On a spooky island, three stranded travelers find an evil doctor working with foreign spies and in control of zombies.
Pilot James "Mac" McCarthy goes off-course somewhere between Cuba and Puerto Rico and is unable to pick up any radio transmissions. When he and his passengers, Bill Summers and his Black valet Jefferson Jackson, hear a lone transmission in a foreign language, they crash-land the plane on the island below. The lost men find themselves in a graveyard, and follow the sound of drums to a nearby mansion. There they are greeted by Viennese Dr. Sangre, who treats Mac's minor head wound with the warning that untreated injuries are easy prey for evil spirits. Sangre says there are no radios on the island and allows the men to spend the night as his guests, although he insists that Jeff stay in the servants quarters in the basement. Jeff becomes alarmed when the maid, Samantha, and the cook, Tahama, call forth two "zombies," but when he runs upstairs to tell his boss, Sangre dismisses the idea as ludicrous. Sangre's wife Alyce also appears to be in a trance-like state, which Sangre attributes to jungle fever. Sangre appears surprised when Bill tells him about American Admiral Wainwright, whose plane disappeared in the same location. Sangre then tells the men that no one in his family, which includes his beautiful niece, Barbara Winslow, can leave the island because they are Austrian refugees lacking passports. Later that night, Jeff confides in Samantha that Bill is a government agent on a secret mission. Sangre's butler, Momba, Samantha and Tahama leave Jeff alone in the kitchen just before midnight, with the admonition not to pay notice to anything unusual. When two zombies nearly attack Jeff, he runs to Bill and Mac's room for safety. Jeff is later awakened by the appearance of a woman who seems to come and go through a wall, and when he awakens Bill and Mac, they believe him only after finding an earring. The three men split up to search the house, and Bill finds Barbara in the library reading a book on hypnotism. Barbara says that she is reading the book to help her aunt, who has been in the trance-like state since arriving at the island, and Bill confides his belief that Sangre is hiding a radio. Bill and Mac finally believe Jeff's stories about zombies after Mac is attacked by one. The next morning, Mac and Bill discover a freshly dug grave in the cemetery, and that someone has stolen the plane's radio. Mac goes in search of a generator, while Bill returns to the house, unaware that the admiral is being held hostage in a cellar and that Tahama is trying to pry military secrets from him with the use of voodoo. After Sangre calls in a report to his German allies, Mac disappears. Sangre then lures Jeff into the cellar, where he hypnotizes him into believing that he is a zombie. While Bill is searching for Mac, he finds Barbara using hypnotism on her aunt, and assumes that she is collaborating with Sangre, despite her protests that she is trying to restore her aunt's memory. Mac returns in a zombie-like state, and a physician called by Sangre says that he has been dead for hours. When Momba receives orders by radio for Sangre to transmit the stolen military information, he and Tahama prepare a special ceremony to wrest the information from the admiral. Jeff lines up with the other zombies for dinner, but Samantha breaks his spell. Jeff then meets with Bill and moments later, they hear a woman's scream and find Alyce dead. Bill and Jeff follow the sound of drums into the cellar, where Sangre is holding a ceremony during which the admiral's thoughts are to be transmitted into Barbara's brain. Bill breaks up the ceremony and when Sangre orders the zombies to attack Bill, they instead follow Mac, and turn on Sangre. Sangre shoots Mac and, while backing away from the zombies, falls to his death into a firepit. After Wainwright phones the Coast Guard, and Mac's injuries are treated, Wainwright tells Bill that Sangre forced his plane to land with a false radio signal, then killed his crew and tortured him for Canal Zone fortification plans. When his torture did not work, he used Alyce and Barbara as test subjects with other methods.
During World War II, a small plane off the south coast of America is low on fuel and blown off-course by a storm. Guided by a faint radio signal, they crash-land on an island. The passenger, his manservant and the pilot take refuge in a mansion owned by a doctor. The easily-spooked manservant soon becomes convinced the mansion is haunted by zombies and ghosts. Exploring, the three find a voodoo ritual in the cellar, where the doctor is trying to acquire war intelligence by transferring personalities into his zombies. But the interruption causes the zombies to turn on their creator.—Cynan Rees <[email protected]>
In World War II, during a storm, a small plane crashes in an island between Cuba and Porto Rico, but the pilot James 'Mac' McCarthy and his two passengers, Bill Summers and his Black servant Jeff Jackson, survive. Bill is in a mission trying to find Admiral Arthur Wainwright, who vanished in that area. They are lodged by the Austrian Dr. Mikhail Sangre in his mansion. The scared Jeff finds that the place has zombies, but Mac and Bill do not believe in him. Later, they find that Dr. Sangre is a spy transferring the knowledge of the admiral and other prominent persons to the zombies.—Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
A small plane crash lands onto a small island and into a cemetary. The survivors James McCarthy and his servant Jeff (Dick Purcell and Mantan Moreland) and the pilot (John Archer) are greeted by Dr. Sangre (Henry Victor) and asked to stay in the mansion until a boat arrives.
Jeff is asked to go sleep in the kitchen with the other servants while James and Bill are given a room. While down in the kitchen, Jeff discovers zombies are helping out. When he mentions this to James, no one believes him. After he is attacked by the zombies, they let him sleep in the room upstairs.
That night the wife of Dr. Sangre, comes in the room through a secret door and rops an earing. Jeff happens to see her and again James and Bill don't believe him, but when he shows them the earing, they suspect foul play. They go snooping downstairs and Bill is attacked by a zombie, while James discovers the doctors neice doing her own snooping in the library, investigating a book on hypnosis.
The next morning, James and Bill go to the plane in order to use the radio. They find out its gone. They spilt up and Bill goes searching for the Doctors radio, while James goes back to the mansion to talk to the niece. He discovers that both Bill and Jeff have disappeared.
Jeff is hypnotised to be a zombie and later while in the kitchen, he realizes he's not. He goes back to the bedroom through the secret entrance and meets up with James. They both enter the secret entrance and they find a voodoo ritual in the process. When the doctor discovers them, an attack ensues and the Doctor is killed.
The doctor was working for the Germans and was trying to get information on an admiral that had had crash landed in the same place a few weeks before. The doctor was trying to transfer the admiral's thoughts to the niece in order to get that information.