cricketbat I wanted to like White Zombie more. After all, it is considered to be the first "zombie movie" ever made. But the pacing and acting made it seem like the longest 68-minute film ever made. I think it would have worked better as a silent film.

BA_Harrison Madeline (Madge Bellamy) and Neil (John Harron) travel to Haiti where they are to be wed. Unfortunately for the loved up couple, devious local Charles Beaumont (Robert Frazer) has designs on Madeline and gets voodoo witch doctor 'Murder' Legendre (Bela Lugosi) to make it appear as though the young woman has died. In reality, she is under a powerful zombie spell and is brought back from the grave to become Beaumont's obedient love slave.White Zombie, starring Bela Lugosi, is considered an early horror classic by many, who laud the film for its eerie dreamlike atmosphere and expressionist/gothic imagery. I, on the other hand, found it all rather disappointing, the extremely sluggish pace and hammy acting (Lugosi leading the charge, with his evil zombie eyes and silly zombie grip) leaving me distinctly unimpressed.Yes, there are some memorable visuals, most notably Legendre's creaky sugar mill (powered by zombies), his cliff-top fortress and its cavernous reception room, but there are also long stretches where nothing much of interest happens (most of the scenes involving the expressionless Madeline), making it the sort of film likely to put all but the most ardent of Lugosi fans into a catatonic state.3.5 out of 10, rounded up to 4 for IMDb.

jadavix "White Zombie" is a cool little horror tale, barely clocking in at feature film length at only an hour and seven minutes.The film is a take on the zombie legend of Haiti which is a far cry from the kind of zombie movie/TV show/video game we have all seen at least a million times. The movie does feature an army of zombies, rather than just one, but they are not flesh eating creatures who transmit their disease through bites and must be put down with a shotgun blast to the head. Instead, they are more like mindless automatons.Moreover, what this film has, that very, very few zombie movies in the modern era have had, is a main bad guy. Generally the zombie outbreak is caused by a phenomena like a crashed satellite or comet. Often times it is not even accounted for. In "White Zombie", there is a very definite cause for the dead walking: voodoo magic performed by none other than Bela Lugosi.Watching "White Zombie" made me wonder a couple of things. Firstly, I was considering whether Romero (RIP) and his "Living Dead" pictures were the first time zombies were depicted as flesh eaters. In "White Zombie", they are slaves created to do Lugosi's bidding. His evil nature is accentuated by the fact that it is hinted that some of the zombies are former rivals of his, being exploited after death as an ultimate act of humiliation.Secondly, I wondered if, by not having a main bad guy controlling the zombies that "White Zombie" has, we are essentially missing a key ingredient that would generally improve these stories. I mean, nobody is scared of zombies any more, if they ever were. They exist basically to demonstrate the different ways the human body can be degraded and destroyed, and maybe to make us think how we would try to survive an "outbreak". "White Zombie" gives you a real channel for fear in the consummately evil character created by Lugosi.I do penalize "White Zombie", however, for not containing any extremely effective frightening moments. This might be a bigger minus for some rather than others; if you watch a lot of horror films like me, you don't expect them to scare you, because most don't. You expect to be entertained, and you will be.

Oodipherus The overall acting felt so forced for this film. I know it's a movie with zombies, being alive today, i'm desensitized by all the high-quality zombie films out now so White Zombie seems more silly than scary. I'm sure for the time, people were creeped out by the film and the idea. But I was more creeped out by how slow and uneventful 70% of the movie was. Granted, it's definitely a classic horror film, but not one i'd ever recommend to anyone. However, I was pleasantly interested in the double expose scenes of the haunting eyes. When I think of this film, I think of those eyes and those bushy eyebrows.All in all, not terribly interested in ever seeing this again.