MACUMBA LOVE. United Artists, 1960. Walter Reed, Ziva Rodann, William Wellman Jr. and June Wilkinson. Written by Norman Graham. Produced and directed by Douglas Fowley.

   Persons of a certain age will remember Douglas Fowley as Doc Holliday in the “Wyatt Earp” teleseries. Going back a little further, others may recall his turn as the harried director in Singin’ in the Rain. To me, he’ll always be the snaky bad guy of countless B-westerns, but it’s a safe bet that damn few will think of him as the auteur of Macumba Love, and I suspect his ghost will walk a little easier for it.

   Sad to think that a film with such a promising title proves a waste of time but the sad fact is that Macumba Love takes all the elements of a good trashy film— bad script, bad acting, low budget, sex, torture and voodoo—only to squander them.

   The story has potential: Walter Reed plays an investigative writer looking into the local folkways (this was filmed in Brazil, as was Love Slaves of the Amazons) up against a hostile voodoo queen, diffident authorities, and a strange moodiness on the part of his Latino girlfriend (Ziva Rodann, appropriately named “Venus de Viasa” here.)

   When Reed’s newlywed daughter (June Wilkinson) arrives with her husband (William Wellman Jr.) in tow, Ziva starts putting the moves on the young man, an enterprise helped along considerably by her dresses, none of which seem to cover her quite adequately. Meanwhile, the natives stay up late pounding drums and dancing around a fire, zombie-corpses wash up on shore, veiled threats are tossed about, Voodoo trinkets passed around like re-gifted Christmas presents, and Ziva gets less and less subtle about her campaign of seduction.

   Unfortunately, that’s about it. Instead of a plot developing, tension rising or anyone actually doing anything, we just get more drums, dancing, threats, trinkets and teasing. And then a little more drums, threats, teasing, etc. And then a little more…. you get the idea? The discerning viewer, having seen and appreciated films like Voodoo Woman or The Disembodied has come to expect the drums-and-dancing scenes; indeed, they’re practically the sine qua non of the genre. But one can only sit through a certain amount of it before a certain familiarity begins to creep in, and in this film it doesn’t so much creep as gallop.

   Or take the scene where the vamp lures the newlywed hubby to her boudoir: She invites him with a palpably fake pretext, he agrees and… and we get interminable shots of them riding along the beach in a carriage! By the time they reach her den of iniquity we’ve pretty much lost interest.

   Macumba Love has B-Movie street creds aplenty: Walter Reed, starred in Flying Disc Man from Mars and was a featured player in Superman and the Mole Men. Ziva Rodann worked in Pharaoh’s Curse and Forty Guns, and whoever designed her outfits seems to have enjoyed his work. Likewise June Wilkinson, who appeared (in the best sense of the word) in that classic The Immoral Mr. Teas And William Wellman Jr. … well he gets a scene staked out bare-chested for torture, if your tastes run to that sort of thing.

   With all this going for it, Macumba Love should have set a bad-movie standard all its own, but alas, it’s just too damn slow and repetitious, smothering its tawdry promise in tedium, doubly disappointing because an actor of Douglas Fowley’s sleazy expertise should have known how to do it right.