Tooth decay can be a terrible thing my readers, so one can barely conceive of the various dental issues of the undead! Today we… Oh.. PLAGUE! not plaque.. that makes a lot more sense.

Last year I had a theme of the walking dead, aka Zombies. Now while this year I don’t have such a theme, there are still good zombie movies to review and today we are going back to one of the entries with an iconic scene. Hammer’s Plague of the Zombies, which once more teaches us the important lesson, that the rich are absolute BLEEPS and we should REDACTED for they will show no kindness to us and will indeed make slaves of us to live in decadence. No really that’s basically the plot of the film… or at least what I took from it.

Now to be clear. While these are walking corpses, it’s much more Voodoo going on here than what you would think of as zombies nowadays. In fact it is openly called Voodoo (though that is also rather inaccurate and you would need to look into a bunch of things to know the actual truth of said religion including proper names).

The film stars Dr Quatermass, ok it stars André Morell as Sir James Forbes, who played Dr Quatermass in the phenomenal masterpiece Quatermass and the Pit (have I reviewed that yet, seems an omission if I haven’t) who receives a letter from his student Dr. Peter Tompson about a strange malady in the Cornish village where he resides. Sir James’ daughter Sylvia Forbes twists his arm to visit since she’s friends with Peter’s wife Alice.

So you get a rural English village, filled with superstitious people who are grumpy and untrusting of doctors, all the while a blatantly evil rich asshole is raising an army of the dead for slave labour.. sorry for the spoiler but this wasn’t a subtle film on that, it’s one of those “yep he’s evil” the moment you see him.

This does continue the problematic portrayal of both rural people, and portraying foreign religions as somewhat evil and using black magic. Take note of the age of the film, 1966.

The most famous scene is that of the zombies rising from the graves which happens around the end of the second act so drawing closer to the conclusion of the film. The design of the zombies is one of the better parts of the film and honestly a fair bit of an improvement on those of Dawn of the Dead, the famous Zombie movie by Romero that would come out in 1978 but then again you don’t have nearly as many of them and Romero then did a far more horrific showing in Day of the Dead. It’s a bit weird to find out that the most famous scene in the movie is a dream sequence. Oh there are zombies but that clip which is often shown is from a dream sequence after… well I’ll let you watch to find that out.

This is definitely one of the good Hammer films. and one of the most memorable ones that does not include Dracula or Frankenstein. It is not one that could be thought of as Hammer taking a something done by Universal, since they never did zombies.

Definitely one to watch and wonder why people still haven’t caught on to the whole issues with the landed gentry yet.

Rating: 🧟🧟‍♀️🧟‍♂️🧟