Alicia I love this movie so much

GamerTab That was an excellent one.

Jonah Abbott There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

marshrydrob King of the Zombies, is a comical piece; in the long list of classic horror film. The opening score, in the sounds of tribal drumming; gives the film an adventure theme.The mood of the film, is that of a mysterious island. The continually playing drums, hint at the presence of black magic: voodoo. The movie plays out similarly to that of an Abbot and Costello movie.The story is a little slow moving, but the combination of humor and mystery; makes the film worth watching. The gathered cast, is worth many a respects even today. King of the Zombies, may not actually be classic horror, but it is a good movie, and is not your average every day zombie film.

utgard14 Horror comedy from Monogram starring Mantan Moreland and a couple of forgettable bores. I'm not a big fan of Moreland but I'll admit he outshines these two guys by a country mile. It's basically an old dark house film with the three men stranded in said house on an island with a mad scientist (Henry Victor in a role originally meant for Bela Lugosi).There's a lot of stuff about voodoo and zombies, which is just an excuse to let Moreland do his bug-eyed double-takes and "afraid of spooks" routine. This is the part of Moreland's comedy shtick that I have never enjoyed. And it's not because of the offensive racial element of it, but rather because I'm not enamored with comedians who rely heavily on goofy facial expressions for laughs. I've voiced the same complaints about the likes of Red Skelton and Huntz Hall. But there is a part of Moreland's act I do like and that's when he falls back into his vaudeville routine of having a snappy back and forth with another actor. We see a bit of that here when he shares scenes with the maid (played by Marguerite Whitten). Those scenes were my favorite parts of the movie.Anyway, the horror isn't all it's teased to be as there's an espionage plot that's a lot less interesting. It was 1941, after all. It's not a great movie but it's not terrible by Poverty Row standards. It moves along quickly enough, which helps. But the entire film rests on Moreland's shoulders. If you love him, you'll probably laugh your tail off watching this. If you don't, this will go over like a lead balloon.

bkoganbing You had better be a fan of Mantan Moreland's clownish behavior not to mention racial stereotyping in order to sit through King Of The Zombies. In the days of the studio system this could only come from the mind of Sam Katzman at Monogram who probably just wanted to get use of the jungle set on the Monogram lot for a dirt cheap picture.Dick Purcell and John Archer looking for a lost admiral get fooled by a false radio signal and crash on the island of Dr. Sangre, second cousin to Dr. Moreau. Henry Victor is the good doctor and when he's not working for German Intelligence he's conducting experiments in hypnosis and voodoo with the natives. He's convinced a lot of them that they're zombies.Mantan as Archer and Purcell's manservant is with his employers and he does the whole Mantan shtick during the film while one of them is taken captive. It was the usual claptrap up to the very end.But when one of our intrepid heroes, now convinced he's a zombie, keeps coming for Victor as he fires point blank into him without any effect and knocks Victor into a flaming pit. And then in the explanatory postscript we are told he's just ailing a bit and he'll be up and around good as new in a bit, I throw my hands in the air.As did I'm sure many who saw this travesty on the big screen in 1941. It's not even decent wartime propaganda.Unless you just Mantan Moreland, stay away from this stinker.

Leofwine_draca For those who thought that RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD was the first real zombie-comedy-horror, think again. A good forty years before that film, a movie came along that portrayed the undead menace with an equal number of laughs and chills. That film is KING OF THE ZOMBIES, and it's a great little movie. Now, I may be biased, seeing as how the last zombie film I watched was the god-awful REVOLT OF THE ZOMBIES, made five years before this. That movie was a boring, zombie-free mess. KING OF THE ZOMBIES, by comparison, is a tightly-paced little thriller set on the confines of a tropical island.Essentially it's one of those 'haunted house' type movies, as our protagonists find themselves trapped in an eerie building and menaced by mysterious figures and the walking dead. These 'zombies' are of the classic variety, the hypnotised-workers group, and the make up, although simple, is more than effective. There's a lot of running around and voodoo ceremonies going on in the basement, and it all seems rather quaint and dated by today's standards. The majority of the cast are fairly wooden in their roles, especially the stiff-upper-lip 'heroes', but Henry Victor does a passable imitation of Bela Lugosi and Joan Woodbury wins points on her sheer loveliness alone. And then there's Mantan Moreland.You see, this is a COMEDY horror, along the lines of the classic Bob Hope type 'old dark house' comedies popular during the 1940s. And the presence of Mantan Moreland, a black actor typecast in this genre for his wide-eyed terror, means that we're in for a very funny ride. The type of humour seen here might seem racist and highly dated to a modern audience, but this is what passed for top comedy back in the 1940s and there's no point putting modern political correctness on an old, creaky black and white flick. Moreland shivers with terror, screams, runs and makes wisecrack after wisecrack in his various run-ins with the undead, and he's easily the best thing in the movie: he displays sound comic timing, great acting, and is a sheer likable personality. He also gets a huge amount of screen time, making this a very painless film to watch.