Ouanga (1934), dir. George Terwilliger, George Terwilliger Productions
...And this might be the single most racist thing I've reviewed this year.
Deep in the tropics, Klili Gordon (Fredi Washington) oversees her own plantation. Business is good, but she's got eyes on her neighbor's yard as well as her neighbor, Adam Maynard (Phillip Brandon). He's known her for years, they get along and all told seem like they'd be a perfect couple.
Oh, but there's that whole 'one drop rule'. Ms. Gordon has mixed ancestry you see thus Adam has NO CHOICE to expel her from his land and marry Eve Langley (Marie Paxton). Simple because she's white.
Ms. Gordon shockingly doesn't take this very well and jumps to voodoo as the next logical step. She manages to raise thirteen dead men from the grave to stalk and kill Ms. Langley. Somehow this fails to work.
Thankfully Adam's overseer, LeStrange (Sheldon Leonard) is a deft hand at the whole voodoo thing and vows to stop Ms. Gordon!
Sweet hell. I mean, wow. Zombies were still new to pop culture at the time (Maniac didn't explicitly call their undead the z word) and White Zombie was still fresh in people's minds. I'm baffled at how the latter film manages to be both more accurate and less offensive than this.
This might be the first time we've seen both the folklore take and a more modern blend of the zombie on screen. There's voodoo but the creatures here are dead. They don't eat flesh, but I have the feeling if they could have worked that into this mess if they could.
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