Here's a real goodie! One day, I'll get around to doing a proper write-up for this sleazy creature feature, until then...

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.

Hot off the back of a recent viewing, Eddie Romero's Filipino-lensed Black Mama White Mama is a terrific adventure with Pam Grier & Margaret Markov; a prostitute and revolutionary, butting heads and causing havoc as two opposing women forced to work together!

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.

Been a while since I kept this rolling, so here's the first one of year! An early Bill Lustig outing starring Sharon Mitchell & Jamie Gillis, and don't let the title fool ya, this ain't a roughie!

I've had a really boring day, so here's an equally boring title card to match.

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!