Edward Cahn’s Zombies of Mora Tau (1957) is barely feature-length, running only 70 minutes, but I can save you even more time.  Just watch the opening credits and then turn the damned thing off.

I love this card, which comes up just before the “action” kicks in.  It’s really got everything to interest a 10 year old boy (though I confess I wasn’t even born when this one came out).  “Ancient world” … “a twilight zone between life and death” … “nameless creatures” … perfection!  I love the shadowy figures behind the jagged horror letters and the creeping ground fog.  Words can’t even adequately express how warm and fuzzy this makes me feel.  It reminds me of my childhood nights under the covers, reading monster magazines with a flashlight.  Though the genre was moving away from the gentle, classic shocks of the old Universal and Columbia movies to more hyper-violent fare in the wake of Night of the Living Dead (1968), The Exorcist (1973) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), monster mags were happily behind the curve and banging the old, worn drum of “ghoulies and ghosties and things that go bump in the night.” The card above reminds me of all the spooky toys and gimmicks sold in the back pages of horror comics, the shrunken heads and X-ray specs and Sea Monkeys and 6′ tall Frankensteins (which turned out to be a poster, dad gum it).

Too bad Zombies of Mora Tau isn’t nearly so fun.  The concept is certainly sound – a group of adventurers attempting to salvage a sunken ship safeguarding a fortune in diamonds encounters an army of zombie sailors protecting their cargo – but the direction is stolid, liver-lipped Gregg Palmer (The Creature Walks Among Us, From Hell It Came) is a lousy, loutish hero and too much of the film is spent inside a plantation house as the characters drink coffee, smoke cigarettes and play blackjack while they bicker endlessly.  Worse yet, the zombies aren’t very frightening (when they rise en masse from their coffins, they look like contestants doing the unison stand up on To Tell the Truth), played as they are by professional wrestlers and stunt men (with seaweed worn around their necks for “underwater” scenes in which everybody acts in slow motion).  They lack menace, not being the biting variety of zombies, and come off like Teamsters who just want to hug you.  

The movie does have its moments, a good one early on as creepy old woman (and zombie expert) Marjorie Eaton (Night Tide, Mary Poppins, The Reincarnation of Peter Proud) walks the cast past graves dug for them in advance.  Bad girl Allison Hayes (Attack of the 50 Foot Woman) even falls into one, which just sours her mood for the whole film.  Blacklisted writer Bernard Gordon (who signed this film under the nom-de-plume “Raymond T. Marcus”) comes up with some acidic dialogue (Hayes to Eaton:  “You old hag, you’re dead already… you just don’t have sense enough to lie down”) and Hayes even gets turned into a zombie, which robs her of fun things to say but allows her to pad about looking uncannily like Lily Munster and being afraid of candles.

If you want to see underwater zombies done right, check out Ken Wiederhorn’s excellently eerie Shock Waves (1977) or even Lucio Fulci’s Zombie (1979), in which a waterlogged zombie fights a shark.  Now that’s thinking outside the box!