Creature of the Walking Dead

As I lie on my cold, lonely bunk, the phantasmal, filmy, milk-white mist pouring through the bug-splattered sash of my window, my eyes peered deeply into the screen, the physical manifestation of the mind's eye, at the dark-shadowed brick of the Gothic old streets—which may have been London by way of Juarez.

A cloaked figure follows a woman out of a church. The woman is as unsuspecting as Polly Nichols or Annie Chapman, if not more an exemplar of moral rectitude. The figure approaches silently from behind, the woman unaware that she's being trailed. Clop, clop, clop might be the distant sounds of hooves on cobbles, one would imagine; but there is nothing but an orchestral swell of music, looped, repeated over and over, as the figure in the top hat bears down on the woman, his hand closing over her mouth.

Later, she will be strapped to the operating table in the secret laboratory/dungeon, a tube draining her blood, her vital fluid, from her and pumping it into the rotting, fly-blown cadaver on the table next to her.

And oh, what a joyful descent into madness and death!

Creature of the Walking Dead is a wonky, but very atmospheric for all that, Mexican horror flick that exploitation producer Jerry Warren shot new footage for, added some narration to, and released as Creature of the Walking Dead. The new footage includes what has to be the single longest cinematic arm massage of a morbidly obese actor (Bruno VeSota) ever filmed, along with a seemingly endless expository dialogue set-up leading into a Gothic horror murder mystery with a Jack the Ripper lean.

And this is all atmospheric and very good. A presumable streetwalker streetwalks through the darkened frame as she's stalked by a man not noticeably wearing a deerstalker, but a top hat and one of those short cloaks. And Then the Screaming Starts.

This is Dr. Malthus, who quite quickly spirits her back to his secret lab, wherein he's trying to drain the substance of these young, virginal (okay, that's just a presumption) victims, so he can REANIMATE THE TOMB LEGIONS and give that bumptious young upstart Herbert West a run for his ever-lovin', corpse-huggin' money.

So, yeah. So anyway, the next thing we know, he's being marched to the gallows, and they're shot from behind, as it were, giving them a dream-like surreality worthy of a television recreation, and everything is dark and spooky and eminently satisfying.

Then we flash forward in time to presumably modern times, and the grandson of the late doctor (whose underground lab seems to consist of a series of jail cells with desiccated stiffs moldering in them) returns to his ancestral digs and resurrects Granddad so he can continue to kill presumable Whitechapel whores as they emerge from the same entrance to the same church decades apart. Or something.

There are atmospheric visual flourishes marking this little odd South-of-the-Border horror flick out as having some pretensions to quality: one scene that sticks in mind is a coffin adorned with a crucifix whose lid does a Nosferatu thing by emerging straight up—coming toward the viewer's face.

And, if we are remembering correctly, there's the fiery climax wherein, spoiler alert, the dear dead doctor, lifting his arms in a Jesus Christ pose, is immolated in the burning hell of his lab. We don't know that perhaps we're not just borrowing this memory from another old film; we've slept since then.

But not in a dungeon jail cell with the desiccated husks of the dead.

CREATURE OF THE WALKING DEAD | 1965 | Classic Movie | Ann Wells, Willard Gross

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