It's been a while since the Cap'n gave you folks a "So You Won't Have To". Maybe because I've been watching good movies, or maybe it has to do with planning H-Fest, but I've been derelict in my duty of simultaneously informing and steering you away from crap movies.
Well, tonight you're in luck. I accidentally stumbled onto a SYWHT out of curiosity, and it's saved the rest of you from having to watch it in three week's time: Zombies on Broadway.
Sometimes, if you haven't heard of a movie, it's not because some hidden gem is waiting to be discovered. Sometimes, a movie goes missing because it's just that bad, and Zombies on Broadway is certainly that. Not only is it not a horror movie, or a horror comedy, but it manages to be not scary and unfunny at the same time. Even the billing of Bela Lugosi is pretty misleading, since he's nowhere to be found for most of the movie.
Instead, audiences are treated to the foreleast in comedy teams: What's His Name and The Other Guy. Okay, they have names: Jerry Miles (Wally Brown) and Mike Streger (Alan Carney), and they appeared together in a series of movies (like Girl Rush) that look suspiciously like low rent Abbott and Costello movies. To no one's surprise, Zombies on Broadway is also like a low rent Abbott and Costello movie.
Jerry and Mike are working for gangster Ace Miller (sheldon Leonard) as press agents. See, Ace is trying to go straight with his new club "The Zombie Hut", and Mike and Jerry promised him a real live zombie for opening night! They figured that since nobody in 1945 knows what a zombie is, they could sneak one past Ace, but a clever gossip reporter threatens to expose the whole operation, so Jerry and Mike are sent packing to find Dr. Renault (Bela Lugosi) in San Sebastian in order to find a real zombie.
Tangent: your guess is as good as mine as to why a gangster like Ace Miller even cares what a gossip reporter has to say, especially since deriding The Zombie Hut has no real bearing whatsoever on his criminal past. We only know Ace is a gangster because he threatens to kill Jerry and Mike repeatedly.
So Jerry and Mike go to San Sebastian to find a zombie (the voodoo kind, not the gut munching variety), and instead get involved in Abbott and Costello-esque hijinks. Seriously, Zombies on Broadway lifts just about every gag from Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and Africa Screams, only this time they forget to make them funny. The witless duo meet singer Jean LaDance (Anne Jeffreys), and are stalked by Renault's zombie Kolaga (Darby Jones). See, Dr. Renault is jealous of voodoo zombies, so he's trying to replicate on with medicine. Renault lives in a castle somewhere in the middle of a jungle with his pilfered zombie servant, some other dude, and two dogs.
Mike and Jerry also run afoul of a voodoo ceremony, meet a monkey, and have castle hijinks revolving around Jerry getting knocked out instead of Dr. Renault. Mike has time to get into blackface, get poked in the butt with a spear, and turn into a zombie! Even Bela Lugosi gets into the act and plays peek-a-boo with a monkey! Hilarity!
I guess the title is only kinda misleading: no one's technically on Broadway, and there's really only one zombie at a time until the very end. Lugosi's Dr. Renault is more of a glorified cameo, since this movie is more interested in stupid jokes and recycled "I saw the zombie but now he's gone!" sequences. For a movie that's only 67 minutes long, Zombies on Broadway sure feels like twice that.
Maybe sixty five years ago, back when zombies were something people didn't know much about (this did only come out two years after I Walked with a Zombie), you could pull this kind of shenanigans with audiences and get away with it, but Zombies on Broadway doesn't really live up to anything it promises. It coasts on lazy writing and exploits audience ignorance in order to offer plenty and deliver nothing.
Now you know, and hopefully you won't bother finding out for yourself. In fact, I'm going to say skip disc two of the Warner Brothers Karloff / Lugosi set altogether. You won't be asked to sit through them during Horror Fest, so there's no sense in wasting your own time either.
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Side note: I'm rather serious about the voting window being short for choosing one movie. At most I'll give you two days, but we need to cut the list down so we can fit them all in on Saturday. Please drop by and vote as often as you can, as this determines what we'll be watching on Halloween.
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