“Garden of the Dead” (1974) directed by John Hayes.
(MF Title: “That’s the sound of the men, turning into zom-m-bies..”)
Starring Duncan McLeod, Lee Frost, John Dennis and Susan Charney.
Zombie Film Rating:

Overview: Welcome to Camp Hoover (Yes, the less well known invention of the vacuum guy). A sordid little prison camp facing imminent closure, filled with cliched characters and coincidentally about to be overrun by the undead.

It seems that a sizeable portion of the formaldehyde addicted (yes, you read that right) inmate population has concocted an escape plan. Naturally their effort (due to said Formaldehyde dependancy) goes wrong, and the inmates are killed by movie cliche #760, the tyranical and charisma deficient warden.

Who knew that exposure to formaldehyde causes dead bodies to rise from the grave seeking revenge?

Summary: As the movie opens we’re given our first view of “Camp Hoover” a prison work camp made entirely out of chicken wire and balsa wood. Facing closure by the state (we can only assume someone in the state legislature came across a scientific article about the benefits of a new material called “concrete”), a small group of convicts take a break from their formaldehyde sniffing and decide that this is the moment to put their escape plan into action.

They sneak out to the formaldehyde tanks and escape through a tunnel (unlike normal tunnels this one runs horizontally above ground, and not underground like those dumb conventional tunnels). Their stealthy egress is ruined by one of the prisoners accidentally discharging a shotgun taken from an overpowered guard.

The warden (you can tell he’s the warden, he’s wearing a black suit and gloves) gathers the majority of his guards and pursues the escapees (who have now stolen a truck) in a short car chase. The guards then shoot every escapee dead to teach them a lesson.

The warden returns to the camp, leaving a guard and a few prisoners to bury the dead escapees. The warden punishes the bunkmates of the escapees by chaining them up in the prison yard while the burial detail is quickly eaten by the reanimated bodies of the escapees. The zombie prisoners then have a short meeting, grab some tools and attack some trailer park residents (for no clear reason) including the wife of one of the “good” inmates at the camp.

She escapes, and flees to the camp followed by the zombies. We have a few minutes of bickering between the guards and the warden before the zombies arrive and breach the fenceline without effort. They head straight for the formaldehyde getting themselves a quick fix.

They then begin an inexplicably slow, and entirely unsuspenseful assault on the guards and remaining prisoners who set aside their differences and band together against the common undead enemy. They then kill the undead enemy with shotguns.

Critique: An incredibly low budget film, one of its best attributes is its short run time. There are no special effects to speak of, the make-up is BAD, the sets are laughable and the acting is consistently horrible. It’s really a typical zombie film.

That said at least the film has no pretensions, and delivers pretty much exactly what I expected from it, a low budget zombie movie.

The Final Word: Worth seeing if you’re absolutely desperate for zombie content, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to see this. It just doesn’t feel like a zombie movie.