SunnyHello Nice effects though.

Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Brennan Camacho Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

Nicole I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

ferbs54 Psychotronic-film buffs who watch the Paul Naschy films "Crimson" (1973) and "The Hanging Woman" (also 1973) may come away feeling a bit shortchanged regarding the amount of screen time allotted to the so-called "Boris Karloff of Spain." In the first, Naschy plays a jewel thief who has been shot in the head following a botched robbery, and thus lays in a near coma for the film's first hour, while awaiting a brain transplant; in the second, he plays a necrophilic grave digger whose screen time is brief in the extreme. No such drawbacks for the eager Naschyphile crop up in Leon Klimovsky's "Vengeance of the Zombies" (1973 again...quite a year for Paul!), fortunately; in fact, in this one, Spain's leading horror icon plays no less than three (3!) roles, and is marvelous in all of them. In the film, a rash of killings has begun in modern-day London, perpetrated, it is soon discovered, by a quartet of recently resurrected women whose interred bodies had recently gone missing. When Elvire Irving (played by an actress only listed as Rommy) is almost slain by the zombie of her recently departed cousin, she hightails it to the country estate of her Indian guru Krisna (Naschy #1), soon to be joined by her psychologist boyfriend Lawrence Redgrave (Vic Winner, who had also costarred that same year with Naschy in the excellent film "Hunchback of the Morgue"). But, as it turns out, even this escape to the pastoral village of Llangwell is not sufficient to separate Elvire from the ghastly zombie predations, or the schemes of Krisna's burnt-faced brother, Kantaka (Naschy #2)....Basically a giallo film with large doses of the supernatural stirred in, "VOTZ" gives us a masked killer utilizing a small band of the female undead to do his bidding, as well as numerous other homicidal tricks. It features a nicely complex story line (courtesy of screenwriter Naschy) to keep the viewer guessing and a few genuine surprises toward its conclusion. The picture contains any number of startling moments (most notably a dream sequence, in which Elvire meets the Devil himself, played by--you guessed it--Naschy #3), and the quartet of pasty-faced, slow-moving zombie gals really is quite eerie to behold. For the dedicated gorehounds out there, "VOTZ" should also prove quite pleasing, boasting as it does a battered bloody face, a hatchet in the head, a hanging, a throat impalement, several garrotings, assorted knifings, death by beer can (!), a throat slitting, a decapitation, a crucifix stabbing and--perhaps worst of all--the beheading of an actual chicken during a voodoo ceremony (as in "Hunchback of the Morgue," with its live rats on fire, an animal WAS apparently harmed during the making of this picture!). The film makes excellent use of its London locales (it was also shot in Navacerrada and Torrelodones, Spain, both sites being northwest of Madrid) and spotlights the most striking-looking gold-painted woman since a certain 007 movie from 1964. That's the good news. The bad news is the film's unfortunate soundtrack from Juan Carlos Calderon, a funk/fusion blend seemingly more apropos for a blaxploitation action flick starring Fred Williamson or Pam Grier. The juxtaposition of zombie risings with this funky junk seemed highly inappropriate to me-- almost non sequitur--as it did, apparently, for many other viewers, as well. Still, Calderon's music IS occasionally effective here, most especially the discordant, outre jazz that accompanies that above-mentioned dream sequence. For the most part, however, it almost torpedoes what is otherwise a well-put-together horror outing; hardly essential viewing, but surely a must-see for all of Paul Naschy's many fans.As for this DVD itself, from the always dependable folks at Deimos, it sports a great-looking print of this obscure film; the so-called "export" version, with all the nudity (deemed too risqué by the bluenosed Franco censors of the time) left intact...although whether we need to see a zombie in a see-through nightie is another question! The DVD is introduced by Naschy himself, a few years before his death from pancreatic cancer in 2009 (oh, if only HE could be resurrected!), in which he tells us, with lovable immodesty, "It is a strange movie, a really shocking movie...one of the most horrifying movies in the Spanish horror cinema!" Who am I to argue with the Boris Karloff of Spain?

MartinHafer The opening sequence is very cool and quite scary. An evil couple is apparently robbing the dead of their jewels at the mausoleum. And, in a nod to karma, they are killed by an avenging zombie. Abruptly, the film begins and the locale changes completely--and you really aren't sure what this has to do with the rest of the film.A woman is naturally feeling troubled following the murder of her father (whether or not this is the man in the opening scene, I don't know) and so she seeks solace from an Indian mystic. However, she is attacked several times by zombies (what a bummer) and ultimately is carried by one of them into a weird Satanic ceremony filled with green-faced zombies. There, the Indian mystic is dressed like the Devil (the outfit and makeup are pretty cool but they later refer to him as 'Baron Samedi'--the voodoo spirit of death) and the lady is stabbed and he drinks her blood. But, just as she's about to die, she awakens to find it's all a dream. Despite this freaky dream or vision or whatever it was, the lady remains at the mystic's home--proving she's pretty dumb.In the meantime, various murders take place--orchestrated by the same masked person you saw at the beginning of the film. As for the murders, by today's standards they are tame--they were, for their time, very bloody and graphic....and featured a bit of gratuitous nudity. This is probably NOT a film to show your mother-in-law! After these killings, you finally learn from some Scotland Yard folks that those killed were all somehow related. It seems that they all came from British families of people who remained in India following independence in 1947. In 1957, some sort of evil event occurred--and the families returned to India and did not talk about this incident. So, it appears that perhaps the mystic is using Haitian voodoo to exact revenge for this 1957 incident. Tune in if you want to find out where it goes next.This story has a lot of good and a lot of bad. The killings are pretty graphic and there are plenty of scary moments. But, the plot often makes little sense (such as why the lady never called the police and why all the victims of the zombies just stood there waiting for the slow-motion killers to get them!). If you love Spanish horror films, this is worth seeing--otherwise, it just didn't quite work. The writing certainly should have been better.By the way, in one scene a guy is apparently killed by a can--yes, a can. How this killed him, I have no idea--it sure seemed pretty stupid as well as impossible. Also, a live chicken is actually beheaded for the film--a rather cruel way to get some chills.

poe426 VENGEANCE OF THE ZOMBIES has a lot going for it: Paul Naschy, doing triple duty as a guru, the guru's doppelganger, and Satan himself (in FRONT of the camera; he also wrote it as well); a veritable plethora of unusual characters (besides the three played by Naschy); some interesting no-budget makeup fx; and some genuinely decent direction (again) by Leon Klimovsky. There are some genuinely creepy moments in this one (the appearance of one woman actually startled me) and Klimovsky once again uses slow motion to great effect. The only real problem I had with this one was the decapitation of the chicken: I tend to think of all animals as children and seeing an animal sacrificed on a celluloid altar just ain't justifiable in my book.

lemon_magic Shades of Jess Franco...this one has all the marks of a classic Franco hack-a-thon, and comes out of Spain. As with almost everything Franco did, this director obviously had the knowhow to create a decent film, but he couldn't be bothered to go back and polish all the rough parts. And the movie seems to be nothing but "rough parts" all the way through. The result is like watching the "rushes" for a talented neighbor's home movies for a script he hacked out in a day, if your neighbor had a photogenic wife (like "Rommy") and a 35mm camera. The plot is completely lurid, which actually part of the movie's charm. It starts out with a masked guy (very "Phantom Of the Opera") reviving dead women as zombies to do his bidding, which mostly involved strangling people who obligingly just stand there and let them get on with it. (I have to admit that the make up on the zombies is pretty effective and one of the real reasons to watch the movie.) At least that's the opening scene. And before you know it, the plot has become a freeway pileup of Indian mysticism, serial murder, topless women, stylized slow motion assaults, zombies (of course), Satanism, ritual sacrifices, hallucinatory nightmares...have I left anything out? Oh yeah, all done to a swinging heavy jazz soundtrack that starts a new theme every two or three minutes, stops in the middle of a musical phrases whenever a scene ends, and in general seems to have nothing to do with the action on the screen.The DVD print I saw (part of a "Drive In Movie Classics 50 pack) was awful; it was a full screen "pan and scan", but managed to consistently leave out one or all of the actors in a given shot, instead giving us revealing shots of the middle of the set.And mixing for the sound was apparently done in the bottom of a steel barrel. The overall sound managed to be muddy but was nevertheless so shrill and tinny that I was afraid it might make the neighborhood dogs start to howl. This was a shame because the dubbing for the dialog actual was one of the better efforts I've heard from this era - the dialog is still stilted and clumsy, but it seemed as if the ESL voice actors might have been allowed to actually rehearse a little before they had to jump into the studio. And again, the jazz music was mostly very sprightly and vivid - sort of the stuff you'd hear in a TV commercial for the new model Lamborghini or something; it would have been nice to hear it the way it was performed. My guess is that someone in production intentionally mixed things to sound best coming out of the speakers at a drive-in movie. Either that, or they hated us and wanted us to bleed from the ears and die in torment. So yes, it's a mess. But somehow, it's an enjoyable mess, if only for the ambition of the lead actor, who casts himself in three different parts and the director, who tries to mix three or four different horror genres in one screenplay, and some hard working supporting actors who try their best to give the proceedings some dignity. Do NOT pay money to see this, unless it's part of a collection. If you pay more than $5 to own a DVD of this movie by itself, you will probably be looking around for a throat to slit when it is over.