Film review – Garden of the Dead (1972)

My notes on Garden of the Dead (1972)

I saw this in 1975 as it was originally intended – as a B pocture (re-titled Tombs of the Undead in the UK) for director John Hayes’ much more elaborate Grave of the Vampire – and again in 2023, when I programmed it at the Gothique Film Society, on the principle that I hadn’t seen it in so long it must be better than I thought it was as a sixteen-year-old (when I listed it as perhaps the worst film I’d ever seen in a fanzine article).  Happily, I can say that either the film or I have matured over the years – it’s no lost masterpiece, but it works for an audience.  At 59 mins – longer listed running times seem to be a mistake rather than evidence of cuts – it’s too short to have the dull spots most Z-pictures are stuck with, and its random plotting is weirdly compelling.  Even by the standards of 1970s zombie films, it refuses to make sense and the thumbnail-sketches of characters are functional with a no-name cast perfectly filling the stereotypes of hardass warden, rebel con, nice guard, woman waiting for her guy to be released, clumsy foulup, liberal doctor, man mountain, etc.  The moustached clumsy convict who seems addlebrained even before he comes back from the dead as a zombie looks like one of the Ritz Brothers, but he’s actually Carmen Filpi (‘Old Man Withers’ from Wayne’s World).

Okay, here’s the premise – an open prison (Camp Hoover) in the middle of nowhere is about to be shut down, the old-fashioned warden (Philip Kennally) – he wears gloves all the time and favours punitive methods which went out with I Was a Fugitive From a Chain Gang – forced out of the penal system, and the cons relocated to other institutions.  Waitress Carol (Susan Charney) comes to the wire everyday in a short skirt to parade for her husband Paul (Marland Proctor), which gets the other cons (and some of the guards, maybe) het up.  Bradock (Virgil Frye), nastiest guy on the block, is addicted to inhaling fumes from the many barrels of formaldehyde stored in the camp and has a gang of followers he’s got similarly hooked.  We presume muscular, handsome, decent-seeming Paul will be the hero, but Bradock stabs him – he survives but is bedridden for the rest of the film – just before leading his gang on an  escape … but butterfingers Nolan (Filpi) drops the shotgun they steal from a murdered guard and it goes off.  The warden and posse give pursuit, gunning down the now-unarmed escapees an gun them down – burying the bodies in shallow graves in ground soaked with formaldehyde and eerie mist.  If there’s any trace element of social commentary here, it might have to do with the guards’ trigger-happiness being paid back when their victims return from the dead with a grudge against all the living.  Somehow or other, Bradock and co come back to life – they crawl out of graves with increasingly pasty-faced makeup and set out for revenge.

In 1972, the conventions of zombie movies weren’t set in stone and no one made a fuss about zombies who talk (as in Return of the Living Dead), run (at considerable speed), use tools and act as a gang.  Hayes stages an attack on a trailer park quite well even if it’s a bit of a knockoff of a scene from the first Count Yorga film – the low budget is evident in that the park is closing too and there’s only one mobile home there – with a sedated Carol hearing her nice landlady and her husband being killed then waking up to see pasty faces clustering around the vehicle.  Of course, the zom-cons besiege the camp – loser Nolan is again first to die, melted into goo by a searchlight beam (messy makeup is by Joe Blasco, who did the early Cronenberg films) – and go wild with pickaxes, rakes and bludgeons.  In a sequence as a zombie disables all the vehicles, it’s obvious the actor has been told to be careful not to do any damage as he waves his axe at the engines.  Even as zombies, the cons have an unnatural interest in formaldehyde – which here has all manner of magical properties, but makes a change from radioactivity I guess.  Sexploitation director Lee Frost has a bit part.