Zombies of Mora Tau

A bunch of people go to the island of Mora Tau. Right off the coast of it, a ship sank with diamonds aboard and they want them. There's nice guy Jeff Clark (Gregg Palmer), Dr. Eggert (Morris Ankrum), George Harrison (!!!) (Joel Ashley) and his slutty wife Mona (the immortal Allison Hayes). What they don't know is that the ship is guarded by zombies who kill anyone who tries to take the jewels.

Admittadely novel idea is almost completely destroyed by a silly script and some pretty bad acting. The "underwater" scenes are actually pretty hysterical. They're obviously shot on a sound stage with the actors moving very slow and having bubbles pour out of their diving suits! Notice how the plants on the "ocean" floor never move.

Still I have a certain fondness for silly movies like this. It takes me back to my childhood where these popped up on Saturday afternoon TV constantly. It does have a little creepy scene when the zombies attack at the end and Hayes (a seriously under rated actress) is very good in a nothing role. Also I saw a nice, clean, letter-boxed (!) version of this on TCM. Silly but fun.

Zombies are guarding a sunken ship full of treasures in a lagoon on the outskirts of a sleepy, nearly-deserted Southern town. Cardboard screamer shenanigans; sure, some of it is fun, and the sequence where the zombies walk out of the water is skillfully done, but Allison Hayes (as the sexy bad girl) still can't act! It's reassuring to see her cast as yet another femme fatale, but her line readings are robotic--she's zombie-fied. The underwater sequences are a joke, yet the picture provides a definite nostalgia for the days when monster movies were bereft of commercial pandering and noisy, humongous special effects. It's not in the same league as, say, "Creature From the Black Lagoon", but it does have some atmosphere. Whether it was intentional or not, some minor art comes through, along with a whole lotta bad acting. ** from ****

Adventurers tangle with zombies who can walk underwater. (Did George Romero ever catch this?)

The fifties were a fallow decade for the walking dead. Scary zombies may have roamed INVISIBLE INVADERS and CREATURE WITH THE ATOM BRAIN, but they were sci-fi generated. (PLAN 9, anyone?) MORA TAU more or less sticks to the hoodoo playbook, but its finale is unforgivably weak, and the underwater scenes, which should have been a highlight, are blatantly bogus. If the story were rewritten on land, it would have spared lots of trouble and unintended laughter.

On the plus side, quickie director Ed Cahn always aced day-for-night shots, and nearly all of the action here occurs in darkness. The film is free of stock wildlife footage and white dudes dressed as natives. The cast seems to appreciate scripter Bernard Gordon's snappy dialogue. Cult actress Allison Hayes pulls double duty as a shrewish moll and a zombie. Can't act worth stale jujubes, but still a treat to watch. There's also plenty of gaffe guffaws, my favorite being the portly zomb who "chases" victims down a staircase as he clutches the railing.

One of the many plot implausibilities in this enjoyably awful Sam Katzman-produced dreck occurs when Allison Hayes, she of the killer figure, is murdered by diamond-loving zombies and becomes one of the walking dead. She's clearly a zombie; Marjorie Eaton, trying to preserve her dignity as the Maria Ouspenskaya-like hideous matron, tells everyone she's a zombie; she walks like a zombie, and her face is even blanker than when she was alive. But the rest of the avaricious crew treats her like a real live girl, vowing to get her to a doctor as soon as possible for a diagnosis. That leads to plot extensions that add on another 20 minutes or so, though the entire nonsense clocks in at a little over an hour. A pretty high body count for '50s horror, direction and production values not far above the Ed Wood level, and hilarious "underwater" photography round out this Grade Z programmer, which is inept but not dull.

One of the sillier 1950s fright night flicks, and directed with little imagination. An unlikable search party arrives at a small African plantation with hopes of retrieving a cargo of diamonds from the bowels of a ship that was sunk some 60 years earlier. The only problem is that the treasure's being guarded by a small band of sleepwalking-style zombies (the original sailors who went down with the ship when it sank) and they've done a fine job so far of killing every other search party that has intervened over the decades. The elderly wife of the zombified captain is still alive and wants the diamonds too, but only to destroy them so she may give rest to her husband's wandering soul.

That description is much more interesting than the way the movie actually pans out, but at least we've got the stunning Allison Hayes to gawk at as she plays the bitchy babe with the killer figure. There are some very weird underwater simulations when the divers are attacked by the dutiful zombies, who somehow are able to walk straight across the ocean floor without floating to the surface. ** out of ****