It’s hard to tell if producers Republic intended Valley of the Zombies to be a comedy. It’s certainly very funny at times, but it was supposed to be that way? Who knows. The title is certainly misleading – there’s no valley and only one zombie, and a strange one at that, more of a mad doctor vampire than the zombie we’ve come to know and love. This was still early days for the zombie film, long before George Romero laid down ground rules in Night of the Living Dead (1968) that have been stuck too rigidly ever since. Director Philip Ford (the nephew of director John Ford) and writers Dorrell McGowan and Stuart E. McGowan don’t even stick to the rules created by White Zombie (1932) and one often gets the impression that either no-one involved knew what a zombie was or wanted to make a different kind of film and got lumbered with the title (it bears some resemblance to Vincent Sherman’s The Return of Dr. X (1939)).

Dr Rufus Maynard (Charles Trowbridge) has the brilliant named Ormand Murks (Ian Keith) (“I’m a strange man”) committed to an insane asylum because he believes that blood transfusions are making him immortal. Two years after his arrival, Murks is operated on by asylum director Dr Lucifer Garland (Wilton Graff) but Murks dies during the procedure, his body released to his brother. In the film’s present day, Murks has apparently returned to life and has been feeding on blood that he steals from Maynard’s lab. He’s been revived and kept alive by voodoo and goes on to murder Maynard and his lab assistant, Fred Mays (Earle Hodgins). Detectives Blair (Thomas E. Jackson) and Hendricks (LeRoy Mason) suspect Maynard’s partner, Dr Terry Evans (Robert Livingston), and his nurse girlfriend, Susan Drake (Adrian Booth, previously known as Lorna Gray) of being behind the killings and they are forced to clear their name. They investigate the Murks estate but are trapped in a mausoleum by Murks after they discover Garland’s body. When Murks hypnotizes Susan and forces her to submit to giving him blood, the race is on to stop Murks before he kills her.

Valley of the Zombies is a cut above the usual Poverty Row horror of the time and is better than your average Republic offering, but that said, it’s still no great shakes. There are plenty of murders, but disappointingly few thrills with much of the interesting stuff taking place off screen. It’s never much more than a brisk time-filler, zipping through its meagre 56 minutes leaving little time to worry too much about the paper-thin plot.

Ian Keith is good value as the Victorian melodrama villain, but the rets of the cast, especially Livingston and Gray, are insipid, largely just clones of William Powell and Myrna Loy in The Thin Man films. Keith had been a regular in the films of Cecil B. DeMille and was one of the actors in the frame for the title role in Dracula (1931) before Bela Lugosi landed the part. He was a dependable character actor, and he delights in taking centre stage here, leaving barely an inch of scenery unchewed – if the film is tolerable in any way, it’s largely due to him.

It’s certainly not got anything to do with the script which, even in 56 minutes, still manages to find ways to drag the plot down to a standstill. There’s a nice body in the fridge gag which hardly makes up for Evans and Drake’s tedious mooching about in an old dark house which sorely tests the patience of even the most forgiving of viewers. A lot is crammed into the running time, but it’s remarkable just how little of it is all that interesting. Ford does what he can, bringing a touch of film noir to the proceedings, and Reggie Lanning’s photography gives the film a glossier look than one might suspect, but the material doesn’t give them much scope for anything special.

A lot of the dialogue is very funny but again one wonders if it was meant to have been a comedy or whether it was just badly written. Whatever, it seems pointless to spend too much time worrying about the whys, hows and wherefores of a decidedly minor film, not even one that rates a footnote in horror history. As zombie films go, it’s very low down on the list on anyone’s “must-see” list.