IMDb meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 1 minutes, rated 4.6 by 510 cinemitizens.
Genre: Horror
Verdict: Only for completists.
Set-up. Veda is dead. (What a waste since she is usually a corker.) But then John Carradine is her husband so maybe that explains her preference. He is Dr Max Heinrich von Altermann. Get it? Look at the release date, 17 September 1943. Max and Veda live in foggy Louisiana on the German Coast.
Veda’s brother, Stupid, comes to mourn her and vents his suspicious on anyone with a German name. He brings along Handsome. Neither one of these dorks can drive a car or carry a bag so they have Black Stereotype to look after them. There they find Gale Storm straight from secretarial school typing away, oblivious to everything.
Turns out Max has seen ‘Revolt of the Zombies’ (1931) and ‘King of the Zombies’ (1941) and mashed them together. From ‘Revolt of the Zombies’ he got the idea of an invulnerable (and cheap) army of the living dead and from ‘King of the Zombies’ he got a Germanic mad scientists to unleash such an army on YankeeLand, well, in this case DixieLand. Is that creative thinking, or what? Hmmm
So diabolical is Max that he is experimenting on Mrs Veda in life and in death. The fraternity brothers thought the worst. For them situation normal.
Now Stupid, Handsome, and Stereotype arrive to gum up the works. Stereotype realises almost instantly some creepy things are happening but when he tries to tell Stupid and Handsome they dismiss his reports as the hysteria, foolishness, and ignorance of a black man. The duty of being the butt for the arrogance of superior white men to kick often went to women.
Stereotype investigates and finds out more and more but his information is rejected, ignored, and disregarded even while Stupid and Handsome investigate matters by smoking cigarettes. In this case it is very like, though no doubt unintended, ‘King of Zombies’ where the same black stereotype was far ahead of his white, superior masters.
Bob Steele is there, he of distinctive voice and mien that made him a delightful villain in Westerns, here partly in parody of that sort of role, as a double and triple secret agent to paper over the script holes.
Also in the cast are Uncle Remus and Madame Sul-Te-Wan who played maids, slaves, and natives in countless Hollywoodisms, going back to W. D. Griffith’s ‘The Birth of a Nation’ (1915) and ‘Intolerance’ (1916) and including ‘King Kong’ (1933).
Mantan Moreland has 130 credits on the IMDb. He and other black actors of the era were later reviled for embodying stereotypes as noted above. Madame Sul-Te-Wan said, her choice was to work as a maid and earn $7 a day or to play a maid in a movie and earn $70 a day. She found it an easy choice.
Even at 61 minutes, it seems padded. Carradine sleep walks through this one without any of the intensity and malevolence he could muster. There is not much Veda can do as a corpse,
though she tries. The only energy comes from Stereotype. There are a couple of good one-liners but the fraternity bothers were dozing when they came. The ending in the swamp is neat but leaden in execution.
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