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It indeed opens on a Market Street sign, the plaque on the door does indicate a medical license, and the lighting on Lionel Atwill's goateed visage might suggest a bit of insanity. "A great boon to mankind," suspended animation as the path to immortality. He approaches the lenses with chloroform-soaked cotton wad in hand until the screen is blotted out, the experiment goes awry, "his guinea pig double-crossed him and stayed dead." Fugitive aboard an ocean liner, washed ashore on a South Seas island with socialites and sailors. The scatterbrain (Una Merkel) just about sums it up: "A murder mystery, a shipwreck, and now we're the prisoners of a bunch of savages." Browning's West of Zanzibar is the precedent as Joseph H. Lewis uses the pulpy jungle to sharpen his technique—the natives prepare a fire ritual so the hungry filmmaker can stage a dash of deep-focus symmetry using torsos, torches and palm trees. The chieftain's wife is down after a heart attack so the doctor announces his powers of resurrection, a shot of adrenaline does the trick and thus a new "god of life." Among reluctant subjects are the debutante (Claire Dodd) and the steward (Richard Davies), plus the unimpressed palooka (Nat Pendleton). "Hey folks, the Boogeyman is here. Anybody want a headache?" The quack turned lord orders a bride, his genius fails him when faced with an authentic corpse, a bonfire superimposed over test tubes states his fate. Watching it all is Lewis, knowingly disdainful like Atwill contemplating a skull ("Artistic in a crude sort of way"). Girolami reshuffles the innards in Zombie Holocaust. With Hardie Albright, Anne Nagel, John Eldredge, Noble Johnson and Rosina Galli. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |