Zombies of Mora Tau

Starring Autumn Russell, Gregg Palmer, Allison Hayes and Marjorie Eaton

Original working title Zombies of the Ocean Deep

Released March 1957

"Here dwell those nameless creatures who are condemned to prowl the land eternally... the Walking Dead."

Problem is, they don't really prowl. They stiffly propel themselves in painstakingly slow steps, wrapped in old sailor-outfits right out of a Popeye cartoon, garnished with seaweed.

Allison Hayes (she of the famous Attack of the 50 Foot Woman) is easily the best known member of the cast. The lead male actor, Gregg Palmer, as deep-sea diver Jeff Clark, has a long list of Cowboy work to his credit, in particular 6 films with John Wayne. Autumn Russell, the lead female role, is much less known with only a smattering of roles across TV and some feature films.

B-Movie producer-maestro Sam Katzman doesn't put Allison to much use in this film. She provides snide sneers at her screen husband (Joel Ashley) and at Autumn Russell (her competition in the female victim category), and makes a drunken pass at Gregg Palmer's character. Otherwise, she lays on the furniture in the background of various scenes and eventually gets turned into a zombie, and then she, too, becomes agonizingly slow.

Diamonds of Mora Tau

The story (by George Plympton and Bernard Gordon using the cover name of Raymond T. Marcus because he was on the Hollywood "blacklist") is about a cache of ancient diamonds aboard a sunken ship, guarded by the undead crew that sank with it. Though these undead sailors can move around underwater, they're actually sensibly headquartered in a crypt on the mainland, bunking together in a single room with a selection of caskets arranged in an orderly line. There are no lids on these coffins. Like a fire department that might get a call in the middle of the night, they have to be ready to go immediately if a new diamond salvage operation comes along.

And there's been quite a few. When this latest expedition appears on the "African coastline" (Santa Anita, California), the elderly Marjorie Eaton (as Grandma Peters) cheerfully gives the new arrivals a tour of a well-used graveyard, narrating to the newcomers the end result of past diamond hunters.

Gregg Palmer puts energy into his scenes, as does Autumn Russell, but for the most part the cast is tuned to the pace of the plot. Scenes of people walking or running around the old house where Grandma Peters lives is repeated enough that we know that this is the common B-movie director effort to fill time because we apparently don't have enough story. Some scenes appear under rehearsed, with pauses and gaps between bits of the dialogue, wrecking the appearance of an actual conversation taking place. This problem doesn't afflict Palmer or Russell, though, who we can see trying to put kinetic action into this glacial movie, but that effort vanishes once those two go off screen. In explanation, Katzman only had nine days of production time on this feature film, and director Edward Cahn, who was a longtime veteran editor, is said to have basically shot Zombies of Mora Tau with his future edits already in mind.

The Lewton connection

Interesting note, the movie starts off with Autumn Russell (as Jan Peters) returning to be with her Grandma, traveling down a forbidding dark roadway. The car she is in plows over a zombie out in the road, and the nonchalant driver shrugs it off as an everyday occurrence. But this road trip hearkens directly to Val Lewton's 1942 I Walked with A Zombie, which starts in a similar fashion with a similar trip and monologue from a driver about the voodoo afoot in the local countryside.*

That's as far as the comparison goes between Lewton's superior film and Zombies of Mora Tau. Plagued with common short production B-movie problems, the script doesn't try to achieve anything unexpected, and the plot is an arrangement of chase vignettes. We watch as the statuesque Allison Hayes is doing this or that, mostly without dialogue, and Autumn Russell screaming. The ponderous zombie sailors walk as if sleepy and half-blind, these roles filled out by many professional wrestlers hired to also help provide some of the first-rate stunt work we see.

Underwater Undead

During the 1950s many a movie used underwater photography as part of the pitch for an exciting film (for example Creature from the Black Lagoon, Underwater! and Boy on a Dolphin) but the under-water photography in Zombies of Mora Tau is mostly faked. Gregg Palmer and Joel Ashley have on deep sea diving suits, and it looks realistic enough when they're being hoisted in or out of the water, but actual 'deep sea' scenes look like the camera is shooting the action through a fish tank. Some scenes do have the realistic tendrils of air bubbles, though, so we get a mix of real water photography and not. When Palmer and Ashley or the undead sailors appear under the sea, they're usually walking about on a darkly-lit, plain old landlubber movie set.

A few good words

The moody cinematography by Benjamin H. Kline is nice (and doesn't cheat on the night-shots, which is where the bulk of the movie takes place), and the cast is interesting to look at (despite serious gaps in the acting department). The sets are limited and sometimes laughable (like the zombie crypt) but visually there is frequently professional craftsmanship being shown. Unfortunately, at times, though, Director Cahn simply sets up his camera to aim square down the center of the set and films the actors like we're watching a stage play. The slow pacing derails any momentum built up from a good scene. There are some good scenes.

These zombie sailors are like prototype extras for the much later Disney Pirates of the Caribbean movies, and the basic plot (cursed diamonds and haunted sailors) is surely reminiscent of those Disney mega-hits.

When Gregg Palmer's character finally chucks the diamonds into the water (and defeats the greediness he's been battling within himself and also consequently releases the undead zombies to eternity), this at least prevents any obvious pathway to a sequel.

Related: Allison Hayes

FOOTNOTES:

*The Val Lewton/Jacques Tournier I Walked with A Zombie is the B-Movie gold-standard when it comes to old Hollywood Zombie films of the black-and-white era, Lewton's film being a literate and well-made Caribbean-voodoo reworking of the Bronte novel Jane Eyre.