La muerte viviente

Just before he died Boris Karloff shot back to back footage for four poverty row horror flicks. Additional scenes were later shot in Mexico - with mostly different actors! - to bring each of them up to feature length.

This is the first and most coherent of this unfortunate quartet of pictures. It's also the dullest. Boris is a plantation owner on an island threatened by a curious voodoo cult that throws in cannibalism and snake worship with the usual business plan of raising of the dead to work in the fields.

The story is bereft of any new ideas and the phallic imagery is rather puerile. Still, we do get some lively snake dancing and the matching of the two sets of footage is not that bad, although Karloff's foreman appears in one scene with a beard and the next scene without!

If only the great man had stopped here!

One of the four films that Boris Karloff made at the end of his life. He made four low-budget films for a company that produced the films in Mexico, although Karloff's scenes were shot in California by director Jack Hill. Karloff is visibly old and haggard, and frequently sits through most of his dialogue. I'm afraid that his presence cannot save this film from being utterly tedious and ludicrous. Karloff plays a French plantation owner seemingly connected with some snake cult, voodoo worship, and a lot of weird characters. There is a dwarf that wears crazy glasses and is slain for some inexplicable reason. There is also a woman that stares at people while she dances around with a snake. She has a wild white streak in her hair. The island has a new police chief that acts with all the conviction of a puppet. The actors are all Mexican (except for Karloff and one other actor). The blending of the footage shot in Mexico and that shot in Hollywood is done adequately, however, the film makes little sense. Script and editing are poorly conceived and poorly executed. Poor Boris! At least it is nice to see him again.

Echoing narration informs us about the "diabolical" new threat of voodoo on the island of "Korbai" near Haiti and a laughing, sneering midget in sunglasses cuts the head off a (real) chicken. Then Anabella (played by Julissa), a member of the International Anti-Saloon League informs some soldiers that, "Modern science has proved that alcohol is responsible for 99.2% of all the worlds sins!" She arrives on the island with others to visit her uncle Carl von Molder (Boris Karloff or his masked double).

Meanwhile, blue-faced zombies are overrunning the island. Voodoo cultists kill soldiers with a blowgun, strangulation and machete and regularly resurrect the dead with the help of the dwarf (who whips them). Rabid zombie women eat a man and one soldier adopts one as his girlfriend to scratch his back and fan him. ("Imagine a beautiful woman that can't talk. Every man's dream!") The niece has an extremely bizarre dream of her evil double suggestively sucking on a (real, live) snake before kissing her (?)

Little of this movie makes sense and the ending stinks, but it has some weird, senseless stuff to recommend. It's one of four much-hated movies Karloff did in 1968 before his death, constituting his final film work.

In 1968 horror legend Boris Karloff was filmed and the footage was incorporated into four Mexican horror movies released in the early 1970s after his death. Now these movies are regarded by most horror buffs as being absolute turkeys, but if 'Snake People' (the only one of the four I've seen to date) is anything to go by I must disagree. Karloff looks old and ill but his handful of scenes are still worth a look. The rest of the movie is a bit illogical, but unlike the naysayers I didn't find it to be boring. Voodoo snake cults, come on, how is that boring? The most interesting thing about 'Snake People' is that it was partly directed by cult film legend Jack Hill ('Spider Baby', 'The Big Doll House', 'Coffy', 'Switchblade Sisters'). Quentin Tarantino is a massive Hill fan and calls him "the Howard Hawks of exploitation". I believe Hill shot all the Karloff scenes in California and this was mixed with Mexican footage directed by Juan Ibanez, but apart from that I have no idea whether the movies were already scripted before filming, or improvised later Roger Corman style. Anyway, the story concerns a young woman (Julissa) who visits her aged Uncle (Karloff) on a small Caribbean island. Unbeknown to her it is the home of a voodoo cult which eventually kidnaps her. But hey, the plot doesn't really matter, there are lots of zombies and snakes and a creepy dwarf in a top hat and Boris freakin' Karloff dude! To be completely honest 'Snake People' wouldn't even crack a place in my horror top 100, but you know what? I enjoyed it. Enough to watch it twice. And if I was faced with the choice of watching it a third time or sitting through the likes of 'Cabin Fever' or 'House Of 1000 Corpses' again then it's me and Boris and the snake worshippers baby!

"La Muerte Viviente" aka. "Isle Of The Living Dead" aka. "Snake People" of 1971, is an extremely trashy and unintentionally hilarious movie, and one of the last movies of the great horror icon Boris Karloff. I have utmost respect for director Jack Hill for movies like his great blaxploitation classic "Coffy" starring Pam Grier. "Snake People", directed by Hill and Juan Ibanez, however, is one of these movies that are so bad they're actually pretty good. I'm a big fan of trashy B-horror flicks, but the only two reasons why I enjoyed "Snake People" were Boris Karloff, who plays a rather small role in this, and the movie's unintentional fun value.

The tropical island "Korbai" is reigned by a bizarre voodoo cult. The cult's unholy priests, amongst them a creepy midget and a scary snake dancer, sacrifice beautiful local girls to their occult deity "Damballah". The girls, who volunteer as sacrifices in order to achieve eternal life, are then resurrected from the dead as mindless zombies. Determined to put an end, to these rituals, that are ignored by the local police, Captain Pierre Labesch comes to the island. He asks the islands richest landowner, Carl Van Molder (Boris Karloff) for help. In the meanwhile, Van Molder's niece, who came to the island to fight alcoholism, befriends a local police lieutenant.

As a horror movie, "Snake People " fails entirely. As an unintentional comedy, however, it is hilarious. The dialogue is extremely poor (and therefore extremely hilarious) and apart from Karloff, the acting is really bad too. The locations are amateurish, the plot has huge holes and many logical errors. While Captain Labesch, for example, is obviously French, and came to the island sent by 'the government', other law enforcement officers of this government have English names. I laughed a lot when I saw this movie the first time, and I will definitely watch it again. Don't expect any suspense, but watch this as the unintentional comedy it is and entertainment will be guaranteed. 3/10