Product Description

Young couple Madeleine and Neil are coaxed by acquaintance Monsieur Beaumont to get married on his Haitian plantation. Beaumont's motives are purely selfish as he makes every attempt to convince the beautiful young girl to run away with him. For help Beaumont turns to the devious Legendre, a man who runs his mill by mind controlling people he has turned into zombies. After Beaumont uses Legendre's zombie potion on Madeleine, he is dissatisfied with her emotionless being and wants her to be changed back. Legendre has no intention of doing this and he drugs Beaumont as well to add to his zombie collection. Meanwhile, grieving 'widower' Neil is convinced by a local priest that Madeleine may still be alive and he seeks her out. Written by Gary Jackson {garyjack5@cogeco.ca}

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #60791 in DVD
• Published on: 2005
• Released on: 2005-03-22
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Color, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 73 minutes

Review
hands from the screen of the Rivoli yesterday and tried to hynotize blondes into killing their boy friends. A legion of individuals, with deceased minds but alert bodies, threw butlers into subterranean streams. Eagles screamed and vultures carried on a terrific caterwauling all around a mountainous castle. And half way through the picture that inspired all these things an actor wistfully remarked:

"The whole thing has me confused; I just can't understand it."

That was, as briefly as can be expressed, the legend for posterity of "White Zombie." Charity still the greatest of the trilogy suggests that the sentence be allowed to stand as comment. To go on would lead only to a description of why the eagles screamed, and that would prove very little, indeed, in the orderly scheme of life. There was, in short, no great reason. Nor was there, to be candid, much reason for "White Zombie." The screen, shuddering slightly, can go on; it can forget, it can be a Zombie, too.

The idea of the picture is that in Haiti there are individuals who dig up bodies, invest them with motive power but not with intelligence, and set them to work. They make good servants. They can carry off blondes without getting ideas in their heads, which helps in these mad days. When they have served their fell purposes, moreover, they can walk off high cliffs and out of the picture. But not the necromancers; they must be shoved over, off and out.

Of the cast, Bela Lugosi plays the chief part that of the lad who has the power to turn corpses into automatons. Madge Bellamy is the blonde, John Harron the young man in the affair and Robert Frazer a sort of semi-tropical villain. All the actors have strange lines to say, but appear to enjoy saying them. Those given to Mr. Harron seem, on retrospection, to be the most fantastic if a superlative of any sort is allowable in a discussion of "White Zombie."

"Not that," he says at one point. "Better death than that."

Yes, indeed, much better. --The New York Times

From the Studio
The term ‘zombie’ only came into general use in 1929, after the publication of William B. Seabrook’s The Magic Island. In this book, Seabrook describes the first ‘zombie’ he came across in this way:" The eyes were the worst. It was not my imagination. They were in truth like the eyes of a dead man, not blind, but staring, unfocused, unseeing. The whole face, for that matter, was bad enough. It was vacant, as if there was nothing behind it. It seemed not only expressionless, but incapable of expression."

This is a good description of the zombies that appear in the first zombie movie, Victor Halperin’s White Zombie, made in 1932 and featuring that emergent horror drawcard, Bela Lugosi. A2ZCDS have brought this old Hollywood Classic feature films on DVD.

THE PLOT: Madeleine (Madge Bellamy) and Neil Parker (John Harron) are in for a rude shock when they arrive at Charles Beaumont’s (Robert Frazer) Haitian mansion to celebrate their wedding. Beaumont, who is madly in love with Madeleine, asks ‘Murder’ Legendre (Bela Lugosi) to use his magic to help him seduce the girl. Neil is horrified to discover that his fiancé has been turned into a zombie and is at his wits end to rescue his ladylove from the grips of lunacy and the wicked Legendre’s spell.

About the Actor
It's ironic that Martin Landau won an Oscar for impersonating Bela Lugosi (in Ed Wood (1994)) when Lugosi himself never came within a mile of one, but that's just the latest of many sad ironies surrounding Lugosi's career. A distinguished stage actor in his native Hungary, he ended up a drug-addicted pauper in Hollywood, thanks largely to typecasting brought about by his most famous role. He began his stage career in 1901 and started appearing in films during World War I, fleeing to Germany in 1919 as a result of his left-wing political activity (he organized an actors' union). In 1920 he emigrated to the US and made a living as a character actor, shooting to fame when he played Count Dracula in the legendary 1927 Broadway stage adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel. It ran for three years, and was subsequently, and memorably, filmed by Tod Browning in 1931, establishing Lugosi as one of the screen's greatest personifications of pure evil. Sadly, his reputation rapidly declined, mainly because he was only too happy to accept any part (and script) handed to him, and ended up playing pathetic parodies of his greatest role, in low-grade poverty row shockers. He ended his career working for the legendary Worst Director of All Time, Edward D. Wood Jr.. He was buried in his Dracula cape. IMDb Mini Biography By: Michael Brooke