Welcome to Zombie Strains, the podcast that watches all the zombie movies we can stomach.

Today, our zombie movie is set in a prison where the prisoners are getting restless.

“Then we're gonna crawl through the tunnel to the bushes on the other side of the fence. And it's just a short walk to the loading depot.”

But the prisoners have a bad habit of sniffing a dangerous substance. What could go wrong, right? It's the Talking Zombies of 1972's Garden of the Dead.

You know, I've seen people act like that in pictures. What do they call them, zombies or something?

Zombie.

Zombie?

What's a zombie?

Well a zombie…there’s um... ...Mr. Bill there’s... ...the living dead.

They are the living dead.

Get me the zombies!

Against an army of zombies, no armies could stand!

The unburied dead are coming back to life and seeking human victims.

I’ve seen the dead rise.

Kill the brain, and you kill the ghoul.

Welcome to Zombie Strains, I'm John.

I'm Andy.

And I'm Brad.

Hello everybody, how are you doing? Did you enjoy our zombie movie set in a prison today?

Who else thinks this should have been the movie they showed to teenagers to scare them straight back in school?

Instead of scared straight, yeah.

Yeah, you know, not a bad idea. I swear I recognize the warden in this movie, I suppose we'll get to that in just a second. So I don't know about any zombie-related news, two quick stories to fill you guys in on. So I told my wife that I was going to watch Garden of the Dead as my zombie movie, which she laughed at. And then the next morning we were chatting. And I'm like, oh, I should watch on Saturday morning. I'm like, I should watch this. I think I'll watch the movie in the morning. And she said, you mean zombies in the garden? And I said, I said no, but that's a much better title than Garden of the Dead. So all right, well, I guess we'll talk about Garden of the Dead then. Producer Brad, tell us about this very short movie.

Did you guys enjoy the shortness?

You know, I enjoyed the movie more because it was shorter, because if they had stretched this same story out for another half hour, I think it would have been a lot less fun personally.

Oh, imagine this, but an hour and a half. Right, that is, that will scare us.

Yes, though I have, I would like to defend this movie in a couple of ways, but we'll get to that as we go.

I have no idea what you're going, how you're going to do that, but I look forward to learning.

Okay, well, Garden of the Dead was released on September 15th, 1972. It was a limited run with Grave of the Vampire, another film directed by the same director, John Hayes. That film was better known mostly for the writer, David Chase, who wrote the screenplay, and David Chase is the creator of The Sopranos.

Oh, okay.

Oh, whoa. Okay.

John Hayes began his film career directing short films and received an Academy Award nomination for his 1959 short, The Kiss.

All right.

I'm waiting for a surprise and shock.

Well, yeah. I mean, nothing surprises me anymore, Producer Brad.

Okay, fair enough. In the 60s, he started making low-budget, full-length films, and three of his early films starred a young Ru McClanahan, best known as Blanche, from The Golden Girls.

Oh, yeah. Okay.

And the Internet says that he asked her to marry him, and she declined. Hayes' films veered into exploitation in the later 60s, and in the 70s, he added horror films to his filmography. Jack Matcha wrote the screenplay. He has only two other credits, one episode of The Love Boat and one episode of Good Times.

Oh, Good Times.

I've never even heard of Good Times. What is that? Really?

It was a spinoff from the TV show Mod.

Yes. Yeah.

Joe Blasco did the makeup. He had a long career and is a well-known makeup artist who was very influential. He worked on two David Cronenberg films, Shivers and Rabid. He worked on The Newlywed Game, also She-Wolf of the SS, and is credited as the originator of The Bladder Effect, and then also ran a successful makeup school that trained many other professional artists.

And The Bladder Effect is like when you're shooting the blob, and like it undulates and like bursts.

Like the skin pulses. Yeah.

Oh, interesting.

Paul Hipp was the cinematographer. He has over 46 credits from exploitation films to network TV. But the credit that jumps out at me is the 1980 film The Boogans. Do you guys remember that?

I don't.

No.

There's a horror film about a town that has mining tunnels underneath that have been closed since decades prior accident. And they go to open them up and there's something down there.

Is it any good?

I haven't seen it since like 1981. So I don't know. I just remember the name The Boogans.

Okay.

Yeah. It's kind of a funny name.

Is it the Cornish tin mines that are under the town?

Yeah. We only do Cornish tin mines here, producer Brad.

True. But he also did another film that I just have to tell you about. It's a 1972 film called Traitor Horn. And horn is spelled H-O-R-N-E-E.

Okay.

And I'm just going to read the IMDB description. A private detective journeys to Africa to find a legendary white guerrilla. The guerrilla turns out to be an escaped Nazi war criminal. And what other fact am I going to tell you about the guerrilla?

It's a Corrigan suit.

It's a Corrigan suit. At least the internet says it is. I was trying to back that up, but I'll go with it for now.

Nice.

That's incredible.

Now, this film was shot in Topanga Canyon near Los Angeles, so the cast is full of Hollywood actors, unlike recent low-budget films from Florida we have watched. Philip Keneally played the warden. He was a character actor who worked on many TV shows through the 70s.

I'm playing a lot of villains, I presume. Like, I just, he just looked super familiar to me.

He's, well, he's got that hard look.

Yeah, yeah.

Kind of like, I can't remember the name of the gangster from The Godfather 2. He has a look of one of those guys with that sort of dark, sort of frizzy hair.

Yes, exactly. And he was in The Rockford Files, which, you know, if you haven't ever watched The Rockford Files, do yourself a favor. I'll probably say that 10 more times in the 70s.

Was he a recurring character in The Rockford Files?

His parts are all one-off, so he was a character actor who got one part and then went on to the next show.

Yeah, you know what's fun about The Rockford Files is you can see a lot of actors, if you're a Gen Xer, you can see a lot of actors that became famous later in the 80s getting their first roles in The Rockford Files. Like Tom Selleck is an episode of The Rockford Files before he was anybody. So there's a lot of stuff like that. That's pretty fun.

How do you feel about the new Rockford Files coming out?

I don't know anything about it because the first one was so perfect. Like maybe it's good. I don't know, but I don't know that I need another Rockford Files when I already have the best one. So I'm open, I guess.

All right. Carmen Philpe played Nolan, the prisoner who during the prison break trips and shoots the shotgun. He worked nonstop after Garden of the Dead on mostly TV shows and became a successful character actor. His best known role is as Hobo Jack from Pee Wee Herman's Big Adventure. He's the guy Pee Wee meets in the boxcar who starts singing.

Oh, that's awesome.

Lee Frost plays McGee, the sympathetic guard who lets Johnson leave the compound to have a moment with Carol. Frost has very few acting credits, but he directed over 30 movies, mostly exploitation films. He did direct a film that I think you've heard of, The Thing with Two Heads, that starred Ray Milan, whose head is transplanted onto Rosie Greer's body.

I remember hearing about that film, but have never watched it.

I've never seen it too, but I've seen the poster. Like Ray Milan's character is supposedly horribly racist, and his body's failing him, so they take his head and put it on the shoulder of Rosie Greer, who's black, a former football player, in prison. And so the two heads live side by side on the same shoulders.

I'm trying to decide if that movie could at least be said to have its heart in the right place or not.

I don't know.

Suzanne Charney played Carol. She worked steadily in the 70s on all the popular TV shows. So basically, this is a film that has a lot of actors who you don't know, you may have seen, but who just worked and worked and worked, and they ended up on this 59-minute zombie film shot in Topanga Canyon.

It's a movie with only that guys.

Yes.

Yeah, but I'm not sure there are that guys that you would recognize. I didn't recognize the guys, the hobo from Pee-wee. I noticed it in his credits. I go, oh. Yeah. So I guess they're so good, they're not recognizable, which is also a good trade for an actor.

It is. Though some of that guys have made... In the 80s, there were that guys that had a very specific style and would play the same part over and over, and they were like, like What's-his-face from The Breakfast Club, who always played a jerk, the principal. Like you would recognize him, but he always plays that sort of same character. You know, whereas these people are playing really different characters from time to time.

So the 80s were peak time for jerk boss type characters. So this Warden would be perfect. But you know, how many like, how many sleazy CEOs and jerk bosses and angry principals did we watch in the 80s?

Famously, what was the other one from?

William Atherton.

Yes.

What was he? From Ghostbusters and Real Genius and Die Hard.

The EPA director from Ghostbusters? Okay, yeah, he's great.

Yeah, that's the one I was thinking of actually. Yeah, he's everywhere.

My favorite part of his is from Real Genius though, where he plays the professors taking credit from Val Kilmer.

Yes.

Do you remember that film? I do remember that film. Great film.

It is a great film.

I have not seen that since, I mean, in probably 35 years.

You know what? It holds up a lot better than other comedies because it actually has a pretty big heart, and the main character is like a kid. So a lot of the comedy, I mean, no comedies age that well, but it ages less badly than others, I think.

Okay.

Yeah. Well, that's what I have, Andy. You want to take it from here?

Yeah. You know, it is tempting to do some sort of deep dive into the prison industrial complex in the 70s for this movie, but I decided after watching this movie that I was not going to be doing that. So let's start out, John. So I'm leading the show discussion today, so why don't you take like 30 seconds to give us an overview of this movie?

All right. So this movie is set in a prison. It's a rural prison. So it's like a barbed wire fenced prison set in the middle of nowhere with bunk houses and a house for the warden. Even the guards live within the prison. And you find out early on that the prison is going to close down. However, they're going to complete their work, which is to ship Formaldehyde from the prison to other places. It's a little unclear where the Formaldehyde comes from or where it's going to, but that's not important. In any case, there's a division between the prisoners. Some are trying to escape, and those prisoners are also addicted to Formaldehyde. They attempt an escape, get shot, are buried near the prison, and come back as vengeful zombies who then assault the prison, killing most but not all of our protagonists. In the end, they manage, they figure out a way to eliminate the zombies, and the people who are left alive live happily ever after. How's that?

Stirring, touching. This movie is set in a prison. I guess it's somewhat clear from there's fences and stuff, but the prison, there's all these signs telling you that it's a prison and warning you away, but the signs are written in such a bad font. I couldn't understand them. Did you guys have this trouble?

Yeah, it was incredible.

All right, well, let's jump in.

But I think that brings up something else, that this film, there isn't a good quality out there. It hasn't been re-scanned. In fact, when I went to the AFI website to research this, they complained about how hard it is to read the credits because they watch the crappy copy too. Yeah. So it's hard to tell sometimes what's going on on screen.

Yeah, so the opening credits are just over a still photo of the prison yard that's on a normal day, but they're red and they blur so badly that you can't actually read many of them during the intro.

So yeah, let's start there because really nothing sets you up for thrills and chills like a two-minute still photo of a construction yard while the credits play over it. So we get the credits and we come to understand that we are in a prison out in the boondocks somewhere. There's no, I couldn't pick up like a regional accent, so there's no like southern accent or anything. Anyone want to take a stab where this is supposed to be taking place?

I mean, I think it's supposed to be taking place like in the desert of California. Like I think it's just that simple. But I don't know, maybe it's, you know, Colorado or something.

There's more greenery than I would have expected from that, but who knows, right? So I mean, where we are is we're in a back lot in Hollywood or something.

Topanga Canyon.

It's actually outside. Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of things have been shot in Topanga Canyon.

Yeah. So our first introduction to this prison is seeing all the prisoners. I thought they were workers at first, but their prisoners are loading barrels of formaldehyde, big industrial barrels, the kind that, you know, evil companies put toxic sludge into are being loaded onto trucks.

Yeah. We'll see the barrels. The barrels are recurring theme, especially in the 70s and 80s when there's a lot of environmental panic. I think we saw them in Teenage Zombies.

It was that...

Zombies on the Beach. What was that one?

Strange Invasion.

The Horror at Artie Beach.

Oh yeah. Horror at Artie Beach.

This is the second film to have barrels in.

Yes. And we'll see them. I don't know if we're gonna... I don't think we're gonna watch the first Chud, but I think there are barrels involved there. I just remember a lot of 70s and 80s movies with barrels of toxic waste leading to outbreaks of various mutated creatures.

Yeah. This type of barrel just is a stand-in for toxic waste and pollution.

Yeah.

You know, presumably they're used to... Presumably, they have a mundane use that isn't a hostile to all human life.

I believe there are oil barrels normally.

But, you know, yeah, exactly.

Have you seen one in person in real life?

I'm sure I have. In a construction site or something.

But I've only heard of them being used to store toxic sludge or where like cartels put your dead body or something.

You know where I saw one? My sister and I got in trouble with one of her friends. So the neighborhood Brad and I grew up in, it was actually a construction site. It was new construction and there was a barrel like this on one of the sites.

Just so you know, you are describing in exact detail the opening to Strange Invasion.

Oh, all right.

Where the kids played in a construction. Yes, that's right.

So my life was essentially that. But what my sister and I did, there was like a bag of concrete and it had rained, and one of the barrels was kind of half full of rain. So we put the concrete in it and we made a giant concrete block and we got in trouble.

As you should have.

That's my riveting story about one of these barrels. So the answer is yes, producer Brad.

John, you were out of control.

John, which construction site?

It was right next to, it was in my cul-de-sac. So it would have been.

So it was right in your closet. Yeah.

That was my first mistake is doing misdeeds right next to my house. That maybe wasn't the best idea.

Your mom could see you from the front porch. Exactly.

So listeners, your challenge for today is, listen to this episode and then write in and say, was that more interesting than the plot of this movie?

All right. So this is the first, I just want to defend one thing about this movie, Andy.

Okay. I'm coming in a little harsh on this one.

Well, let me abstract it a little bit. Here's our premise, not necessarily our plot. Prisoners who are forced to do unsafe manual labor are killed while escaping and come back to the prison as zombies to seek revenge. Like as a premise, I actually think that's pretty good. Like that premise could be a good movie.

Yeah. Is that fair?

You're not wrong. Yeah. That's fair. All right. But hey, so let's hold on the formaldehyde. The formaldehyde requires us to stop and discuss.

Yeah, a long discussion, yes.

For another minute or two before we get there. So we meet our kind of cast of characters. I never really got to know whose name went with which character. They set up a few people here at the beginning that you think are gonna be your traditional protagonists, but then nobody in this movie really rises quite to the level of hero, like a protagonist.

And it keeps switching. So early on, it's like this one prisoner who maybe is the nice prisoner who's gonna get out and see his lady and...

Johnson.

Johnson. And then later, it's the guard Jablonski. Like I think there's a couple, like different parts of the movie have different people who are leading the protagonist team, I guess.

So we get some shots just establishing kind of the routine of the prisoners in this formaldehyde processing place, whatever it is. So you know what? I'm looking at my notes, and we actually do need to talk about formaldehyde now, because what, John, do some of the prisoners sneak off during their lunch break to do?

They sniff formaldehyde gas, like straight out of a hose. I don't know. So and it supposedly gets them high.

Oh, yeah. They like get all giddy.

They get giddy. And they're grinning like fools.

Later somebody comments that it's made them into a bunch of, you know, idiots or something because they're sniffing all the formaldehyde. So do you want to start on the problems with this, or would you like me to start?

Oh, sure. I suspect we both went down a formaldehyde rabbit trail.

So tell you what, let me do a small one first. So the first time we see the formaldehyde processing center or whatever shack, it's the warden, the doctor and a guard. And the doctor is standing in the middle of a bunch of formaldehyde smoke and he lights a pipe. So the first thing I like to say is formaldehyde, concentrate formaldehyde gas is extremely flammable. So that's my first criticism of formaldehyde in this movie. I thought I'd let you have the next one about its properties to get you intoxicated, but I wanted to throw that one out there.

That's rather delightful. So let's talk formaldehyde everyone. So I don't know what they're doing here with the formaldehyde. I don't either. Formaldehyde does occur in nature, but not in a form or in quantices sufficient that you could be harvesting it. It's manufactured industrially. And so I'm just not really sure what they're supposed to be doing. I mean, I realized the movie doesn't care, and it's a little dumb of me to care. But John, I mean, in your research, you probably Googled something. I mean, now I'm on a watch list, but you probably Googled, Can You Get High Sniffing Formaldehyde?

That's almost exactly what I Googled.

Did you want to tell us what you learned?

Actually, the answer I got was great, but I didn't dig further. And in retrospect, I should have. It said, not by itself. So I'm like, so I'm like, well, and now it occurs to me I should have dug deeper, and been like, well, what could you do with it?

So what I learned is that formaldehyde is toxic, and it would be extremely unpleasant to inhale in any quantity. It would be like inhaling, getting a mouthful of mace or something like that. It's toxic. Long-term, it would give you cancer. In the immediate term, it would severely stain your eyes and your throat and make you start coughing and retching. It wouldn't produce the state of euphoric bliss that these prisoners enjoy. So I did do a little bit more digging of, is there like an urban legend about formaldehyde or something that would have prompted it to be in this movie? So remember, we're in the 70s, drugs are coming to your cities and the kids are always getting hooked on some new drug you've never heard of. So I just was curious if formaldehyde had some sort of a representation in the big laundry list of drugs that kids were experimenting with in the late 60s and 70s. And the answer is no, but there is... I can't confirm this, so I just found this on the internet. So the internet tells me that in the 70s, some street drug dealers began dipping cigarettes or joints in liquid PCP and other substances, which included, and so they were dipping them in anesthetics that would produce like an extra intense experience of like hallucination or numbness. And so it's possible that somebody made that leap from they're dipping the drugs in anesthetics to they're dipping it in formaldehyde.

I suppose.

I mean, maybe. And then I also heard... This sounds fake to me. I've got this off the internet. The internet tells me that dealers and users sometimes, in some areas, colloquially referred to liquid PCP as quote embalming fluid.

Oh, okay.

So, I mean, that sounds fake to me, but because, I mean, what kind of cool... Can you picture a bunch of cool hip cats or whatever discussing their drug slang and calling it embalming fluid? I don't know.

Probably not. But that leads me to two things. Two things I want to say. So first of all, they don't call PCP PCP anymore. And in fact, I was at the doctor a couple of years ago, and they said, well, you should probably talk to your PCP. And I was like, what are you talking about? And so now it stands for primary care physician. So there you go. There's that.

Yeah. So just to clarify, in the 70s, they dipped it into the chemical, what is it? Phencyclidine, something like that. They didn't dip it into your primary care physician.

No, they didn't. Go ahead. But no, I remember, there's a line in Terminator about his priorities. Mine is PCP, it didn't feel a thing or something. It was just what we called a random drug at that time. But the other thing is, so this explains, though, I think the movie is making a leap here, right? Like formaldehyde is a preservation agent, like in a lab, whenever we've seen a heart in a jar, one of our favorite things, and it's surrounded by fluid, we're presuming that's formaldehyde, because you would use that to preserve it. But I think they're making a leap here between formaldehyde and embalming fluid, because they want to have an excuse to have the zombies be preserved and come back later, right? I mean, that's what I thought.

I think that that is what they are trying to riff off of.

Yes, so it worked, I guess, in a sense, because I figured it out.

But are you sure that no cool kid at school ever cornered you and was like, hey John, hey Brad, you guys want a hit of embalming fluid, and maybe held up a beaker and sloshed some liquid around it?

No, they didn't.

Okay, well, that's what our prisoners here, and that's the end of this rabbit trail. That's what our prisoners here are getting high on.

Can we talk a moment about what it looks like when they sniff it? Because I thought it actually looked kind of cool. Yeah, it's like, all right, you boys, you guys were so disappointed by this. Well, the smoke coming out of the hose that they're sniffing is thick, but it's not smoky. It's sort of like cotton-like. I don't know, there's a viscosity to it that was really interesting.

Yeah, and they do kind of love it. They're really hamming it up.

I will give you that. I will say that I don't know what color, like a big barrel of formaldehyde would be. Here, they're clearly using just water or something. I think if you're doing a cheap horror movie and people are guzzling and later immersing themselves in formaldehyde, you got to make that green.

Come on.

Fair enough.

Well, Richard Helmer is credited as the special effects person for Garden of the Dead. He went on to a pretty big career. He worked on Apocalypse Now, Armageddon, Fury with Brad Pitt, Sky Captain in the World of Tomorrow. And a lot of his credits are as a pyrotechnician, which means he would do the practical effects that you would see on set, not effects that were digital and added later.

Yeah, there's a lot of smoke in Apocalypse Now, so.

Well, we can move along here. We learned in that scene where the prisoners are all getting high, that they are also planning an escape that very night.

Yes.

Led by Braddock.

Yes. Braddock is their ringleader. We're gonna find out he's a total jerk that is hated even by the other prisoners. Yeah.

I do want to point out, though, that we also get a speech from the warden here, who's like, oh, they're closing us down because my tough-as-nails, hard-ass method of treating prisoners is no longer acceptable, which I think is actually slightly relevant.

Yeah. Hang on to that thought. I think it's gonna come back in our wrap-up discussion, John. So we do meet our final... So we have met a couple of characters here are gonna recur. We have the warden, who's that tough-as-nails jerk. We have a couple of prisoners who are dangled to us as possible heroes, but none of them really are. We have a Dr. Saunders, who, I guess, shows up to...

An explosion in a formaldehyde shack, even though he lit his pipe, that's Dr. Saunders.

I guess, you know, he's the local physician. He makes his rounds later. We'll see him making his rounds and visiting somebody else. And then we meet the only woman in this movie, and that is Carol. Carol, we have a little scene, right, it's actually quite a long scene, a long scene where Carol drives up to the prison in a waitress uniform.

In a 1968 Ford Galaxy.

Okay.

Sorry, Ford Galaxy 500, carry on.

I have some car questions for you, John, a little bit later. I hope you did some more research.

Yes, and I think I even have the tab still open, so.

Okay, perfect. This is Carol. She's here to see her boyfriend, Paul, who's one of the prisoners. Do we ever find out what Paul did?

No.

Okay. Well, I assume since she loves him that it was something really innocuous. But anyway, here's, he's here in hard labor. She's here because she's sad, because she's heard that the prison's gonna be shut down and all the prisoners are gonna be dispersed to other prisons. So they have a tearful little moment where they hug and kiss. And there's a nice guard that Brad mentioned, I think, who lets them hug and kiss for exactly one minute and then starts yelling at them. And that is everyone who's gonna be in this movie. So I did kind of laugh. Did you guys notice, so Carol is talking, while Carol is talking to Paul, her boyfriend, she's talking about like this terrible waitress job that she has. And basically there's a sense that like she's really given up a lot to stick with Paul during his imprisonment. And at one point she complains about, that on her job, she complains about being fed felt up by salesmen and truck drivers. There's this pause and then she emphasizes the truck drivers. It's like as if everyone in the theater would like a chill would pass through them at that time. So anyway, sick burn on truck drivers.

And salespeople, let's be honest.

Yeah, I should have put a trigger warning for that at the beginning of this episode. Anyway, all right, well, that prologues out of the way and we can get to the meat of the movie. Because later that night, the prisoners are gathering and are planning an escape. That's right. John, you already mentioned that we've met the ringleader Braddock. He's like the most evil prisoner. Yeah. And he is kind of ordering everyone around. I didn't completely understand what was happening in the scene, but my sense is he's basically saying, look, if you're not gonna be in the group that escapes with us tonight, you better keep your mouth shut. That's right. And to make his point, Paul is being a little bit wishy-washy about whether he's gonna participate in the escape or whether he's gonna keep his mouth shut, because he's got that girlfriend he cares about, and he doesn't want to ruin his future, right? So Braddock makes an object lesson out of Paul by stabbing him. And then I thought Paul was gonna end up being our hero in this movie, but he actually is just lying in a bed for the rest of the film, and we hardly see it.

Yeah, he's not killed.

So it is implied by one of the other prisoners that Braddock has maybe been intentionally encouraging some of the prisoners to get addicted to the formaldehyde so that they would be useful idiots to command. Is that?

Makes them dumb, and therefore you can sort of order them around. That's the impression I got.

Okay. So the breakout begins. John, do you want to describe the breakout?

Yeah, so they've dug a tunnel, and they keep working on the tunnel. And the tunnel's actually in the formaldehyde shack, which seems like a bad spot for it, but that's okay. So, they climb out with sacks. I'm not sure what the sacks are for, and a rope. All of this is a little mysterious. But they end up on the other side of the fence near the bushes. But to start the breakout, the first thing they do is they assault a guard, kill him, and take his shotgun.

Yes.

And this is the guard who was nice to Johnson.

That's right. Yes.

McGee.

Did you guys shed a tear when this guy died?

I thought it was a little unfair, but I did not shed an actual tear.

I couldn't tell from the visual quality of this film that this was the nice guard, so I didn't feel that.

I couldn't tell you that it was a guard who went down.

Can we stop and talk about this for a second? So a lot of this film is shot for night, and I think at least a dozen times, I've made a smart remark about how fake movies that do day for night, how fake they look because they're not shot at night. So this movie is the counterpoint to that argument, where they shoot a movie at night, and you cannot see a thing for half the movie. This does have some small good effects of like having zombies appear out of nowhere and that kind of thing, and that's good. But largely like they're shooting at night with sort of one-directional light, and you sort of can't see anyone or know where they are or anything, and that's kind of a problem. So maybe I should take back what I said about all that day for night shooting.

So yes, the escape is underway, and on the way, one of the prisoners screws up. He trips and he accidentally lets a shot off with the shotgun. That's right. Which alerts the guards back at the prison that something's going on. All of the guards assemble and they jump into a police car and a truck, and they head out to run down the escapees. That's right. So here's where I had a couple car questions. John, do you want to tell us what we're dealing with here?

Yeah. So the police car is actually a 1972 Plymouth satellite. The prisoners, one of the trucks, the big truck they're using is an old one. It's a Chevy Task Force 440. The other truck that they actually escape in though, is a 1969 Ford F-350, so.

Okay. Well, my question is, this car, the police car they have, I love the aesthetic of the 1970s cop show police car.

Yes.

And can you tell me, like, is there, so what I have in mind is like these cars, they're really, they look really long and flat.

Yeah, the Galaxy 500 also looks like that earlier in this movie.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. They have like these enormous hoods that the must, like the, there must be like six feet of car in front of the driver on these. And they have big trunks as well.

Yes. And there's also, they have this trailing, like the top of the car, the canopy, sort of, rather than being sort of a sharp angle or something, it trails. It's like a, it's like a shallow angle that trails towards the trunk. So it also looks, makes the car look longer and lower.

Yeah. Yeah, it does. It looks really long and low. And whenever I see these cars, I always think like when you're, it must be so easy to clip stuff when you're taking turns because your car extends so far out in front of and behind your wheels.

Yes.

But, so what is the iconic 70s cop car, John?

It's glossy black on the hood and the backside and gloss white on the door, on the drive, on the forward doors and the roof. And then, then any printing that needs to be on it is, is on the white door. Actually the city of Ann Arbor has a car, just one police car painted like this, except for it's dark navy blue and white, but it's the same principle. They've tried to sort of recreate that aesthetic. Also, it's a Ford Explorer, not an Explorer Expedition, so.

And I think the model that you're asking for is like the Dodge Monaco is one of the common ones, as well as the Ford Gran Torino.

Yes.

Okay. All right. Well, that was, I just love the look of those cars.

They're the cars that led us to all the small Japanese cars that we enjoy today. With these cars, they got seven miles to the gallon. We'd still be driving Gran Torinos, but now we drive Corollas.

I assume these are hideously unsafe, but if you have a head-on collision, whatever you hit has to travel through a huge amount of car to get to you, the driver. So I would like to think you had some crude safety in the bulk of your car.

Safety through superior firepower in your car.

And not to go too far down this, but the Blues Brothers, the Blues Mobile was a 1974 Dodge Monaco. Perfect, as a reference point.

All right, well, that car that John mentioned earlier does successfully manage to run down the escaping prisoners. So they're shooting each other.

Well, they're not shooting each other. Can I tell you what's happening is the warden and the guards don't even like shout, stop. They just open fire like bam, bam, bam, bam. So this is how old school the warden is. You're not even offered a chance to escape my prison. You don't even get a chance to surrender. You're just dead.

This is the era where the sentence for any sort of crime was just dead.

Yes, exactly.

There is no process had to be gone through before they decided to use lethal force. It was like, did you just steal a necklace from that store?

Yeah, I just robbed a grocery store.

What are you doing?

Yeah.

Anything could happen to you.

That's right.

I don't want to just rip on the quality of this film, but I did note that the car chase was particularly poorly shot.

And very short.

So they run the prisoners off, and then they have this shootout, and all of the prisoners are shot and killed, except for one who is shot, lingers for a couple of days and dies later, we're going to learn. Right. And like one or two cops are shot, I think, but so we then skip back to the prison. It's a couple of days later, and our furious warden is shackling up all of the prisoners who are still back there, who he thinks knew about the escape and didn't tell him. He's shackling them up outside at night in the prison yard on these like really old school torture looking shackles.

Yeah, and he tells them they have to be out there for three days.

I actually have an audio clip for this. So let's hear in the warden's own words, what he's doing and why he's doing it.

Brad Elk lived in agonizing pain 48 hours longer than the rest of them. He too shall be tossed into a shallow unmarked grave without dignity as they were. Well, the same thing goes for any of you who attempt to escape from this camp or any other camp you're transferred to. You six men knew of the escape and yet you said nothing. You shall remain here for three days on bread and water. This sort of punishment was outlawed years ago, Warden. You shall stay here for four days, Mitchell. And I shall have one additional day for every word I hear from any of you. Officer McGee was murdered because you chose to say nothing.

Yeah, a couple of things here.

First, he says shall a lot, which is, I don't know, it's...

I think it's supposed to be kind of biblical, right? Because he's in old school. He's bringing down the...

Hold on, hold on.

Welcome to Andy's Chronicles.

Yes, please carry on, Andy.

Okay. I actually don't have a point about this, but I initially thought it contrasted with the sort of brutal cruelty of his words. But John has made me think that maybe this was meant to kind of call to mind like a ranting old school preacher calling down hell and brimstone.

He dresses in all black with sort of pointy cowboy boots. He's got a very old school preacher vibe to him. But also what I find interesting here is this reminds me of the principal from the breakfast club where Joe Nelson can't shut up, so he keeps giving him another day of detention and another one. Yeah, so exact same kind of thing.

Now, listeners, if you thought that a bunch of prisoners being chained up in the yard in a zombie movie was going to produce a really awesome tense scene where they're still chained up and the zombies are running around, you are incorrect, but I applaud your hope.

It does produce a scene.

It does produce a scene. It is not, yes. But we really immediately, the movie now, we have the stages set, and the movie immediately does not waste any more time getting to its premise. So John, we skip back to where all of those dead prisoners are being buried in the aforementioned shallow graves, and these are very shallow graves.

You mean the garden?

The garden, yeah. You know, no one, no one.

They could have made a bigger deal of that.

They could have made a bigger deal. No one says garden. I mean, Garden of the Dead is a pretty good title that is kind of wasted on what they do with it.

But not as good as Zombies in the Garden, just to say.

So John, this is the scene where we meet our zombies. So why don't you explain what happens?

So they're burying them in this thick fog rolls in, which I presume is like formaldehyde smoke or something. It's very unclear. And as they're doing this, an arm reaches out of the ground and grabs one of the prisoners who's doing the burying. And then the zombies emerge, they sort of lean forward out of the dirt. Like when they said shallow graves, they meant like three inches of dirt over them. And so they like lean up and they are, they're still wearing their prison uniforms. They have on like gray face paint with large blackout eyes. And that's about it. Like there's not that much to them at this point. You know what I mean?

There is one nice moment that I appreciated, and that is when one of the hand pushes up and grabs one of the grave diggers by the, grabs his leg. And instead of screaming theatrically or starting to shout or whatever, he looks frozen like he doesn't know what's happening. And I thought that was kind of nice because some people would react to this completely incongruous chain of events with just like, just be, would be frozen still, I think.

Yes. And then his, the other guy who's helping him dig graves flees immediately.

Oh, I love that. As soon as there's trouble, the one guy's just like, yep, I'm not here. But he doesn't get very far the zombies corner and kill them.

Yes.

And I have an audio clip. And then I want to talk a little bit more about how the zombies kill. So let's hear an audio clip of the zombies so you can hear them.

We must have the liquid back of the can. We will destroy the living.

So, I mean, I'm sure you have a point to make, but these zombies both have some intelligence and are seeking vengeance very specifically on the prison and the leaders of the prison.

Yes. So these are the rare zombie in the zombie movies we've watched over the decades that can speak. They retain, I would say, and we're about to see they retain not just like a rudimentary base level of intelligence, but they are mostly fully human intelligence.

But without impulse control, they're like raging creatures, but with intelligence.

So they have two goals. One is to get the liquid, the formaldehyde, back at camp. And I don't know why they need to just quote destroy the living, but-

Well, there may have.

But, well, so here they want revenge on the prison guards and stuff. And I think it is interesting when the idea of the dead returning and inexplicably wanting to kill everyone who's alive, I think that is an interesting idea and a scary one. It suggests that they know something or they're motivated by something that they experienced while being dead that has made them return. And the only thing they want to do now is kill everything. I think that's kind of interesting and a little scary. Yeah. This movie isn't the movie that's gonna explore that. But I also wanted to say, so they kill by strangling at the beginning here, they strangle you. And that is because they retain their human intelligence and they know what a human's vulnerabilities are. I am curious though, modern zombies do not kill you in like smart ways, right? They just claw at you generally. You're walking dead type zombies.

Yeah, they're sort of like unstoppable machines, right? Even if they have to go through molten lava, they'll just move towards you and try to kill you.

Yeah. And like they can't target the vulnerable points of your body, like your throat or something, right? They just grab you and they try and tear at you and bite you until you die. And so I'm just curious where many, many of the zombies we have seen kill in a human way, right? In a methodical way to suggest they know. Strangling is a really common way of killing for a zombie to kill its victims in the movies we've watched. I'm just curious when that goes away. And zombies really become feral, like truly feral entities, but not here.

But these zombies are fast moving zombies who will sort of leap into frame, assault somebody, and then leap away.

Yes.

So there is a bit of a...

I thought that was kind of interesting because when these zombies appear, at first, it's like they're Night of the Living Dead.

Yes.

They rise from the ground and they have that look. And then once they start their action, you realize it's not Night of the Living Dead. There's something different.

Yes.

So the killing spree begins right away. If they, I mean, they may want revenge on the prison, but they do seem to just instinctively want to kill anyone they come across, because first they kill this nice old couple that is renting a trailer or an RV to Carol, where she's staying.

Which is a 1970 Explorer, and I tried to look up what car company it was. There used to be a company that made RVs called the Explorer Company, and they had one product, and it was this.

When did the RV, like the big bus-sized thing that your family bought and tooled around the country, and when did that come about?

I don't know, and I would be curious. I did not do a deep dive on that, but maybe for next time.

Yeah. At any rate, Carol is in there, like in a state of hysteria, because Paul had been, her boyfriend had been stabbed and was seriously wounded during that escape, before the escape attempt. Anyway, she's in there. She sees the zombies kill the couple. She does a lot of scream. I mess this up every single time. I say it in this podcast. Scream queen screaming. She does a lot of screaming.

Pretty good scream.

And we get a pretty good zombie. The zombies surround her RV in a pretty cool way. There's no way out of this RV. I mean, they're pressing in all around it. They're taking their time, and that's how she manages to escape, because she starts up the RV and she drives straight for the prison. And basically the rest of the movie is going to be the tale of the zombies besieging this prison. Is there anything that has happened yet that we haven't talked about that we need to cover before we get into the kind of the closing, extended action scene?

No, I think that about covers it. I don't think there's anything crucial that we missed.

Okay, so Carol drives up to the prison. The guards go out to greet her, and the guards actually see these zombies. They don't of course understand that they're zombies. They see some figures shambling down the foggy nighttime road.

They're sure that they've seen Braddock out there.

Yes, that's right. So they are in a state of confusion. I will say this movie, starting from here on out, rather effectively depicts a state of confusion where people don't really understand what they're fighting or what's going on. Let's hear an audio clip of the warden and some of the others trying to get a grip on the situation.

What's this all about, you blondie?

I don't know, warden. I don't know if I can find the right words to tell you what I just saw.

Why don't you just try?

To look like Braddock and maybe Nolan and Culler and Donovan, all of them just coming down the road.

Get to my office. Have Dr. Simon look at her.

Yes, sir.

So the warden takes a little while to, everyone takes a little while to grasp what they're dealing with here.

And I think at this point, he still doesn't believe it.

That's right. So what happens now, there's a lot of incident. We're talking now about maybe the last 20 minutes of the movie. There's a lot of stuff happens. This is an extended action scene, I would say, where there is, and John, in a minute, I'm going to invite you to just call out maybe one or two things from it that is worth pulling out. But basically, what we see going on from here is the zombies make a series of like kind of snatch and grab and put a pin in this because I want to talk about it in our wrap up discussion. The zombies make a string of kind of snatch and grab attacks to take out individual guards and then fade back into the night. And they eventually do fairly easily get inside the prison walls and start creating chaos. In the course of all of this, there's a number of kind of discrete scenes that I'm not going to go through in detail one by one, but it culminates with them finding out what the zombie's weakness is. So John, in between the zombie attack starting and them figuring out the weakness, what do you want to call out? What was interesting to you?

Well, one thing that was, first of all, there's one really nice shot here where one of the guards is sort of walking along. He's walking sort of in front of the line of prisoners who are shackled in the yard. And between two vehicles behind him, one zombie appears as just sort of staring there. And if there's a sort of effective creepy shot in this movie, it's that one, right? Which I thought was pretty good. They do some other things that are interesting, though, and I would like to think this is not just sloppy writing. But the zombies are feral, but they have a purpose, and they do have enough intelligence to do things. So at one point, they go to the motor pool, pop open the hoods of all the cars, and smash them with a pickaxe, right? But I think it's actually, I mean, it's not brilliant, but it's fairly well done, where they're savage, and they're doing it almost as if they're out of control. But there is a sort of malign intelligence to what they're doing. They have enough sense to do this to keep them from escaping. But they're not sophisticated, right? They're not like sneaking in there and cutting the brake lines or something. They're using their savage strength to destroy them. So I thought that was kind of interesting, actually.

I thought so. I wanted to ask you specifically about that scene. But yeah, I mean, the general thing here, I've been a little down on this movie. This is a pretty good sequence. It's chaotic, but not because I think it's film sloppily. I think it is effectively showing you a situation where the heroes are all kind of separated. They're working on incomplete information about what's going on. The zombies are hitting fast and then running off before anyone can sort of respond effectively. And it makes for, I wouldn't say it's scary, but it does make for some good moments. It's amazing to me, John, how that shot you described where somebody is standing in the foreground of a shot and you see a bad guy coming at them from behind. We have seen this early. We saw this. This was in Invisible Invaders. There was a shot like this. Remember that guy is like, I don't know, he's fiddling with some electronics while a zombie robot is slowly creeping up behind him. And this is in modern movies. It uses this really well. One of my favorite modern horror movies, it follows like half the movie is shots of something slowly walking up behind characters that don't see them. So it's just neat to see this sort of horror vocabulary in play in good movies and not so good movies. I want to ask you, if you had a pickaxe and you had 10 seconds to disable a car, like can you do it and you open the hood, what do you hit? I'm just curious.

Oh, gosh, I think you would hit, I don't know if you could bust through the oil pan, but if you, I mean, I would, you know, it would be more effective. You could just take off. I mean, if you're just a person. Take off the tires. You could do the tires, but you could also just take off the oil cap because a car will stall without any oil pressure. So maybe they're just puncturing the oil reservoir, right? So, okay. But what would I hit? I don't know, but I think if you gave a good smack to like, I mean, the spark plugs are right there, usually exposed on the top. If you gave a good smack to the spark plugs in that whole situation, then they couldn't spark and the car couldn't start. So that's a better answer.

Okay. There is a scene where the zombies do make it to the formaldehyde and they, there's kind of an extended sequence where they drink it.

Now they're not just sniffing it.

And they splash all around in it and you see something you don't see very much, which is zombies smiling. So it's a little bit of a, it doesn't look quite right, but in a good way.

But what has happened, I think is what they're, let me give, try to give this movie some more credit. What they're doing is saying like, the zombies are still bad guys, prisoners who have become sort of the most extreme version of themselves, right? So instead of inhaling the formaldehyde, they're slopping it all over themselves. Instead of getting in fights, they're killing people. So they have intelligence, they're still acting out their living lives, but in a more extreme way.

I also think this is giving the movie way more credit.

Let's keep going though.

But do you remember all the way back, the very first movie, zombie movie, White Zombie? One of the horrors of being a zombie in that movie was most of the zombies in that movie were slaves who were brutally enslaved, worked in horrific conditions and died. And then they were raised from the dead and they were put back to work in those same horrid conditions. One of the really genuinely effective horrors of that movie was the idea that your suffering doesn't end with death. Here we have zombies and they are still addicted to a drug after death, which I think that the movie doesn't really, I mean, the movie doesn't have the time or I think the interest in exploring it, but I actually think that's pretty horrifying. What if you came back from the dead and you were permanently still addicted to whatever, heroin or something like that? That sounds pretty awful.

You know what? And here's a comparison for you. You ready? The Patrick Swayze, the Demi Moore film Ghost, his realization as he's a ghost, he's learning with the other ghosts, the ghost sees a cigarette and he says, I'd do anything for just one more drag. And that's when Patrick Swayze realizes, I don't want to stay a ghost forever because look what happens to you. Interesting. There's no connection between these two films, but that's what reminded me of it. And that scene really stuck out to me for the reason that you're mentoring. Like that does sound terrifying, right?

Yeah. So at the end of all of this, there's more incident. If this sounds exciting, I guess, you can watch the movie. We'll, in a few minutes, we'll actually recommend whether you should or shouldn't do that. But at the end of all of this, they discover two things about the zombies. First, they aren't completely invincible. They can be knocked down by a blast from a shotgun. They do seem pretty tough. There is one zombie does take a shotgun blast, and it drives them off, but it doesn't seem to kill them right away. But the real weakness of the zombies they discover is light. Yes. The zombies start to, they hate and fear the light, and they start to decay almost immediately when they're hit with the light.

Particularly a big spotlight they have on the prison towers.

Exactly. So I don't know if this is any kind of light, or if there's just something special about the soup, the high-powered light, but they use the spotlight on one of the towers to kill a zombie, and then they realize, oh hey, they don't like light. And this is where we get those, you know, Brad, you said the guy who did the special effects was pretty renowned. This is where we get some, this movie's only real gross special effects. So you want to describe it, John?

Yeah. So they hit a zombie with the powerful spotlight, and its skin starts to sort of, it looks like it's a kind of a mummy almost, and its skin starts to sort of snap and peel, and then it froths at the mouth like a, like rabid dogs don't, but we pretend rabid dogs do, and it sort of melts away as it's doing this. It's pretty great, actually. Actually, this movie is not very gross at all. It's, this is like the only gross thing in it.

And we should give credit to Joe Blasco, the makeup artist, that's his work that we're admiring here.

Yeah. And it worked, yeah.

Yeah, there's a shot, a little, there is a shot where the skin is like kind of sloughing off. It looks pretty good.

And if you, yeah, if you remember the, there's that big sort of head in the background of the poster, it's a shot of that moment where the, where the face is sort of melting into. And I remember when we just saw the poster, we were like, that's kind of cool. And I, and they, I think they must've realized that was their coolest thing too, because they put it on the poster.

So we have all the info and all the setup we need for this movie's final sequence, final tense sequence. And that is, they know that the spotlight can drive off the zombies. The surviving, the remaining survivors are all holed up in one of the buildings. There's some convoluted stuff that I'm just gonna skip over.

Yeah, for some reason, they won't kill the woman, but they were trying to, like, they won't kill her. In fact, when she was in the RV and they were, they were just staring at her. So I don't know what that's about.

Yeah, okay, that explains why they, I didn't understand in the RV scene why they didn't just break in and kill her like they did. But yeah, so in our final scene, here is the plan. Our heroes are gonna make a break out of the building they're hiding in. And there's some people manning the spotlight up on the top of the tower. And as long as those people keep the spotlight trained on our survivors, they're just gonna follow the survivors up the spotlight as they make their way out of the prison to safety, I guess, or to a safer place.

I think they're trying to get into the concrete bunker that houses the generator, because that's safer than the house that they're in. I think that's the plan.

Yeah, the convoluted stuff I was talking about was they talk about getting to the generator and who was gonna run to the generator. And I didn't understand it. But so what we have seen is a pretty good horror scene. You have seen this in very recent movies, like the Quiet Place movies. This is a scene where the heroes are moving through a dangerous area and there is some sort of rigid rule they have to follow or else they'll be instantly killed. So in a quiet place, they have to be super quiet. They can't make a peep or something will instantly snatch them, right? Alien Romulus had this scene too. Remember they're walking through that room full of facehuggers and they have to keep calm or something like that. Anyway, so in this case, the zombies are crowding around them right at the edge of the light, and the zombies can't reach into the light. And the tension comes because the spotlight keeps, like the generator keeps going out for a second and the spotlight goes away. It's kind of clumsily implemented, but I appreciated what they were trying to do.

If they hadn't sort of done it all as a long shot, you know, if they had tried to maybe catch some tension on an actor's face or something, it might have been more effective. But I feel the same way. It's a great idea. They just didn't execute it particularly smartly.

And at the end of it, the spotlight, the generator dies or whatever, and the spotlight does go all the way out. So they run back into the building and it looks pretty bad for our heroes. But then the zombies gather outside. I really probably should have gotten audio of this. And they start shouting for them to send the woman out, which is weird. And so Carol steps outside. And do I remember correctly? Carol's like hiding a shotgun.

She is, but she doesn't use it. She's got a shotgun.

She doesn't use it. So Carol steps outside a little uncertain what's happening. And the zombies basically walk up to her and they just stand mesmerized by Carol.

For no reason. We don't have any reason.

It's not explained. Like this might have meant something if these zombies were people we cared about or who had been established to have some sort of relationship with Carol.

Yeah, like if it was her boyfriend or something.

Well, in the beginning, when Carol shows up and is with Paul, some of them are just sort of staring, wishing they were Paul. They were watching through the fence. So maybe it's residual feelings like that.

Yeah.

So just kind of dumb lust then, I guess. But yeah, I think you're right, Brad. And that causes the zombies to just sort of stare, you know, just stare at her long enough for everybody else to bust out of the room with guns and blow away the zombies. And that's the end of the movie.

And that's in fact, Jablonski, who's sort of our hero at the end of this movie, the guard, he shoots one, and then he snatches the gun from Carol and shoots another one.

Yeah.

So, and there we are at the end.

That's a wrap on Garden of the Dead. Before we get into a wrap up of questions, any scenes or sequences or elements that I missed?

No, I think you've noted, and we'll talk about this more in the wrap up, there's a bunch of, there are actually some good bits in here that we enjoyed maybe more than we thought, that didn't, that just the whole thing didn't quite work. Cause it felt like a made for TV movie or something.

Yeah, exactly. Okay, well, so let's just jump into the closing questions. John, in Garden of the Dead, is there a hero party?

Yes, though it's very indistinct and it keeps changing, but yes.

Yeah, so I think what we are learning is it's hard to care about a hero party if you can't name them, you know, if you haven't gotten at least, if you haven't learned at least one thing about each of the characters in a hero party, it's hard to feel any real attachment to them. But we've got one.

I also think we're missing the tropes of the hero party. We don't have the stereotypes, which sometimes we make fun of, but when they're all bland characters, it's like you said, you don't care. I miss those.

Yeah, we have interchangeable prisoners and a woman who screams in interchangeable prison guards, you know.

Yeah, I mean, this movie would have been better if say that jerk prisoner Braddock had been in the survivor party, right? Because that's a good survivor archetype, right? The jerk or the criminal that nobody else trusts, but he maybe has the skills and the nerve that our more law-buying heroes don't. That's a classic zombie survivor, but no. So how does the party do? What's the mortality rate here?

It's pretty high. A lot of them get killed. And speaking of characters with personality, the warden maybe could have fulfilled that role, but they kill him pretty early in the standoff too. So, you know, I think they've done themselves a disservice by taking all the characters with the sharp edges out of the party. But yes, most of them, a lot of them get killed. A lot of the guards get killed, but Carol and her beau Brad, or is it Paul? I can't remember.

Paul, I think, but yeah.

Paul, they survive, so, and Jablonski survives.

Is there a zombie horde?

Yeah, it's pretty small, but it's definitely a horde.

And I should have asked this first, but can you describe what strain of zombie we're dealing with here?

So these are, that's actually a bit of a mix. I think they're actually supposed to be science created zombies. Somehow the formaldehyde has reanimated them. It's not really explained, but they're accidentally created science zombies.

I do think this is meant to be in the category of toxic zombie.

We'll have more toxic zombies as we go.

Yeah, for sure. All right, we already answered if there was a horde, and how are zombies destroyed or killed?

You can shoot them, but you got to get them good, like in the chest or the head, or they keep coming. So they're tough, but you can shoot them with a shotgun.

Can they return to being human?

No.

Well, John, you forgot, also bright light.

Bright light, yes.

Oh, bright light, of course, yeah. Okay, yeah, that's their real weakness.

I like how you say bright light, because that's what the mogwai says in Gremlins, which is a movie I know you've watched recently. I'm trying to imagine these zombies being like, bright light! Yeah, no.

And I think we've already said, these are regular human speed, although they are able to run pretty fast. So they're not predator naturally fast, but they can move quickly when they want to.

No shuffling zombies here.

So with all that in mind, John, are there any new strains here that we want to call out as being new or an old thing cast in a new light as far as zombie characteristics go?

Well, I don't know that we've had zombies with this level of intelligence before. They are problem solvers. They have a vengeful plan. They're not smart, but they are cunning. And I don't know how many zombies we've had like that.

We haven't had, the zombies we've had that are smart tend to be like one-off villain zombies, like the guy in Valley of the Dead, or Valley of the Zombies. So some of those in the past, those feel like a different... But these zombies feel like they visually belong in the category of United Living Dead zombies, but they retain some of the intelligence and malevolence of our standalone zombie villains from earlier decades, which is an interesting mix, I think.

It's a good mashup.

I would add prison zombies. I don't know if we're going to see more of those, but this contained atmosphere is sort of new. I would also add zombies who are addicts.

Yes.

Oh, of course. That is interesting.

The addiction. I'm glad you mentioned the prison thing, because I had a similar thought, Brad. This isn't a strain of zombie, but something about this movie is I wonder if we are starting to see the advent of the, quote, interesting location for a zombie outbreak.

Right.

That's a good point, right?

Like it's a special sort of bottle episode, so to speak.

Yeah. So most of our serious zombie problems in the past have taken place in fairly mundane location, everyday locations, like they're rampaging through the city streets or a medical facility. But a lot in the decades to come, we're gonna see zombie movies set on a train, we're gonna see them set in a submarine, at a vacation resort, in an elevator, in a prison, right? The Walking Dead, at least the comics, I don't know if the show does this, but in the comics, there's a big part of the first arc of that show is the heroes decide that a maximum security prison is a good place to hunker down, and it's their base for a long time. So I think people are maybe starting to realize zombies get a lot more interesting when they take place in an unusual, in a setting with unusual constraints on what the heroes can do, or a setting like a vacation resort, or like the Hollywood, Beverly Hills zombies in zombie land, that has like a thematic, a thematic power with the theme of the zombies and stuff. So.

Right.

I think it's also a sign that people are acknowledging the existence of Night of the Living Dead, and trying to add their own stamp to it.

Yes.

Yeah.

I think we saw that in, in Bear in Blood, but also, but more in, what was the one before Bear in Blood? Oh, Tombs of the Blind Dead. Yeah. And this is another, perhaps lower quality, another example of the same kind of thing. That nobody, what's interesting to me, actually, about this is, you know, we built the pillars you're about to ask me on, on sort of the modern zombie movie, right? But even before, so we sort of came to a formula for zombies. But right out of the gate, people are saying they're doing zombies butt, you know, and, and then they kind of stopped doing that, and sort of fell into these regular patterns. But people are still experimenting with, okay, zombies aren't just zombies wandering around. Isn't that exciting? So we got to do something else with it.

Yeah, agreed. So speaking of those pillars, at the beginning of this podcast, John, you identified four pillars of the zombie film. Let's find out how many of them apply to Garden of the Dead. John, does Garden of the Dead feature an apocalypse?

It does not. It's very location based and very specific to people coming back from the dead if they've been addicted to formaldehyde.

Does Garden of the Dead feature contagion?

Disappointingly, no. And what I'm realizing is without contagion, it's a hard time, you have a hard time getting tough moral choices or loved one turning against you. Those are all sort of intertwined in a way that I don't think I...

Or apocalypse.

Or apocalypse, yes. But without the contagion, you know, like people do turn against them, but it's prisoners they hated. So I think we could probably score that as a yes in a way, but both contagion and tough moral choices. Now, there is a tough moral choice. Sorry, I jumped ahead on your question, but the warden does decide like, hey, don't let that woman in here.

Yeah.

And the guards don't listen to him. So there is sort of that tough survival of the fittest kind of thinking in this movie.

I think, and as you said, they took out their most prickly, but interesting characters too early. Because you need those prickly characters around like your Braddocks or your wardens to make the choices seem tougher. Yeah.

If everybody gets along, it's less interesting. Right.

Okay. So you just answered that there are some hints of tough moral choices. Are there loved ones turning against you in Garden of the Dead?

Well, you know, no, not exactly, but you do get previous alive people you've known trying to kill you, that you just don't love them. So you get like a half point there.

Yeah. All right. Well, I'm going to turn it over to you to ask me some 70s questions.

So when we did our 1970s episode, Andy came up with some themes he thought we would see in our 1970s movies. So let's go through and see how many of these show up here. Does this evoke the terror of crime, lawlessness, and anarchy, Andy?

Yes. That theme is written throughout this film. First of all, I mean, you're in a prison, and so that is inherently going to bring those themes out. But you have a couple of things going on here. First of all, you have this, I don't want to say commentary, but you have this, the agents of the law are brutal, represented by the Warden, and over the top, and you might say old school, specifically called out in one of the audio clips I shared that like, hey, we don't do this anymore. And then that guy, and then the Warden says, yeah, well, who's going to stop me? Which is, I'm not saying the movie invites you to sympathize with the Warden's perspective, but that is what people say in The Omega Man and our other vigilante fantasies that we've discussed numerous times. So, and then, I haven't even mentioned, of course, the drugs. The formaldehyde is an obvious stand-in for whatever dangerous drug of the month the kids in the inner city are getting addicted to and threatening your kids with, right? So, all of that is kind of running around. I wouldn't say it kind of ever comes to a coherent theme, I could point my finger to, but it's all all of the ingredients of this kind of concern about crime and drugs and the law, they're all in the mix. What do you think?

Yeah, I agree. They're certainly making an assumption that you've heard the news and you know about this sort of thing. And so, it should be well understood that these guys are drug addicts, you know what I mean? So, let me skip ahead a question, because I think this would be an interesting one to ask now. Does this evoke a divide between new and old generations?

So, I don't know how to answer this. I was going to say no until we had this discussion. And now I'm just wondering, because the authority figures and the guard that survives at the end and stuff are older. And yeah, I don't know, I'm gonna turn this around. How would you answer? Because I don't know if I have an answer.

I would say yes, because even though it's not necessarily generational, it is philosophical, right? Like the warden is a super hard ass, and some of the guards are soft, right? One of them lets a woman into the prison, one of them lets a prisoner out to say hi to somebody. They want to try to save the prisoners, whereas the warden does not. So I think there is a difference in attitude between the old school hyperviolent, no tolerance position of the warden and the more empathetic stance of a lot of the other characters.

Yeah. This is not a prison where words like rehabilitation are really thrown around a whole lot.

There's no country club. So does this screen push the boundaries of on-screen violence and sexuality?

Strangely, no. Well, I thought when I saw that this was a zombie prison movie, I thought, oh, man, like they were going to really get some exploitation here. And there is like, there is nothing at all. There is exactly one kind of gross scene. I mean, it's not going to upset you where the zombie is hit by the light and we sort of see its head, its skin flake off, but that's not really very gross.

And the most sexual thing they have Carol doing is wearing short shorts, like Daisy Duke shorts. That's about it.

Exactly. So this movie, we watched an episode of the, do you remember the episode of the TV show Thriller that had that Howard adaptation?

Fisions from Hell, yeah.

That's right. That was like late 50s, right?

And that was gruesome than this thing.

That had more, much more gruesomeness than this movie in the 70s about zombies in a prison. Yeah. So I don't know. So nope.

But what about a lack of trust in institution and authority figures?

So yeah, absolutely. I don't think we need to rehash, but all that discussion about the older generation being, I mean, so we have that clash between the older ways of understanding justice and life and safety with younger ways. I think that's part of this. And the warden dies quickly. It's no one comes, the authorities don't come in to save the day. And while some of the survivors are members of like kind of the, they're guards, so they are sort of authority figures. They are not really functioning in their role as agents of the government at that point. They're just survivors trying to get out. What do you think?

Yeah, no, I agree. I agree. Is there anything about anxiety about the Vietnam War?

I think so. Oh yeah? I didn't until after I watched this movie and started reflecting on it.

Tell me.

Some of these thoughts really coalesce while we were having our discussion. I'm not saying that the movie is making a point with us. I'm not even maybe saying that the movie knows what it's doing.

Right.

But what do you think of when I describe a situation of, we have some heavily armed, professional agents of the government, who have a secure base that they are confidently in, who cannot deal with the sneaky, clever guerrilla attacks from an enemy that won't come into the open and have a real fair fight where the authorities would instantly win.

That's really interesting. What does that remind you of? That would remind me of the Vietnam War. Also, you have a group of addicts in an extreme situation, which also would remind you. So hey, I buy that. I think it's one of those things that's in the air, so you can't help but represent it.

Exactly. There's one or two scenes that I liked a lot where a zombie would sprint into the scene, kill a guard, and then just keep running off screen again. And that just... The movie didn't do it, execute it well, but that's pretty scary, right? You're sitting around, you think you're safe, and then something you haven't even figured out what happened by the time it has run in, killed one of you, and left again.

Yeah, this is where the shooting at night actually is an advantage, despite all the shortcomings in the movie. Yeah, for sure. How about... Does it invoke anxieties about sexuality, reproduction, women's bodies, bodily autonomy, any of that?

No, I thought we were gonna have a richer text as far as this went when Carol showed up in her Daisy Dukes, but that was the extent of it. I don't know what this movie is doing with the zombies. I mean, they are frozen in place, moguling Carol at the end. And I just don't know what to make of that.

Yeah, it doesn't make sense.

I mean, is it just like a King Kong thing where the feral beast is mesmerized by the pure beauty of the female? I don't really know what's supposed to be going on.

Yeah, no, I'm not sure either, but yeah, I don't think that's here too much. All right, last couple. How about economic anxiety and consumerism run amok?

There is a little economic anxiety in the character of Carol. The movie does make a big deal. She has this terrible crap job, and I think it's implied she's like had to... She has left the safety of the city world and has moved out here to live in a dumpy trailer so that she can be near her stupid boyfriend who wound up in jail. And the only way to make ends meet is she has this demeaning job where salesmen and even worse truck drivers are constantly hitting on her. I don't think that is a huge theme of this movie, but it certainly is there. That is not a... Carol is not a hero we would have had 20 years ago in one of these movies.

No, and I think it leads me to our last question, which is, is there tension between urban and rural life?

I think so. In the sense I just described, at one point someone is saying to Carol, soon you'll be able to get back to the city and get a nice apartment in the city. And we are not talking Texas Chainsaw Massacre levels of rural commentary here, but there is this sense of like, you're out here, no one, there's no help out here, right? It's like you're in the wilderness outside the walls of Rome.

Right, yeah, absolutely. All right, Andy, well, bring us home.

Okay, John, we always ask a series of final questions to close out each episode. The first is, John, would you and I survive in the zombie world of Garden of the Dead?

No, because that would also mean not only could I survive a zombie outbreak, but could I survive in prison? And the answer to both of those questions is a hard no. So I have to say I would not.

I would absolutely squeal to the guards about the escape attempt. Like there's not even a question. Like they would have to kill me to get me to like not blab about the plan. I'm having trouble with this because the more fast zombies we get, the less, like it's very hard for me to imagine myself surviving in any zombie world where the zombies can move at human speed or faster. And I'm going to have to kind of find a way where I would be able to survive, but I would not do it here, especially with these hit and run tactics. So, yeah. All right, John, is Garden of the Dead a zombie movie or is it a movie with zombies? It's a movie with zombies.

No, it's a zombie movie.

Okay, explain.

Well, I was only going to say it was a movie with zombies, just to make the joke. It's a movie with zombies in the garden, but that's not the case. The case is, the plot is centered around zombies. It's centered around these prisoners who use this chemical. They escape, they die, the chemical reanimates them, and they assault the prison. That's pretty zombie-centric.

Yeah, agreed. John, all right. Lastly, do you recommend this movie, firstly, just as a general movie that people should go out and watch? And secondly, do you think that this movie has special interest for the zombie-loving listeners of this podcast?

You know, I feel like I have to say no to the general audience for sure. There's just, it's just not quite up to the standard that I could recommend a movie. To zombie fans, maybe, because I think there's a few interesting things happening here, but that's also kind of, it's a soft yes because of the quality. I mean, we're here to watch bad B movies, but this one is extra short, and maybe the shortness is a benefit, but I'm not sure it presents anything so exciting that they need to, but you know, based on our, like I was a hard no before we started talking about it, and now I'm like, you know what, there is some interesting stuff here after our conversation, so.

I agree, at least on the first one, it's a solid no to general recommendation. It's just not that great of a movie. There's better ones to watch, many better ones, even if you want to watch a bad zombie movie. So one of the things I think we brought it up once or twice, movies have abruptly started getting longer. I think the average movie we're watching now is about an hour and a half. Yeah. And an awful lot of these movies are not improved, I don't think, by that extra 30 minutes, because the first couple decades, the movies were always like an hour long, right? And I feel like we have seen an awful lot of hour and a half long movies that didn't really have anything extra to justify the extra time. And so you just ended up with the same plotline stretched poorly across more runtime. So I will say it is like to this movie's benefit, I mean, I think it understands it's kind of a slight movie, right? There's no, I came into this discussion prepared to say that this movie really has very, very, very little going on. Now that we've had the discussion, I do think it has stuff going on, but I think it's more like incidental because of when it was filmed than an artistic vision that has a lot to say about any of these topics. So all that to say, that's a no from me for general recommendation and a soft no to Zombie fans. Is there some interesting stuff in here? Yes, but I bet you we're going to get better toxic waste zombies or drug scare zombies in the next couple of years.

So yeah, I think you're probably right. All right, Andy. Should Andy's mom watch this movie?

My mom should not watch this movie and neither should yours, but not because it's like a disgusting exploitation flick. She shouldn't watch it because it's kind of a clunker.

Yeah.

Sorry, mom.

Yeah. One of these days.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, that means it's time for the scariest part of this and every episode, and that's when producer Brad reveals to me and John what zombie movie we will be watching next.

If I can just interject something. Most podcasts are doing their spooky season podcast. We're all spooky season all the time. So just show up for what we normally do all year, while those pretenders can do their spooky season. So in any case, what does that mean?

For some people, Halloween is year round.

That's right.

All right, well, our next film is interesting. There's no trailer online that I could find, so I'm just gonna share the poster with you.

That bodes ill.

I don't know, I think this could be interesting. Here we go, so please describe for all. Whoa.

Okay, well, it's not English, and it's not in a language I can quite recognize, so I'm just gonna read it. I wanna guess this is maybe Indonesian or something, but.

It's Indian. Oh, interesting.

Indian, okay.

So the language is Hindi.

So the movie is called, I mean, this is my, I'm gonna butcher this non-English title, Do, Gaz, Zamin, Ke, Nicha.

Yes.

Brad, do you wanna translate that for us? Or does it have a translation?

One of the English titles for this film is Two Yards Under the Ground.

That's pretty good.

That's a good one.

All right. Also says Ramsey Films, so it's FU. Ramsey. That's the guy's initials, I'm sorry. And it says, introduces, it's like Shobna, but it almost looks like Shaban, like from the Irish spelling. And there are, and it does say it's an Eastman color, at least that. It also has lettering that one set there is for sure Arabic, and I'm not sure what the other one is.

This is our first Indian film, so that's exciting.

Yeah, it is exciting. So we get to see what Indian films were like in 1972. All right.

We get to see what Indian horror films were like in 1972. That's right.

Yeah. Yeah, let's all pledge not to draw grand conclusions about Indian film based on this movie.

Excellent point, excellent point. Well, everybody, please join us next time where we discuss our first Indian horror movie. We're excited to continue to branch out internationally. Please give us a review and a rating on iTunes. When we get a bunch of them at once, it actually really does help the algorithm promote us. So if you haven't done so, now's a great time. And if you've already rated our show and you want to go to the next level, we do have merch on Redbubble and a link to that is in the show notes. I have a T-shirt. I was going to say I'm wearing it right now, but I'm not because I'm not a liar, but I do wear it frequently. So get a Zombie Strains T-shirt, a Zombie Strains mug. It's all there. It's very exciting.

John has many vices, but he's not a liar.

See you next time, folks. You've been listening to Zombie Strains. We'll be back next episode to talk about another zombie movie. If you enjoyed our podcast, please take a moment to rate us in your podcast app of choice. Tell a friend, follow us on Instagram at Zombie Strains. All of this helps like-minded people find the show. See you next time.