Pros: Creates an atmosphere of darkness and dread in various spots; Some well-executed, spooky sequences.
Cons: The film's protagonist is miscast, and some veteran actors are wasted in small roles; awkward use of clunky expository dialog.
Okay, so I'm a sucker for the made-for-TV horror and sci-fi movies of the 70s. Life was good back then -- my parents broke down and got a color TV, so I could enjoy my favorite late night horror hosts, The Ghoul and Hoolihan and Big Chuck, in living color as they broadcast from the great metropolis of Cleveland.
When I wasn't looking forward to the hosted horror shows, the networks were tantalizing me with their movie of the week offerings that so often included horror, mystery-thrillers and sci-fi. The network execs had finally figured out that broadcasting movies in prime time could be lucrative, and by the early '70s, their own made-for-TV features were capturing eyeballs and in some cases generating eye-popping ratings. For example, as the vampire Janos Skorzeny was draining the blood of Las Vegans in the original airing of The Night Stalker in 1972, he was also racking up a 33.2 rating and 54 share -- monstrously large ratings almost unheard of for scripted TV at the time. Fortunately, the Night Stalker's success guaranteed that there would be many more TV fright features to come.
When I started this blog with the mission to revisit the nearly forgotten B horror and sci-fi flicks of my misspent youth, made-for-TV fright fare was in the mix, but my go-to titles were the generally low hanging fruit of things already in my DVD collection or readily available in cheap public domain collections. Over the years, the list of TV movies available on demand has grown exponentially, especially on YouTube (and with an honorable mention nod to Tubi). It's almost to the point that if you can remember it, you can watch it -- just don't expect a pristine copy in all cases. As a result, I've been wandering the made-for-TV corridors more and more: sample some of the posts here.
FYI, the subject of today's post is not one of those movies I recall fondly from my days in front of the Magnavox console TV. Somehow, The Dead Don't Die flew over my head, under my radar, and around whatever TV guide I was using, because I was completely unaware of the existence of this movie until recently. To further obscure matters, it shares a title with with the very peculiar Jim Jarmusch zombie film starring Bill Murray and Adam Driver (itself rapidly receding from collective memory, as it did not connect with audiences).
I think I was looking up the Jarmusch film when I stumbled, zombie-like, across a reference to the 1975 film and became intrigued. The cast was certainly interesting, with veterans Ray Milland, Ralph Meeker and Joan Blondell, eye candy in the persons of Linda Cristal and George Hamilton, and the always creepy character actor Reggie Nadler mixing things up in a horror tale set in 1930s Chicago.
"What's not to like?" I thought to myself (readers of this blog will probably understand, if not necessarily members of the population at large). Well, to trot out a time-worn cliche, the result is somewhat less than the sum of its parts. Some of the parts are reasonably effective and atmospheric, but we'll get to that in short order.
George "Crispy Colonel" Hamilton plays Don Drake, a sailor who has taken leave to visit his brother, who unfortunately is on death row for the murder of his wife. Before being executed in Old Sparky, the brother (Jerry Douglas) swears his innocence and gets Don to promise that he will find the real murderer and clear his name.
Don is no private investigator, but reasonably, he starts his quest at the scene of the crime -- the Loveland Ballroom, where brother Ralph and his wife had been participating in a dance marathon, and where he had been found passed out in a back room next to his wife's body.
The ballroom owner Jim Moss (Ray Milland) is cooperative and sympathetic, even giving Don the money that his brother had earned in the competition. Something seems off however, when one of the near walking dead marathon contestants drops in a heap on the floor, and Moss roughly tells his attendants to get her out of there before genially resuming his conversation with Don. (For the uninitiated, dance marathons that lasted for days on end were an exploitative fad in the grim days of the the Great Depression, with desperate contestants willing to literally run themselves into the ground for the slim hope of winning prize money. They figure prominently in the celebrated novel and film adaptation of They Shoot Horses, Don't They?. The backdrop of the marathon in The Dead Don't Die helps set up its dark atmosphere and prefigures later developments.)
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| Don Drake (George Hamilton) has a conversation with ballroom owner Jim Moss (Ray Milland) as dance marathon contestants shuffle around like zombies in the background. |
Moss sends Don on his way by suggesting he track down Frankie, the trainer who found Ralph with his wife's body -- although Frankie has mysteriously disappeared. At Ralph's gravesite, Don is shadowed by a mysterious and beautiful woman dressed in black. As Don is dining at his hotel, the mystery woman, Vera LaVelle (Linda Cristal), approaches Don and begs him to leave Chicago immediately for his own good. As they're conversing, Don glances out the window and sees what he thinks is his brother Ralph standing in the street.
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| Linda Cristal as Vera LaVelle looks absolutely funereal. |
Don rushes outside, following Ralph to a shop door, where he disappears. Don barges into the place, an antiques shop, where he is confronted by an old woman, Levenia (Joan Blondell) and the creepy-looking shop owner Perdido (Reggie Nalder). They insist no one came into the shop. Convinced they're hiding something, Don struggles with Perdido, who hits his head hard as the pair fall to the floor. Levenia insists Don has killed Perdido, and while he's looking for signs of life, the woman brains him with a lamp.
Don regains consciousness at Vera's place. The next morning, Don discovers Vera hurriedly packing to leave. She pulls a gun on him, which he grabs. Vera tells the disbelieving sailor that he is in grave danger from Varek, a voodoo zombie master who is enslaving the dead for his own evil purposes.
When Don insists upon meeting Varek, the pair take a cab to a funeral home (an appropriate enough place for a zombie-maker to hang out). The attending undertaker has never heard the name Varek, but directs Don to a room where Perdido's body is on display. As Don approaches the body in the casket, a hideous, rasping voice that seems to be coming from the body identifies itself as Varek, whereupon the corpse reaches out and grabs Don by the throat.
Tearing himself away, Don is aghast as the dead (?) Perdido climbs out of the coffin and shambles toward him. The panicked man fires several shots into Perdido, to no avail, and then flees the room.
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| Perdido (Reggie Nalder) decides to get up and greet the mourners at his own funeral. |
Don breathlessly reports the strange events to Lt. Reardon (Ralph Meeker) at the local police station, who wearily decides he has to check it out. At the antiques shop Don is shocked to see that Perdido is very much alive and kicking. Reardon figures he's got a nutcase on his hands.
WARNING: Before you scroll zombie-like to the next paragraph be aware that there are spoilers ahead.
Before all is said and done and the last zombie has stopped shambling, our intrepid protagonist
- has another encounter with Vera, who tells him that she is one of Varek's zombies sent to kill him, but she has broken the Master's spell by falling in love;
- travels with Moss to the cemetery where Ralph is buried to dig up his body;
- is saved from another zombie attack by Frankie the trainer, who reveals that it is he who actually killed Ralph's wife while under Varek's spell;
- finally confronts the Zombie Master in an abandoned warehouse (that also doubles as a zombie cold storage unit), and learns of his plan to use a zombie army to take control of the city and eventually the world.
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| Ray Milland makes a wardrobe and attitude adjustment for the final act of the film. |
If this sounds to you like an overheated Poverty Row B programmer on the order of something like King of the Zombies (1941), with a mad zombie-maker hell bent on world domination, you're not far off. The Dead Don't Die also indulges in a few film noir cliches, including a protagonist on a mission to clear a loved one's name, and a femme fatale who can't decide whether to kill him or kiss him. The plethora of scenes that take place in the dead of night further enhances the noirish atmosphere.
The 1930s setting is somewhat curious -- the plot could just have easily fit into a contemporary setting. One wonders if the producers had ready access to period sets and costumes and chose the time period to set it off from the other TV movies that were being churned out. On the other hand, the Depression-era dance marathon, with its weary, desperate contestants shuffling like zombies around the dance floor, nicely foreshadows events to come.
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| Don's unjustly executed brother Ralph (Jerry Douglas) is somewhat miffed at being used as an unwitting pawn. |
Unfortunately, fighting against the film's dark atmosphere is the casting of George Hamilton, whose fabulous California tan sticks out like a bronzed sore thumb in a night world populated with pallid zombies. Hamilton could be effective with the right material -- see my post on The Power (1967 -- but in this he wears a constant pained expression as he stumbles around, dazed and confused (at least his pencil mustache fits with the time period).
Playing coy with the villain role is veteran Ray Milland, who won an Oscar for his portrayal of an alcoholic in The Lost Weekend (1945), and in The Dead Don't Die portrays a madman drunk on power. Milland was one of those actors who didn't know how to quit working, and consequently over the years appeared in many beloved B horror and sci-fi movies, including X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963; see my post here) and The Thing with Two Heads (1972), among many others.
The director, Curtis Harrington, recalled how he offered on the set to burnish Milland's image, but the old pro would have none of it:
"Ray Milland was well past his Academy Award-winning days, but I felt very privileged to work with such a distinguished actor. He was still very handsome and would have looked even more so if he had allowed us to put a toupee on him. But his attitude was the he should be accepted as he was, so he played the part entirely bald. He was open to accepting whatever parts came his way at this point in his career. He told me that he had been talking to his friend James Stewart, who expressed envy at the fact that Ray was working and he was not. James Stewart was still the bigger star, and I doubt anyone would have had the temerity to offer him a part in an ordinary television show." [Curtis Harrington, Nice Guys Don't Work in Hollywood: The Adventures of an Aesthete in the Movie Business, Drag City Incorporated, 2013, p. 172.]
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| Don Drake finally gets it: the dead really don't die. |
Harrington also employed two other veterans, Joan Blondell and Ralph Meeker, presumably for their name value, but both are wasted in bit parts. Joan is just an appendage to Reggie Nalder's character Perdido, but at least as an actress whose heyday was in the '30s, she fits into the period ambience.
Meeker, who was so intense as PI Mike Hammer in Kiss Me Deadly (1955), is reduced 20 years later to playing a stereotypical Irish cop whose function is to give the protagonist the stinkeye when he insists that there are dead guys walking around.
Whatever chills The Dead Don't Die manages to conjure up is entirely due to boogeyman Reggie Nalder's presence. The Austrian-born actor suffered facial burns as a young man, which contributed to a distinctive, gaunt look that made him a natural for certain parts, especially menacing ones. Nadler appeared in a small but key role in Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), and is perhaps best known for his work in the infamous exploitation film Mark of the Devil (1970), as well as the Nosferatu-like vampire in the mini-series Salem's Lot (1979).
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| My heart would leap for joy when I saw ads like this. |
For better or worse, Nadler didn't need much makeup to look like a walking corpse. The scene in which Varek's rasping voice seems to be coming from Perdido's dead body lying in the coffin, its mouth stretched back in a deathly rictus, induces real goosebumps. Knowing a good thing when they saw it, the producers recycled Perdido footage in a later nightmare sequence, which ends with a hackneyed shot of a hand breaking through the cemetery dirt to clutch Don's ankle.
Less effective in her part is leading zombie lady Linda Cristal. She starts out mysterious and enigmatic, but the Argentinian actress struggles with her thick accent in relating her incredible and complicated backstory to the disbelieving protagonist. Her character's final exit should have been one of the film's highlights, but crude practical effects and editing veer it into unintentional comedy. Let's just say that the scene brings new meaning to the phrase, "smoldering looks."
Suspense and horror master Robert "Psycho" Bloch wrote the teleplay from his short story. With its clueless, meandering protagonist and clunky expository dialog that slows down the proceedings, the film is not a highlight in the esteemed author's resume. Bloch would go on to contribute better material to such classic TV anthology shows as Boris Karloff's Thriller, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Hammer's Journey to the Unknown, Night Gallery, and Tales from the Darkside, among others. Bloch himself quipped, "Two years later we [Curtis Harrington] teamed up again for another TV movie, The Dead Don't Die. Maybe they don't but the show did." [RobertBloch.net]
The film may not have been a hit at the time, but over the years it has refused to die, clawing itself out of the grave of forgotten TV movies and into places like YouTube with the help of appreciative fans. If only for corpse-like Reggie Nalder menacing some familiar veteran actors, you should check it out.
