Читать книгу The Zombie Book - Nick Redfern - Страница 45

The well-known Hollywood actor Ving Rhames has starred in no less than three zombie-themed movies: the 2004 remake of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, 2008’s Day of the Dead (which was also a Romero remake), and the downright terrible Zombie Apocalypse (2011). In terms of starring roles in zombie movies, however, Rhames has nothing on horror legend John Carradine, who appeared in numerous undead-based productions, including Revenge of the Zombies, Voodoo Man, Face of Marble, Invisible Invaders, Dr. Terror’s Gallery of Horrors, The Astro-Zombies, Blood of Ghastly Horror, The House of Seven Corpses, and Shock Waves.

It is most unfortunate that, at best, all of Carradine’s forays into the world of the zombie ranged from what can only be described as awful to mediocre, since he was actually a highly skilled actor. Born in 1906 in Manhattan, New York City, Carradine broke into the movie industry in 1930, in Bright Lights. It is ironic that Carradine should be so associated with horror-movies, since his very first credited role in the field of acting was a comedy-musical of no particular, longstanding merit. Nevertheless, Carradine, like all actors, had to start somewhere.

Dramas and westerns soon followed (although Carradine did have un-credited roles in both The Invisible Man of 1933 and the 1935 movie, The Bride of Frankenstein), as did the 1939 version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles. It was a film in which Carradine took on the significant role of Barryman, the sinister butler of Baskerville Hall. Interestingly, in the original novel, Barryman is named Barrymore, but Twentieth Century Fox chose to make the change to prevent viewers from thinking there might be a connection to the actors John Barrymore and Lionel Barrymore, both of whom were big draws for cinema-goers in the 1930s.

While zombie fanatics may wish to check out each and every one of Carradine’s movies of a reanimated and undead fashion, very few are worthy of comment. Revenge of the Zombies (1943) is somewhat notable, as it was the sequel to King of the Zombies, which was made two years earlier. Voodoo Man (1944) starred Bela Lugosi in the lead, which made it a crowd-puller with the viewers, but it can hardly be regarded as a classic.

Certainly, the most interesting of all of Carradine’s zombie movies is a 1959 production, Invisible Invaders. It focuses on a hostile alien force that plans on enslaving the people of Earth by inhabiting the corpses of the recently deceased, and using the newly animated bodies as vessels to attack and kill the living while simultaneously causing chaos all across the planet. Not quite Night of the Living Dead, but most definitely ahead of its time in terms of its concept—although sadly not in terms of its less than impressive special-effects and less than great acting.

Although Carradine worked alongside such famous actors as Spencer Tracy, Basil Rathbone, and Charlton Heston, made more than 200 movies on a wide and varied body of subjects, and spent extensive time working in the world of theater, it is for the incredibly huge number of horror movies that he made for which Carradine is most remembered and loved. He was still active right up until the time of his death, in Milan, Italy, in 1988. Carradine did not, by the way, subsequently “come back.”