Crew
Director – Leon Klimovsky, Screenplay – Jacinto Molina, Photography – Francisco Sanchez Muñoz, Music – Juan Carlos Calderon, Sets – Gumersindo Andres. Production Company – Profilmes.
Cast
Paul Naschy (Krisna/Kantaka/Satan), Rommy (Elvire Irving), Vic Winner (Dr Lawrence Redgrave), Mirta Miller (Kala), Maria Kosti (Elsie), Antonio Pica (Superintendent Hawkins), Louis Ciges (MacMurdo), Pierre Besari (Ti Zachary), Elsa Zabala (Susan), Aurora De Alba (Olivia Mortimer), Monserrat Julio (Flora), Fernando S. Polack (Augusto), Norma Kastel (Gloria Irving)
Plot
In London, Elvire Irving is a devotee of the swami Krisna. She goes to join him in his estate in the town of Langwell. There are sinister rituals going on at the estate. Even as she is attracted to Krisna, Elvire receives warnings to leave. At the same time, Elvire’s boyfriend Dr Lawrence Redgrave, a psychologist specialising in the occult, is asked by Scotland Yard to aid in investigating a series of ritual voodoo murders around the city where the dead appear to be coming back to life.
Paul Naschy (1934-2009) was a Spanish actor who gained a reasonable fame as a horror icon during the 1970s. Born as Jacinto Molina, Naschy first wrote the script for Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror (1965) and took the lead role of the wolfman Waldemar Daninsky. For international sales purposes, he was asked to adopt an Anglicised name, for which he chose Paul Naschy. Naschy appeared as Daninsky in a total of twelve films and went on to play a number of other horror icons during his career, including Count Dracula, Dr Jekyll, The Mummy, the Frankenstein monster and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Naschy also directed 23 of his films. The novelty with Vengeance of the Zombies is that Naschy is playing three different roles – an Indian swami, his disfigured brother and a horned Satan during Rommy’s dream sequence. As often was the case, Naschy writes the script here under his birth name Jacinto Molina.
My immediate thought was that Vengeance of the Zombies was one of the films that came out in the aftermath of Night of the Living Dead (1968) exploiting Zombie themes. This not quite the case and what we have is one of the few post-Romero films about zombies that is still using Voodoo as a rationale. And the film does so in ways that are quite interesting.
Certainly, Vengeance of the Zombies is an utterly weird mix of clashing cultural elements. There’s the voodoo ritual and reference to Baron Samedi, which comes from Haitian voodoo by way of the Caribbean. Naschy’s swami named Krisna seems to originate out of Hinduism. And then there is a mix of traditional The Occult and Black Magic and Devil Worship themes, which had become big around 1973 following the success of Rosemary’s Baby (1968). The elements are a mishmash, but Molina’s script makes an interesting stew out of them, especially when it comes to occult expert Vic Winner explaining things to the Scotland Yard detectives.
Leon Klimovsky was a regular director in Spanish genre cinema and put Naschy through his paces several times. Klimovsky tended to be a pedestrian director but Vengeance of the Zombies comes with some undeniably interesting shock effects – a body strung up in a meat locker by a masked figure in black and then its throat slit and blood drained; station master Luis Ciges forced to slit his own throat; Rommy having a dream of being inducted into a Satanic ceremony and abruptly having her throat slit. The whole mix of ritual killings by masked figures, voodoo, swamis, devil worship and Naschy in three roles makes for quite an outlandish but by no means uninteresting film.
Leon Klimovsky (1906-96) directed 76 films between the 1940s and 70s. Up until the late 1960s, most of Klimovsky’s work was a series of crime thrillers, dramas, Westerns and musicals. He first broached horror material with the psycho-thriller Edge of Fear (1964). He then teamed up with Paul Naschy for nine films with the Waldemar Daninsky outings The Werewolf and the Vampire Woman (1971) and Dr Jekyll and the Wolfman (1972) and several other films such as The Devil’s Possessed (1974), A Dragonfly for Each Corpse (1975) and The People Who Own the Dark (1976), plus a couple of non-genre crime films. In addition, Klimovsky made other efforts in the Euro horror cycle of the day such as The Saga of the Draculas (1973), The Vampire’s Night Orgy (1973), I Hate My Body (1974), The Strange Love of the Vampires (1975) and Trauma (1978).
Trailer here