The Ghost Breakers (1940) Review

First of all, this is not a zombie movie. It's a movie that a zombie wanders into an hour down the line. He's quick to shuffle out of there, too. Basically, Ghost Breakers stole an hour and a half of my life. I didn't enjoy a second of it. It was a pathetic Bob Hope vehicle full of cute moments and racist jokes. They kept promising me, the viewer, a haunted mansion on an island, yet it took the meandering plot line over an hour to get to it. Finally, there's one glorious moment when Bob Hope sees an entranced native of the island and remarks, "It must be a zombie." The zombie follows him and his token broad on orders from his voodoo magic masters. It was pretty damn weak over all.



This, along with every other movie dealing with zombies in the 1940s, was inexcusably racist. Bob Hope orders around is poor ignorant Negro manservant way too much for my tastes. The whole first hour of the movie is an endless string of contrived circumstances and situational comedy that falls flat on delivery. I can't believe Bob Hope was as popular as he was. There was only bit of nerd trivia I could pull from this piece of crap. Daffy Duck's movie Quackbusters was largely influenced by Ghost Breakers, and Daffy even paraphrases Bob Hope's character in this movie. Daffy was racist too, though, I guess.