I Watch 'Em So You Don't Have To

Outright Rip-Offs of George Romero Movies

House Of The Living Dead aka Curse of the Dead aka Doctor Maniac aka Kill, Baby, Kill (1973) British

In the early 70's after the cult success of Romero's Night Of The Living Dead, it was exploited all over as much as possible. If you look (and not that hard) you can find many ______ Of The Dead movies going up through the 2000's. This one blatantly rips off, not any of his ideas, just the title. Because about zombies this movie ain't, and good this movie certainly ain't.

Again this movie was hard to understand, both the plot and the movie itself is a very bad print, so I'll try to be as accurate as I can but wiki has very little information on this one either. A white family owns a plantation in apartheid-era South Africa (then called Cape Colony) that grows grapes. They are considered cursed, we're not given much backstory on that. I believe their name is Bratley, that's as good as I could hear. 

If I have to be in this movie, so do you.

So there's a cold, older mother with two sons: Michael, the 'good' son and Breck, the 'insane' son who was crippled in an accident with a horse. Now Breck likes to play mad doctor, using live animals (the opening sequences make you squeamish, but the rest is a snooze fest) for his experiments. Basically the 'living dead' part is his theory that the soul is a tangible uh, vapor I guess that can exist outside the body. Supposedly since his accident he's confined to a chair in the attic. Michael, the good son, does his best to run the plantation but the family 'curse' follows and bad stuff is always happening, mostly murder.

 

Beard? What beard? This is part of my mask.

Local voodoo enthusiasts including a really cool looking 'witch' try their best to counter the 'crazy' son's experiments but fail. Michael becomes convinced that THEY are the ones responsible for all the bad stuff happening. Meanwhile, he's asked some chick to marry him and she shows up. His mother is pissed - she doesn't want the 'family curse' to continue, having it done when the two sons die. He says basically tough, you don't make any decisions anymore, I do. Nice kid. So strange (but incredibly boring) things continue to happen, people die, nobody is a zombie, and the action - well, actually there is no action unless you count all the climbing up and down stairs these people did.

Will you PLEASE get that light out of my eyes?

There is some light flirting between the fiancee' and a doctor who had known Breck in medical school but since these are British citizens in old Africa, there's not even any sideway glances so no excitement there. After things continue to go wrong however, she does seek his help, and finally he brings in the local police to investigate the supposed murders (made to look like a horse had stomped all over them). 

Whiskey... err I mean soul in a jar.

Long story short (too late I know) Breck was NOT an invalid, but kept doing his experiments even after the horse incident. After Michael got the letter from his fiancee', Breck killed him (putting his soul in a jar) and, being a twin brother (of course) pretended to be Michael for the rest of the movie. He's found out, captures the fiancee', she spends about ten minutes screaming, help arrives at the nick of time, mom falls off the upper balcony and breaks her neck.

This is perfectly decent to meet your future in-laws, right?

Breck, using the hoof-shaped poker-like weapon he's been killing everyone with starts flailing it around his lab, breaking the 'soul' jars, which attack him, making him fall off the balcony also. And all is well. Not. Ninety minutes of this, and you really wish for just one zombie, any zombie.

I dunno... floor dancing just isn't that fun.