War Of The Zombies
Italy 1964 colour
aka Rome Against
Rome, Roma Contro Roma, Night Star: Goddess Of Elektra
Director Giuseppe
Vari Writers Ferruccio de Martino, Massimo de Rita, Piero Pierotti,
Marcello Sartarelli
Cast John Drew
Barrymore (Aderbad), Susy Andersen (Tullia), Ettore Manni (Gaius),
Ida Galli (Rhama), Mino Doro (Lutetius), Ivano Staccioli (Sirion),
Philippe Hersent (Azer)
[My Schlock
Treatment intro, originally broadcast on Briz 31 TV 19/12/10]
“Unconquerable
warriors of the damned!” screams the US poster for War Of The
Zombies. “SEE the undead cross swords with the living! SEE the
goddess of the night whose gaze mummifies men!” Sounds to me like
the premise for one of the most incredible horror films ever. Imagine
then your reaction when the film unspools and it’s YET ANOTHER
ITALIAN SWORD AND SANDAL MOVIE! As if American theatre screens and
televisions weren’t inundated enough in the early to mid Sixties
with peplum-themed product, the films’ distributors – in War Of
The Zombies’ instance, American International Pictures – were
forced, as the peplum cycle was grinding towards its demise, to primp
up or flat-out lie about their content.
Luckily War Of The
Zombies from 1964 is not just another Sons of Hercules muscle-fest,
but an ambitious fantasy-horror ranking comfortably near Mario Bava’s
Hercules In The Haunted World and Riccardo Freda’s The Witches
Curse. In War Of The Zombies, however, there’s no Hercules, Samson
or Ursus as the beefcake-flavoured focal point. Instead the film’s
hero is Roman centurion Gaius, sent without his troops to the
troubled Salmacia province to investigate Rome’s missing tribute.
In the opening sequence Roman troops carrying treasure from Salmacia
back to Rome are butchered by barbarians, stripped of their armour
and their bodies stolen by deformed scavengers. It appears the entire
province, including its weak Roman pretern Letitius and his
double-crossing snake of a wife Tullia, is under the spell of a
devilish cult dedicated to the Moon Goddess and “daughter of Isis”,
whose Oath of Blood is performed under the blazing high beam of its
enormous stone bust’s single Third Eye. Through Letitius’ slave
girl Rhama, held in a trance by the cult’s high priest Aderbad,
Gaius learns of its plan to revive the spirits of the dead Roman
soldiers and lead them into an ultimate showdown against their own
living comrades.
Sounds incredible,
and to a certain extent it is. This IS a peplum, let’s not forget,
and as such there are dry patches of wooden dialogue and
stiff-as-corpses emoting to suffer. Once we wade through the
regulation courtships and betrayals, however, we’re presented with
the payoff: a magnificent low-rent but surprisingly effective battle
between the living and the dead, smothered with superimposed colour
swirls of saturated reds and blues (Mario Bava’s favourite palette
for supernatural effects). Rather than rotting corpses, the Moon
Goddess’ army is presented as ghostly figures, their
otherworldliness underscored by slow motion cameras and an eerie
echo-laden soundtrack. Just as impressive is the over-the-top
performance of their leader, high priest Aderbad, played by John Drew
Barrymore (son of John Barrymore, father of Drew Barrymore) in one of
his numerous Italian film appearances between numerous cocktails in
the early Sixties. Quasi-psychedelic, and several notches above your
ordinary Italian sword and sandal, is the zombie-themed peplum
chiller Rome Against Rome, or War Of The Zombies.
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