‘A tide of terror floods the screen!’
Zombies of Mora Tau is a 1957 horror film directed by Edward L. Cahn (The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake; Invisible Invaders; Voodoo Woman) from a screenplay by George H. Plympton (The Phantom Creeps) and Bernard Gordon [as Raymond T. Marcus] (The Man Who Turned to Stone). Also known as The Dead That Walk, it was released by Columbia Pictures.
The movie stars Gregg Palmer, Allison Hayes and Autumn Russell.
Our review:
Watching the workaday Zombies of Mora Tau, produced by the Sam Katzman unit (who provided regular, if largely unexceptional, cheapie genre fare to Columbia Pictures) makes one get the strange feeling of having stumbled into a script read-thru or semi-dress rehearsal for a zombie chiller of later vintage.
Ingredients are there: walking dead who are not impeded by underwater environments (anticipating Shock Waves, 1975) and the zombie-contagion paranoia twist, that anyone killed by a zombie, rises up again as a zombie themselves, incurable and hostile. Unfortunately, the decidedly desultory execution doesn’t mean much, and those genre mile-markers may just as well have been arrived at accidentally.
Behold coastal Africa, looking like a nondescript deciduous-forest suburban neighbourhood outside L.A. – with no black people insight, by the way. Salvage diver Jeff Clark (Gregg Palmer) arrives to help assist a search for a submerged treasure chest of missing diamonds, coveted by George Harrison (Joel Ashley), not the Beatle, one witty critic previously observed, but an obsessed treasure hunter.
Jeff soon learns the whole story; it seems the diamonds are accursed and were originally lost in a lagoon during a 1916 expedition. Thanks to dark magic, the first crew to handle the fortune turned into zombies, who still wander about, doomed to eternally guard the treasure above and below the water.
Further fortune-seekers who have tried to bring up the box were killed by the undead. Summarily interred in a convenient crypt (nothing fancy; it looks like crates in a featureless movie-backlot warehouse), these dead sailors in their matelot suits also rise up periodically and defend the treasure. Harrison doesn’t much care, demanding that Jeff presses ahead with a new deep-sea rig.
Blank-eyed, unshaven, staring undead don’t look much worse for wear after being semi-submerged for half a century – just think of how modern makeup artists would have gone to town on such horrors, even on a B-movie budget. But these are old-school voodoo zombies, just stuntmen guys acting like they’re in a trance, creepy only in a few scattered moments.
Modern accoutrements of flesh-feasting, infection or bodily decay are not part of the equation (or the budget). ‘Underwater’ scenes were staged on dry land, with actors moving slowly and lens filters trying to suggest the life aquatic (or non-life, as the case may be).
Zombies of Mora Tau is in cult actress Allison Hayes‘ filmography (Attack of the 50 Foot Woman), a sultry vamp whose curvaceous figure these days would probably be banned by some international laws. As Harrison’s gold-digger wife, she’s part of the big reveal that going zombie is a one-way trip; they never recover and mindlessly turn on loved ones. It would wait for George A. Romero and his kind to bring that detail out more frightfully.
Another performance of note is Marjorie Eaton, a peppery old-trouper type often seen in Miss Havisham-type roles, here as a widow of the first expedition who stays behind in the local zombie-besieged mansion, unable to leave behind her long-zombified husband. She’s the only one who seems to know anything about effective anti-zombie measures. Though nobody pays attention until it’s time for the film to end, which it finally does, but not soon or cleverly enough.
Charles Cassady Jr., MOVIES & MANIA
“Bottom line, this film is a very enjoyable romp full of delightful pulp tropes–and adorable bubble effects — that completely falls apart at the very end. But as I said, it’s only 70 minutes long, so it breezes by quickly enough that you don’t really mind that it trips over its own feet in the last 2.” The Terrible Claw
Choice dialogue:
“Hello. Weren’t you afraid there isn’t a zombie out here.”
“You old hag! You’re dead already, you just don’t have the good sense to lie down.”
“If only people could find soul and mind when they are alive.”
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