Back from the Grave

The film friezes of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg and a zombified Boris Karloff reemerge on DVD.

Brisker and more entertaining in an old-town, bottom-of-the-double-bill kind of way, the old and forgotten Boris Karloff charmer “The Walking Dead” (1936) has found its way to DVD in a two-disc, four-film Lugosi-Karloff package from Warner that has only sheer awfulness to otherwise recommend it. (“Zombies on Broadway,” that sort of thing.)

But “The Walking Dead” is a machine-gun genre jaunt in which an hour’s worth of plot and exposition is fired out in the first three minutes, outlining a devious gangster scheme that sends innocent schmuck Karloff to the electric chair. Luckily, scientist Edmund Gwenn has been working on reanimation, and the fall guy gets brought back to life. It’s not a shady deal — he becomes instantly front-page news, and Karloff’s mild-mannered pianist, whose life has been taken from him three times, ends up limping into public performances and playing Schubert with one hand semi-paralyzed. Of course, nothing preoccupies his death-befogged mind like getting even, and so the nightly visitations begin.

Directed by Michael Curtiz between Errol Flynn action epics “Captain Blood” and “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” this 65-minute honey presages piles of zombie films made since — it even scans in some ways like the original for a network pilot I co-wrote, “Babylon Fields” (Google it!), though I’d never before laid eyes on the Karloff in all my bygone years of monster culture consumption.

“Ludwig: Requiem for a Virgin King” (Facets Multimedia), “Karl May” (Facets Multimedia), and “The Walking Dead,” which is part of the two-disc “Karloff & Lugosi Horror Classics” set (Warner Bros.), are now available on DVD.

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