Sugar Hill (1974)

***/****
With just enough time for one film, Sugar Hill, an early 70s blaxploitation voodoo zombie AIP Houston-area horror flick features Robert Quarry in his final film contracted to the company that provided him with his most famous role, Count Yorga, was just perfect.  Marki Bey, a foxy, fierce vengeance seeking stunner (70s fashions might often elicit giggles and shaking heads, but Bey, as the title lead, always looks fab) wanting revenge against Quarry for initiating the beatdown murder of her Club Haiti fiance because he wouldn't sell and often let his mafia thugs know they couldn't scare him, always stands with authority and confronts her enemies with conviction. Richard Lawson is the detective who believes the murders, which include a victim fed to starved pigs, another dumped in a coffin with snakes, a third forced to knife himself, is linked to the supernatural...Sugar needs him to be protectively removed from the scene because she cares for him.

 You get plenty in this one:

The n-slur is commonplace;  there's a catfight between Bey and Betty Anne Rees (Rees can't stand her, jealous that she gets Quarry's attention); Don Pedro Colley as Voodoo "god" with a devious wide smile, wicked laugh that lifts high when he tilts his head back heartily, distinctive top hat, and steel-tipped cane, grandly participates in Bey's revenge murders in a myriad of roles and disguises; Zara Cully as Voodoo priestess, Mama Matriesse, with her fantastic face and colorful delivery; the cob-webbed, silverball-eyed zombies who drowned in a nearby swamp while being brought in a slaveship from Guinea, obediently following the orders of Colley's Baron Samedi, with fleshtone and fingers that give off eerie reminders to the likes of I Walked with a Zombie; Sugar making sure she's there when the zombies surround and capture Quarry's thugs, startling them unawares, such as Night Court's Charles Robinson, named Fabulous, in a massage parlor; the catchy tune, Supernatural Voodoo Woman, that will stay in your head for days.

Dig that zombies rise sequence, initiated by Samedi from the swamp, given plenty of time to impress. Atmospheric and creepy, they look as if they've been buried in the muck and mire, under the earth and in the mush, for quite some time. October is just fitting for this.