin would put together something as cheap and awful as this. There is no horror or suspense whatsoever, and even with the music from the original and constant close-ups of Bela Lugosi's eyes from that film, it falls flat. The film is not boring, which makes it somewhat worse, but simply a fraud in its attempt to advertise itself as a follow-up to the moody, atmospheric earlier film. That film was slow-moving and sometimes boring, but its atmosphere, photography and pacing were closer to the horror films of the silent era, making it even eerier in spots than "Dracula" and "Frankenstein". Dean Jagger is the lead who seems to have no real motive for his desire to turn Cambodian natives into zombies. There is absolutely no horror element, even in the few murders that do occur thanks to his zombies. Missing Lugosi's brilliant hand movements ("You must be Hungarian, and you must be double-jointed", Martin Landau's Lugosi told Johnny Depp's Ed Wood when they were watching "White Zombie" on Elvira's TV show in "Ed Wood"), the film simply lags as if it really didn't know what it was supposed to be. The DVD print I saw is actually quite good for a public domain film, and better than many other $5 or under videos that I've seen over the years. That doesn't change the fact that this film was really unnecessary. I would have rather seen Lugosi retreading his old ground in "Son of White Zombie" or even "Voodoo Man" than this stinker.

After watching Revolt Of The Zombies starring future Academy Award winner Dean Jagger I was left with one burning question. How was a society that created these ultimate warrior fighting machines ever defeated in the first place? That's the question you'll be pondering if you take time to watch Revolt Of The Zombies. Towards the end of World War I, the French discover a cult from occupied Cambodia where these undead creatures who cannot be stopped with bullets form a brigade of monks who go over the top and dislodge the Hun.This scares the living fecal matter out of everyone concerned so an international expedition is formed to find out destroy the secret of these zombies so no nation can get their hands on it and rule the world.But we've got some dissent in those ranks. First is Snidely Whiplash villain Roy D'Arcy who murders the Buddhist monk who has the secret and second is Dean Jagger. Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac as we all know and he's determined to woo Dorothy Stone away from rival Robert Noland.I think you've got some idea how this comes out, especially since a race of zombies didn't conquer the world for one country. Dean Jagger as he got the Oscar for Twelve O'Clock High must have shuddered every time he thought about this film and the awful dialog he tried to give a spark of sincerity to.Moral of the story, you might make an ultimate warrior with the zombie potion and the zombie chant, but you can't make an ultimate love slave.