After hearing so much good about it, I finally watched PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES last night, the Anchor Bay widescreen release, and wow, how boring can a movie get? POTZ was excruciatingly slow, even for movies of that period. And I usually don't mind slow movies, like the original version of SOLARIS. But this most definitely overrated "horror" film was a chore to sit through. The problem with watching Hammer movies these days is that they basically look like average episodes of THE AVENGERS or any other TV series made in the UK in the 1960s, but stretched to a very unforgiving 90 minutes. I expected Emma Peel to pop-in at any given moment while watching POTZ.
Everything about Hammer movies screams "penny-pinching film-making": Zero style. Cheap sets, which look all the same in every Hammer movie. Cheap costumes. Mostly unknown actors who aren't very good at acting. Very little action or violence but lotsa stilted expositionary dialogue. Underdeveloped scripts with many dumb characters, like Dr. Thompson. The only good scene was when Sylvia was hounded by the men on horseback. But the fact that this scene was the best moment in a movie with zombies shows how boring and not scary the rest was.
Even though this movie has zombie in its titles, the zombies in the movie aren't very important to the main story. The zombies are just "slaves" used by an aristocrat for his underground mine. The silly film even shows the zombies being whipped into servitude even though zombies are supposed to be dead and therefore can't feel pain, which makes the use of a whip pretty funny.
Not scary, cheap looking, badly acted and very slow, with very little understanding of the whole concept of zombies (see my point about the whip), PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES is not worth your time at all.
Everything about Hammer movies screams "penny-pinching film-making": Zero style. Cheap sets, which look all the same in every Hammer movie. Cheap costumes. Mostly unknown actors who aren't very good at acting. Very little action or violence but lotsa stilted expositionary dialogue. Underdeveloped scripts with many dumb characters, like Dr. Thompson. The only good scene was when Sylvia was hounded by the men on horseback. But the fact that this scene was the best moment in a movie with zombies shows how boring and not scary the rest was.
Even though this movie has zombie in its titles, the zombies in the movie aren't very important to the main story. The zombies are just "slaves" used by an aristocrat for his underground mine. The silly film even shows the zombies being whipped into servitude even though zombies are supposed to be dead and therefore can't feel pain, which makes the use of a whip pretty funny.
Not scary, cheap looking, badly acted and very slow, with very little understanding of the whole concept of zombies (see my point about the whip), PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES is not worth your time at all.