In 1930s Chicago, a sailor attends his brother's execution, and then starts to see his dead brother everywhere. A mysterious woman warns the sailor to leave town, but instead he begins to look into his brother's past, with the help of a gruff police sergeant (Ralph Meeker) and the brother's former employer, a dance hall owner (Ray Milland). What he finds goes beyond what we consider reality. A very young and handsome George Hamilton stars as the befuddled sailor and Linda Cristal is the bewitching mystery woman. Curtis Harrington directed from a Robert Bloch story, and the atmosphere is creepy and at times nightmarish. Harrington leave no doubt about where things are going by starting off with the brother's execution followed closely by a scene in the dance hall featuring a bunch of marathon dancers looking like the living dead. Within the strict limits of a 1970s ABC-type TV movie, Harrington even lays on a bit of true horror, in a scene when when Hamilton is trapped in a funeral home with a walking corpse intent on murder (Reggie Nalder of "Salem's Lot" fame). There's also a taut sequence in a graveyard when Hamilton and the dance hall owner dig up the deceased brother's grave. And the final showdown takes place in an old-fashioned slaughterhouse that takes on the feel of a hospital morgue. Nicely done, although no one in the star-studded cast is called upon to emote much.
Review of The Dead Don't Die
