Les Fantômes de Mora Tau

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 ****

I can never resist a good Zombie movie, and this one gives that interesting twist ....the zombies appear to be amphibious! They are protecting their treasure resting at the bottom of the murky waters....and do so by scaring the treasure-seekers with their horrible looks! Ahhhh!! It seems every group of treasure-seekers that tries to steal the loot, end up dead, so good ole granny (who seems to be the only one who accepts these walking weirdos) takes it upon herself to have the grave sites pre-dug for their convenience....how charming... This flick also provides us with our standard staple of "ear-piercing scream" from the helpless and unknowledgeable "Jan" The underwater sequence becomes quite amusing when the zombies casually stroll along the bottom of the lake towards their sunken ship....I guess being dead prevents the burning of calories, thereby giving them that extra weight to stay down............happy viewing!

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.

I react to movies the same way people react to music. In other words, when people hear an old song on the radio it takes them back to a time and place when they first heard the music, or its sounds evoke some private memories based on its atmosphere or tone. When I think of a film, above and beyond recalling the emotions it gave me, I also think of what was going on in my life at the moment of that screening. And if you've actively sought a title like this on this site, perhaps you do too.

ZOMBIES OF MORA TAU is certainly a juvenile, sometimes cardboard, horror movie, not least because zombie monsters were pretty juvenile after Victor Halperin and before George Romero. However this effort was made to please the juvenile within someone of any age. Why this film affects me is that I happened to watch it during the time in which I was preparing to leave my home town (and simply, my home) to go to school in the city. This was on a Thursday night just before the last true weekend of my youth, in which I was severing some ties while still grasping onto others. What I often did in this not-endless summer when I had the house to myself was take the VCR upstairs and hook it up to my little black-and-white TV in my bedroom-- having my own space, yet still being dependent on a bigger unit to do it. During this time I had an obsession with 1950's science fiction or horror movies, big or small, good or bad, simply because they took me to a comfortable inner landscape which these films idealized. The world still felt safe and unthreatening, and my youth still felt innocent before seeing "the real world" which existed outside my mind or my own little world. Perhaps subconsciously, this too explains why I have felt the need to re-visit these films again over the past few years. Only now, these innocent movies emerge as places in which I attempt to retrieve that last youth.

Now this behaviour may sound naive, but let's face it, so are a lot of these films that we escape to. Whether they're good or bad, big or small, these genre efforts of a bygone era can be now viewed as moving testaments to a safe place that we want back, yet nonetheless acknowledge we cannot have. It may also sound naive to subscribe such psychological stuff to a flick that's titled ZOMBIES OF MORA TAU, but there is a beautiful poetry at work in this movie if the viewer is willing to meet it on its own terms.

Despite that this movie somewhat lumbers to the adult within us, it still speaks to the child in that same body. I saw this film at a time when current horror films of the day attempted to scare people with blood and guts. This film is disarming in its innocence which invites the willing into its simple world-- it still manages to deliver the goods with such simple means as a creepy scene in which candles surround someone with "zombie fever". Plus, teenage boys of all ages still had a crush on Allison Hayes even 30 years after her films were made. Not for nothing did she become the fifty foot woman.

Having to return this 99-cent rental back to the country grocery store before it closed, I was in my car driving through the night, with the lights of the town behind me, pushing forward in the darkness. It was then that I realized that this sly metaphor encapsulated my life at that moment. And I also learned that because I had a soft spot for movies like this, that I was still trying to hang onto was receding in the background of my life. There was a wealth of memories, a state of being, that I admit I could not and cannot relive, but then as now, they remain as vital pieces of my human baggage.

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 ****