James Rolfe: It's Cinemassacre's "Monster Madness". Welcome to the world's first zombie movie. If you're used to blood-spurting and heads getting chewed off then this isn't the movie for you. Though it may not excite by use of gore it has a different kind of power. Watching it is like going into a dreamlike state with Belá Lugosi staring at you half the time – you actually feel like you're being hypnotized.
He plays the leader of the zombies and he's in top performance fresh off of "Dracula". Speaking of which, this is not Universal, the studio that dominated the horror genre for the 30's and 40's. No, this was independent so it gets overshadowed by everything else like "Dracula", "Frankenstein" and "The Mummy". I sorta consider it the rebel of the bunch, but its legacy doesn't go unnoticed. Rob Zombie used it as the name of his first band.
It shows some new filmmaking techniques. There's that closeup of Lugosi's eyes that just float until they land on his head. There's framing through objects, and there's a dialogue scene where the camera starts behind the actor's back, then all the dialogue happens in one single take. By the end of the scene the camera goes back to the same spot it started.
It's a quiet movie and you may find it slow, but it really does have a hypnotic effect. And by the end you feel like a zombie.