King of the Zombies was the second horror film from prolific director Jean Yarbrough, the first having been The Devil Bat in 1940, with Bela Lugosi in the lead. Lugosi was set to star in this uneasy mix of comedy, spy thriller and early zombie film but when both he and his favoured replacement, Peter Lorre, for the role of a voodoo master and “foreign” spy (we all know he was meant to be German but no-one was yet prepared to say it, even after almost three years of war even in this was the first American horror film to actually address the war and ostensibly the first Nazi zombie film) went to Henry Victor who signed on just days before filming began.
In 1941, an American transport aircraft charting a route between Cuba and Puerto Rico runs dangerously low on fuel and is blown off course by a storm, forcing pilot James “Mac” McCarthy (Dick Purcell) to set down on a remote Caribbean island. With his passenger Bill Summers (John Archer) and his manservant Jefferson Jackson (Mantan Moreland), he takes refuge in the home of a white scientist, Dr Miklos Sangre (Henry Victor) and his wife Alyce (Patricia Stacey). Jackson is convinced that there are zombies prowling the grounds, a fear confirmed by Sangre’s servants. It turns out that Sangre is a spy trying to uncover intelligence from a captured US Admiral whose aircraft also crashed on the island and has also created a small army of zombies.

Mantan Moreland has long come in for a great deal of stick for playing eye-boggling, black scaredy cat stereotypes and it’s true that, for the most part, that was all Hollywood, even the lower echelons like Monogram, distributor of King of the Zombies, were offering him. But often overlooked is his comic timing. He was a gifted comedian even if the material he was given to work with was sub-standard and even racist. It’s a great shame that he never got actual characters to play, often just called on to repeat the same tired routines over and over again. All that said, he is great here, still being patronized, but effortlessly stealing every scene he’s in. In a fairer, more equitable world, Moreland would – and should – have been a comedy superstar. Without him, King of the Zombies would have been a lesser film. Even with him, it’s not up to all that much.
The rest of the cast are merely going through the paces. John Carradine probably would have been a better choice for the Sangre role, Victor making little impact as the villain, the heroes are blander than bland and the zombies are mainly just hulking brutes. They do, however, provide one of the film’s two distinguishing features, such as they are. Skittish maid Samantha (Margerite Whitten) notes that “it’s feedin’ time, and they likes dark meat!”, suggesting that twenty seven years before George A. Romero’s ground-breaking Night of the Living Dead (1968), these zombies were cannibalistic. We never actually see them eating meat, “dark” or otherwise, but the intimation is there nonetheless.

The other oddity about King of the Zombies is Edward Kay’s score. Not that it’s particularly memorable or even that good. But against all the odds – and it’s hard to understand how this happened even now – it was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Music (Music Score of a Dramatic Picture). Staggering… It’s a mediocre score at best. Elsewhere, the film is as mediocre as the music but it has a few pleasing moments here and there, most notably when a ghostly Alyce seems to materialize out of a wall. A few more moments like that would have gone down well, but otherwise, Yarbrough’s direction is plodding and strictly by the numbers. It draws too much influence from The Ghost Breakers (1940), but it lacks the jokes, the atmosphere and above all else the presence of the winning duo of Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard (Monogram tried to persuade cinema owners in their press kit to “sell it along the same lines as Paramount’s The Ghost Breakers,” a comparison it simply wasn’t able to live up to).
Two years later, Steve Sekely was behind Revenge of the Zombies, pitched as a remake/semi-sequel, with Carradine finally taking the zombie master role and Moreland back as “Jeff” Jackson (Madame Sul-Te-Wan is in both films but playing different characters). There would be no Oscar nominations this time – this was just a bog-standard Monogram cheapie with little to distinguish it. Yarbrough went on to make a handful of low budget horrors, even making his way to the Universal production line – House of Horrors (1946), She-Wolf of London (1946), The Brute Man (1946), The Creeper (1948) and Hillbillys in a Haunted House (1967) – none of which ever suggested that he had a particular affinity for the genre.