Well, well, well, hasn't it been a while? At some point I will return with a consistent posting schedule, I've several articles in the works, which when I have ample time, promise to finish. Until then...

I recently watched this rather poignant slice of biker-adjacent, post-Manson exploitation; was super cool seeing a 25 year old Sheriff Truman (Michael Ontkean) & Eastwood regular, Albert Popwell chewing scenery. The Peace Killers is well worth the price of admission.

I was a teenager when I first came across Night of the Zombies, the last of six films made by exploitation director Joel M. Reed, in Francis Brewster, Harvey Fenton & Marc Morris' near-biblical Video Nasty tome, Shock! Horror!: Astounding Artwork from the Video Nasty Era (FAB Press - 2005)
At the time, remarking how cool and outrageous it looked just from the supplied Apple Video VHS cover. Really though, get a load of that illustration, take a good long look and tell me you're not the least bit interested? Holy smokes! There's a great big Schutzstaffel insignia stamped above the title, and below that, two gun-toting, totenkopf-looking gut-munchers dripping in Nazi regalia, and even lower still there's a hideously decayed, leering pale-faced ghoul in the lower right, accompanied by the ominous words "YOU COULD BE NEXT..." I could be next....next to what? Next to watch this cool as fuck Nazi zombie bloodbath? Nah, I wouldn't check out this hunk of tripe for almost another 20 years, but I never forgot that wild VHS art! The power of marketing eh? All of those bombastic attributes resonated with my undeveloped prefrontal cortex, I was hooked and ready to be reeled in, but as we jaded film fanatics know - for better or worse - looks can be deceiving, and that truth be told, Night of the Zombies isn't a (good) zombie film, or even a good film altogether. Instead, it's a dysfunctional cinematic curio, yet for all the incoherence and blatant shortcomings it still possesses a distinctive charm and wry sense of humour.

Starring: Jamie Gillis, Ryan Hilliard, Ron Armstrong, and Samantha Grey.

The plot is a baffling mishmash of James Bond-style spy/detective-action caper, a war movie, and a sci-fi zombie film, though there's only about 7 zombies and these are a far cry from your Romero flesh-eaters, this lot are a bunch of walkin', talkin' undead soldiers, kept alive by Gamma 693, an experimental chemical intended to keep wounded servicemen alive until they can reach a hospital. In the middle of this chaos is Nick Monroe (Gillis), a CIA Special Agent; Dr. Clarence Proud (Hilliard), a biochemical expert, and his niece Susan Proud (Grey). Nick is sent on a "minimum exposure assignment" - which I suppose for Jamie Gillis this movie is a minimum exposure gig! He's tasked by his handler to set off for Munich and chase down a lead on "Special Unit C", a chemical warfare outfit from WWII who were carrying the experimental "Gamma 693" gas.



The trio set off for the Bavarian Alps where Nick uncovers a much larger and fiendish game at play, involving world domination by a sort of secretive "undead new world order"; composed of decomposing Allied and Axis fighters, a sort of undead master race that intends to feed on the rest of humanity, prolonging their own lives by enslaving humans and effectively using them as cattle. However, Night of the Zombies is such a diabolical mess these nuances, or dare I say - intricacies, are so poorly conveyed that the whole narrative feels like it's degenerating faster than a walking cadaver. At times it's difficult to understand who's on which side and what schemer is behind any such machination.

Eventually, our intrepid hero, Nick, slathers on a layer of war paint, dons some military duds, and heads out to infiltrate a zombified Allied battalion in the snowy wilderness where battle is still being fought, apparently every night, with the soldiers acting as if they're seemingly trapped in a weird WWII re-enactment that you might find at a country fair. Amazingly, he succeeds, not only navigating his way across a pitch-black terrain, but somehow dodging bullets and shellfire. It's crazy to think those guys/ghouls would have been out there for over 30 years and don't appear to notice a new member joining their rank and file!
Events soon take a dramatic turn when it's revealed that Dr. Proud is a furtive flesh-eater - that's right kiddies, his reason all along for embarking on the mission has been for another fix of Gamma 693 in order to prolong his life. Unable to gas-up, he starts trying to put the bite on his niece, as it's also revealed that consuming human flesh prolongs the zombies' lifespan. Fortunately, Nick arrives just-in-time to have a bit of a rough 'n' tumble with the good doctor, before Susan grabs a nozzle hoses him down with some foam (??? - right!), reducing her uncle to plastic skeleton in a beige jumper. These are the kinds of plot holes, inconsistencies, and creative (or budgetary) choices that are truly magical and become real endearing features to the ever-enduring cinephile.

There's also a bizarre and inexplicable sequence where Nick picks up a teenage-looking hooker and takes her back to his hotel room. He begins talking to her in soft, dulcet, somewhat smug tones - those familiar with Gillis' work will know exactly what I'm talking about, asking her to strip off, all the while he picks up a chair - bemused I thought "where's this possibly going?" before he sends the chair crashing against a mirror, injuring some bloke getting an eyeful on the other side. He comes stumbling through a doorway, bleeding from the face, presumably he's a rival spy, or similarly scheming malfactor, it's never adequately explained. A confounding moment which sends Night of the Zombies spiralling into the category of filmic treasures collectively known as: What The Fuck? Movies.



It's a pity Night of the Zombies is only available in the form of VHS rips, I think the poor presentation adds to the overall "incoherent, sloppy mess" quality it deftly secretes. That's not to say this is beautifully shot, well framed, or expertly executed and merely suffers just because of poor presentation; don't get me wrong, it sucks, BUT I think it would benefit from a proper scan and restoration which might alleviate a few of the gripes & woes presented to the viewer. There's an enormous amount of potential here, but it's routinely and frustratingly squandered, and in a handful of moments, I couldn't help but be just a little bit reminded of Shriek of the Mutilated (1974) and Night of the Demon (1980), two Bigfoot movies that possess the same penniless production values, and in which an expedition set off to explore a remote mountainous region and while camped out there the shit hits the fan in a big bad way. Ironically, both of those movies are shining examples of cine basura, and equally, they too achieve a certain charm and are thoroughly enjoyable in their own right.

Yeah, Jamie Gillis in a non-sex role and guess what fuckers, he shines! The usual poise, bravado, and overall self-assuredness comes off with tongue planted firmly in-cheek, it's a playful rather than grating trait, in a sort of Sherlock Holmes-y way, and it brings a certain affable charisma to his character of Nick Monroe. Gillis, busy as ever in 1981 also appeared in a small role in Bruce Malmuth/Sylvester Stallone's Nighthawks, along with 11 credits for adult films, including: The Amero Brothers' Blonde Ambition, Cecil Howard's Neon Nights, and Shaun Costello's Pandora's Mirror. The links to the adult film industry don't end there either because this, along with two other Joel M. Reed movies: Career Bed (1969) and Blood Sucking Freaks (1976), are lensed by porno cinematographer Ron Dorfman, who also appears in this as Nick's C.I.A. chief. Reed and Co. actually shot quite a number of scenes on location in Munich, Germany with the rest being shot in New York, in the home and on the property of frequent Gillis collaborator and porno mainstay, Shaun Costello.



Nazi zombies? Cool! Where? That VHS cover art primes a prospective viewer for an intense Nazi zombie nightmare, but it's surprisingly lacking in the Nazi zombie department, I think I counted a grand total of two, both in one brief scene, where you can see the shambling members of the Third Reich (see one of the images above - if your eyes can penetrate stygian gloom and make sense of the blurry, dog shit-quality of the VHS rip), and the battalion Nick infiltrates in the last 15 minutes are quite obviously US soldiers, given the fact they're sitting around bullshitting about their Parisian downtime with American accents.

Anyway, for a "zombie" film, Night of the Zombies is utterly devoid of blood and gore and it's stranger still when taking into consideration that director, Joel M. Reed, wasn't afraid of throwing the red stuff around during the production of Blood Sucking Freaks, his debauched riff on H.G. Lewis' splatterific The Wizard of Gore (1970). What does it have going for it then? It has perhaps the most obviously fake, laughably bad, plastic skeletons I've ever seen in a movie. And, although it came out several years before, I can't help but be reminded of the chemical agent "2-4-5 Trioxin" from the infinitely better, The Return of the Living Dead (1985), a kind of cool but ultimately pointless similarity I thought I would take up more of your time with by mentioning.



It's one of those unique American zombie movies, made well after Romero's revolutionary Night of the Living Dead (1968), which doesn't conform to what would become the traditional, or codified rules of zombie cinema, cemented by Romero's Dead trilogy (1968-1985). Unfortunately, it might be one of the worst examples of the genre, yet when grouped with titles like, Ken Wiederhorn's Shock Waves (1977), Jean Rollin's Zombie Lake (1980), and Jess Franco's Oasis of the Zombies (1982), together they virtually form a subgenre of their very own. Nazi zombie movies with Skid Row production values and fever dream atmospheres that are often amplified by mystifying narrative choices.
I've read that Night of the Zombies was originally released in 1979 under the title, Gamma 693, which would have been hot on the heels of Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978), but I can't find a source to truly substantiate this claim, along with it being later released again in 1981 as Night of the Wehrmacht Zombies. As a slight aside, understanding the numerous alternative titles for this are headache-inducing, since along with all the previously mentioned titles, this VHS rip is titled Night of the Zombies II, possibly billing this as a sequel to capitalise on its first release or a quick cash-in on the back of Bruno Mattei's Hell of the Living Dead / Zombie Creeping Flesh (1980), which is also known as Night of the Zombies.
In the UK, it was released on VHS for the first time in 1982 with slightly different artwork, before being re-issued the same year with that incredible Apple Video art. It was briefly re-issued again in 1986 under the title of The Chilling - not to be confused with the 1989 film of the same name by Jack A. Sunseri & Deland Nuse.

In any event, yes - the film's a dud, the direction is clumsy; the cinematography is unusually dark, as if they're attempting to mask the piss-poor production. Yet, that's not to say it isn't watchable or even enjoyable, on the contrary I've seen far worse performances in more recent, larger budgeted flix, and there's just so much fun to be had with this - whether that's at the film's expense or not is entirely up to you, but I would be an outright liar if I said I wouldn't pick up a copy of this if it appeared in a preorder announcement from the likes of Vinegar Syndrome or Severin Films in the future.

I'm loathe to use the term proto-slasher (sick emoji), but I guess Kent Bateman's (yes, Jason Bateman's old man!) The Headless Eyes falls under that jazzy banner, it's a fine example of grindhouse phlegm, and I get a real kick from its charming, grimy, low-budget splatter. Please forgive the poor quality, it was sourced from a crummy download I've had for years, and the other source lacks a title card altogether!

Jack Hill's Philippine-lensed women-in-prison flick, The Big Doll House, starring Pam Grier, Judith Brown, and Roberta Collins.

A day late, but nevertheless, this week's choice is Doris Wishman's Double Agent 73, a farcical spy caper and spiritual successor to Deadly Weapons (1974), starring Chesty Morgan.

It's been a helluva long time since I covered anything related to the living dead and I've been wanting to check this out for a number of years, so let's delve headfirst into John Hayes' drug-fuelled zombie horror, Garden of the Dead.

Starring: Phil Kenneally, Duncan McLeod, John Dullaghan, John Dennis, Marland Proctor, Susan Charney, and Virgil Frye.

Welcome to Camp Hoover, a penitentiary that's soon to be shut down, home to a chain-gang of miscreants, and appears to be nothing more than a fenced-in ranch. To break up the humdrum routine, a group of toughs get their kicks huffing fumes from a canister of formaldehyde and decide to stage a breakout later that night.

Stereotypical "good con" Paul Johnson (Marland Proctor) gets daily bittersweet visits from his woman, Carol (Susan Charney), who also catches the eye of several other prisoners. Paul later refuses to be a part of the jailbreak plot and, as a consequence, gets shivved and severely wounded by loathsome piece of shit and stereotypical "bad con", Braddock (Virgil Frye), and subsequently sits out for most of the movie.

Come nightfall Braddock and his goons escape and for all their hard-work and toil get shot dead by the warden and his guards. The scum are hastily buried in shallow, formaldehyde soaked graves, and through some inexplicable chemical reaction are revived as formaldehyde-craving zombies.



Back at the ranch errr I mean penitentiary, the remaining prisoners are subjected to an irrationally cruel punishment from the Warden for not stopping the breakout. Meanwhile, the gaggle of recently revived ghouls retain most of their faculties, can seemingly talk, and waste little time arming themselves with shovels, rakes, pickaxes, and other readily available tools to break back into the prison for another fix of formaldehyde and wreak bloody havoc upon the living! It all leads to a rather audacious finale in which arch-ghoul Braddock demands the holed-up guards to "show us the girl!" Spotting an opportunity to bring about a final solution to their undead problem the guards devise a means to ambush the lecherous horde.



Well, well, well isn't this a charming little picture, admittedly I lowered any and all expectations (one must with exploitation/drive-in movies of this calibre), but very quickly I got lost in the microcosmic world contained within Garden of the Dead. Not unlike a H.G. Lewis or Ray Dennis Steckler outing, John Hayes manages to construct something out of virtually nothing that manages to be thoroughly entertaining, and with a brisk runtime of 59 minutes, Garden of the Dead moves along at a lightning pace. Characters are mere sketches, or typical prison stereotypes; good and bad cons, warden, sympathetic guard, and a bumbling idiot for comedic relief.



One of the few outbreak/zombie movies made in the wake of Romero's game-changing Night of the Living Dead (1968) and given that in 1972, the standards, conventions, and tropes for what's expected from a zombie film were still being established, much less cemented, Garden of the Dead is very much its own beast. Unbound by any of Romero's "rules", the undead here run, cavort, and stealthily sneak attack their victims. It's made apparent that one of their weaknesses is light and unlike the near un-killable zombie we've come to expect, this horrible lot can be permanently stopped by a close-range shotgun blast.



Garden of the Dead is a horror film with a bit of an ecological/pollution bent with a chemical being the catalyst or cause for reviving the recently deceased as unstoppable marauders. There's also a drug scare angle that's quite typical of the time, in a similar vein to Brad F. Grinter's Blood Freak (1972), it's unique and ironic in the way the dead, escaped drug-addled prisoners, return to life only to break back into jail for more drugs, and mete out some vengeance upon the living along the way. I don't think the irony is lost on anybody that even in death these formaldehyde junkies are fiending for another fix!



Hayes surely gets his money's worth from the fog machine, as there's a bounty of sequences shot against a creeping fog. The cast are largely unknowns, there's even a small cameo from exploitation legend Lee Frost (seriously, when's his retrospective box set coming??), the acting is passable, the effects; horrible, yet utterly charming; Joe Blasco would later go on to do makeup work on two of the Ilsa movies: ...She Wolf of the SS (1975) & ...Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (1976), and Cronenberg's Shivers (1975) & Rabid (1977).

Taking into account that Garden of the Dead was shown as a supporting picture for John Hayes' other 1972 movie, Grave of the Vampire, it's astonishingly good, and given its extremely short runtime it never has the chance for a truly dull moment. It's a trip, just be sure to forget everything you know about zombie movies, if you went into this expecting anything groundbreaking, you would only be setting yourself up to have a bad time with it - instead, allow the images to wash over your retina like the lazy vapours of experimental formaldehyde.

Philip Marshak's surprisingly faithful XXX adaptation / send-up of Bram Stoker's Dracula. I'm surprised, if not a little disappointed, that Marshak didn't opt for the nom de porn Bram "Stroker", perhaps fears of potential litigation far out-weighed the comedy potential.

Starring: Jamie Gillis, Annette Haven, John Leslie, Serena, Reggie Nalder, Kay Parker, John Holmes, Paul Thomas and Seka.

What a cast, eh? All the hardcore heavy-weights of the '70s (literally) came together to give Stoker's seminal vampire novel the XXX treatment. I must stress though this shouldn't be confused with Shaun Costello's Dracula Exotica (1980), a completely different movie that also stars Jamie Gillis as the bloodsuckin' Count.

One of the first, and dare I say, few genuine and sincere attempts at melding horror with pornography that isn't merely played for shocks like Come Deadly (1973), Hardgore (1974), Wet Wilderness (1975) , or anything from the demented mind of Zebedy Colt.

I also meant it when I said it's a faithful adaptation of the source material, serious attention to detail went into crafting Dracula Sucks and it might also be the only adaptation of Dracula where you'll hear Van Helsing utter a suggestion for "warm water enemas" as a treatment for Dr. Seward's patients.



Count Dracula (Gillis) purchases a gothic estate, that's actually name-dropped as Carfax Abbey, next door to Dr. Seward's (Leslie) sanatorium. At the same time Richard Renfield (Richard Bulik), a kind of odd young fellow who's suffering from insomnia, gets dropped off at Seward's mental institution by his Aunt Irene (Pat Manning). During one particularly restless night Renfield is drawn towards the Abbey and after battling his way through layers of cobwebs, discovers the Count's coffin. The next day Drac swings by the asylum and is introduced to the cast, where he takes an immediate shine to Mina (Haven) and not before long the patients and staff begin suffering from symptoms of vampirism. Van Helsing (Reggie Nalder) arrives and along with Seward they realise that Count Dracula is the cause of the sickness, armed with Van Helsing's extensive knowledge, experience, and a fistful of wolfsbane, they attempt to defeat Dracula and save the beautiful Mina.



The horror elements effectively highlight the bestial nature of Count Dracula, appearing more akin to animal than man. In Dracula Sucks, the Count possesses a ruthlessly primal sexual nature; in brief sequences that are shown as a kind of composite with fire underneath and negative-image effect overlaid, except that it's red not inverted, Dracula gives Lucy (Serena) a golden shower while she's in a trance-like state, mercilessly depicting the Count's total control over his victims. The incestuous scenes between the Seward siblings is interesting too, exhibiting human deviancy that's perfectly offset against the aberrant animalistic sexuality of Dracula.

Johnathan Harker (Paul Thomas) suffers a particularly savage and sexualised death at the fangs of a recently-vamped Mina with Dracula standing by. There's a sort of subtle and demeaning sexual assault on Harker perpetrated by Dracula in the lead-up to Mina tearing-out his throat, the moment feels like an act of extremely perverse foreplay for the two vamps, with them sharing a mutual climax of orgasmic delight in Harker's degradation and eventual exsanguination.



Dracula Sucks is a really fun and debauched adaptation of horror royalty. Shot on location at Castle Ranch in Lancaster, California; where Al Adamson shot Blood of Dracula's Castle (1969), its rough rock walls and moody interior exude a believable gothic splendour. That's right kids, the production values for this here fuck film are rich, and are further aided by moody lighting, crisp photography, credible set dressing & costumes. Reggie Nalder is fantastic as Van Helsing, his distinctively gnarled, crinkly features and Austrian accent go the extra mile to really sell it.

Unfortunately, it's not without a couple of drawbacks. It suffers from choppy, uneven editing; some scenes feel like they're cut too short and the ending is particularly abrupt, gimme more Gillis & Haven! Nevertheless, there's a good time to be had with Dracula Sucks, everyone brings their A game, nothing is taken too seriously; scenery is chewed, and everyone gets to have a go with the fake vampire teeth.

The final scenes of a fully-outfitted Count Gillis & the gorgeous Annette Haven bumpin' uglies in Dracula's cobweb-strewn love nest is an exercise in grand, expertly lensed erotica. If you're gonna do it right, it has to look like this.



And... for the primo sleazo crowd, there's an alternative version retitled as Lust At First Bite, it's a reordered edit using alternate footage and substituting storytelling, along with scenes of violence & death, for more hardcore footage and an alternate ending, so if that's your preference, that'll be version for you. Adding a smidge confusion to the mix, there's another film, Dracula's Bride (1980), that's believed to be put together by William Margold, I've not been able to successfully track this down so I can't comment for sure whether or not it's an original production or spliced together with footage from Dracula Sucks!