King of the Zombies (1941)

Primary Genre: Adventure

Secondary Genres: 

• Caribbean zombie
• Espionage
• Iron Age B Movie

Plot:  Two adventurers (Dick Purcell and John Archer) and their comic relief manservant (Mantan Moreland) crash land on a Caribbean island where an admiral (Guy Usher) had recently disappeared and encounter a wealthy European (Henry Victor) living in a mansion with a collection of unusual servants, some of whom might be voodoo practitioners and zombies.

The Good Stuff

• Mantan Moreland as the comic relief runs away with this thing.  He’s quite good, by the way.

The Bad Stuff

• If an adventure movie loses interest in main characters and decides to follow the comic
  relief around for a while, then somebody didn’t have a lot of confidence in the “adventure” part of the deal. Just sayin'.
• Moreland’s role as a stereotypical, uncouth, somewhat lazy, easily spooked black man will likely offend modern day audiences, but as we’ve said, he’s the best thing in this mess, and his delivery is dead on.  Audience is more likely to identify with him than with the main character.
• Completed movie can’t seem to make up its mind if it’s supposed to be an adventure movie or a comedy.  Designated main characters are not played for comedy, but as noted, a huge chunk of the screen time goes to the comic relief character.  So is it a comedy?  Nah, this is more like an adventure movie with plenty of distracting comedy relief, and the comedy relief is more memorable than the main plot. So, is the comedy relief more memorable than the main plot because the comedy relief is well played or because the main plot is so poorly played?  Both.
• Missing admiral subplot turns out to be a MacGuffin about a spy using voodoo to gather military intel, which sounds way cooler than the movie plays it.  The script hints at it, drops clues for it, but by the time the story gets to resolving it, nobody cares.

The Who Cares Stuff

• Plane crash scene uses footage from a pretty good B adventure movie called Five Came Back (1939).
• When completed, the studio tried to sell this as something like The Ghost Breakers (1940), which was a highly successful comedy with Bob Hope playing a frightened man compensating for his fear with smooth wisecracks while investigating a decaying Cuban mansion guarded by a zombie while trying to protect Paulette Goddard’s more adventurous character.
• Although Mantan Moreland does some pretty good comedy here, this probably wasn’t produced as a comedy.  You might have seen movies with comedy performers cast as comedy relief secondary characters to the story’s “real” main characters (examples: Laurel & Hardy in Babes in Toyland and The Bohemian Girl, most Marx Bros. movies after they started working for MGM).  When watching such movies, audiences tend to ignore the main characters because the comic relief not only had more talent; they were more famous.
  
• Even by 1940s standards, this movie with zombies and voodoo doesn't use enough horror to classify it as a horror movie.

The Bottom Line: Disposable poverty row movie with uninteresting main characters loses its needlessly complicated plot to the more entertaining antics of its stereotypical black comic relief character.