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.