Tag Archives: Prison Movies

Trash Or Terror Tuesday: Garden of the Dead (1972)

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It’s time for #TrashOrTerrorTuesday

…when I examine a film that’s been languishing in my personal library to determine if it is #Trash or #Terror

– or more importantly, if it deserves to stay in my collection.

And so, out from the dusty shelves of #VHS tapes & DVDs comes…

Poster art for Garden of the Dead (1972)Garden of the Dead (1972) by #JohnHayes

Formaldehyde sniffing prisoners are killed during a breakout. After burial, the inmates return from the dead to exact revenge on the prison guards who killed them.

“filmed in DEAD color”

#Horror #SciFi #Zombies

#TrashOrTerrorTuesday

 

Some friends and I rented Garden of the Dead (1972) back in high school. The poster, which was featured on the VHS box, looked so damn amazing that we were convinced that we were about to watch the greatest zombie movie since Dawn of the Dead (1978). A mere fifteen minutes into the movie, everyone in the room wanted to stop the tape and move on to something else. I, already a completist at such a young age, argued for continuing to watch “in case it gets better.” My friends allowed it to keep playing until about 30 minutes in and then they ejected that tape as fast they could and smashed it into a million pieces (okay, I may be exaggerating slightly – but they wanted to smash it, believe me).

Garden of the Dead was, without a doubt, the cheapest and shoddiest looking movie that any of us had ever seen at that point in our lives. For years it was legendary among our gang. We would reference it from time to time, whenever we needed a measuring stick for badness. “Oh it’s bad, but it’s not Garden of the Dead bad,” would be something we might have said. Even so, I always felt a little guilty about not finishing the movie…

More than ten years later, a friend who worked for a video distribution company gave me a bag of DVDs that he thought I might appreciate. They were mostly “bad” movies, he said, but perhaps they were “bad” in an enjoyable way. I was surprised and intrigued to see that Garden of the Dead was one of them.

Watching it again, as an adult (and finishing it for the first time), I was surprised by how much better it was than I remembered. It no longer looked as cheap and shoddy to me – as I had seen much cheaper and shoddier movies by that point in my life. It wasn’t exactly good, but it seemed on par with many of the drive-in type movies that I enjoy to watch on a Friday night. So, much to my surprise, I put the Garden of the Dead DVD onto my shelf where it has remained for almost twenty years now. I was a bit nervous that one of my high school friends would see it there and accuse me of betraying the old gang, but… I was prepared to tell them that it was better than we had thought. Still, I never got around to watching it again. So, I figured it was time to put it to the #TrashOrTerrorTuesday test.

The front gate of the "prison" in Garden of the Dead (1972)

The front gate of the “prison” in Garden of the Dead (1972)

Garden of the Dead is bad. I think my expectations were so low when I first re-watched it as an adult, that I was pleasantly surprised by it. It’s still not as cheap and shoddy as it had seemed back in high school, but it’s pretty cheap and shoddy. The “prison” consists of a few old shacks in the middle of a desert-like area, surrounded by a fence made out of barb wire and plywood. It would not effectively keep anyone from leaving.

The warden wears a suit, as if he’s attending a board meeting in a corporate head office, but he’s in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of prisoners and guards. Why would he bother to dress up?

The prisoners get high by sniffing formaldehyde (not sure if that’s a thing), and I guess that’s why they return from the dead (they’re pre-embalmed?).The movie clocks in, mercifully, at just under an hour. If we had known that back in high school, maybe we would have kept watching – but I doubt it.

So what’s the verdict?

Garden of the Dead (1972) is Trash. It has a few moments of inadvertent humour, which might make it watchable for die hard aficionados of bad movies. I don’t think that there are any moments of legitimate terror or suspense. And it’s not really trashy enough to be a truly fun watch.

Oddly enough, the DVD is introduced by Son of Ghoul (a horror host), and he says that it’s the kind of movie that makes you want to smash the TV after watching it. Not a bad description – and if that makes you want to watch Garden of the Dead, then you probably should. I, having already seen it three (well, two and half) times in my life, will not be joining you.

Friday Night At The Home Drive-In: Vendetta (1986)

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Vendetta (1986) is, at heart, a Women in Prison film (or WIP). As I mentioned a while back, this is a genre that I have a particular interest in – and connection to – as I once wrote an important essay about it when I was a film student, and subsequently wrote an entire musical play poking fun at it (which was called  Bad Girls Jailhouse and was first produced in 1994). That play started me on a long path of writing, producing and directing crazy musicals, which was my main focus for over ten years – but that’s another story.

VHS box for Vendetta (1986)Vendetta is not one of the better known Women in Prison films. It came out a little late in the cycle. Caged (1950) is widely considered to be the first official entry into the genre, although there are earlier films that could (and should) be included, such as the wonderful pre code movie Ladies They Talk About (1933). But Caged really started things rolling, and was soon followed by other WIPs such as So Young, So Bad (1950), Women’s Prison (1955) and Reform School Girl (1957). The exploitation possibilities of the genre became clear to producers, and by the late 1960s there were a slew of R-rated WIPs released, such as 99 Women (1969), School for Unclaimed Girls (1969) and Love Camp 7 (1969) (which was also a sleazy Nazi movie, which oddly enough became a sub-genre of its own – but that’s another story). 

Needless to say, there were a lot of WIPs made in the 1970s, including Roger Corman produced masterpieces like The Big Doll House (1971), and Jonathan Demme‘s directorial debut Caged Heat (1974). There were so many great WIPs made in the ’70s that I could spend all day trying to talk about my favourites – but I’ll resist. The plentiful output continued into the 1980s, and included some of the very best efforts, such as The Concrete Jungle (1982), Reform School Girls (1986), and my personal favourite, Chained Heat (1983). 

Cinematheque programmeI first saw Chained Heat when I was 12 or 13, having rented it on Beta with a friend of mine. We loved it of course, and watched it two or three times before returning the tape to the store. I would later describe it as a seminal film-watching experience for me when I hosted a screening of the movie at Cinematheque in Winnipeg back in 2009. Notice that the programme guide mistakenly used a photo from Chained Heat 2 (1993), the vastly inferior sequel. The idea of these screenings was that playwrights (such as me) would host a film that was somehow important or influential in their development, or playwrighting career. Choosing Chained Heat was a no-brainer for me, as it directly influenced the first musical that I ever wrote. Thank you and R.I.P. to Dave Barber, who ran Cinematheque for almost 40 years and just died this past week (far too soon). I had known him since the early 1990s, and would often stop and talk film with him whenever we ran into each other. I will miss him forever.

As the ’80s wore on, the Women in Prison genre seemed to dry up a little, although there were still a respectable number of titles released. Most of them were direct to video
Ad for Reform School Girls, which came out the same year as Vendetta (1986)releases, and not as high quality in terms of production value. 1986 was a pretty good year, however. Reform School Girls, The Naked Cage (by the director of Chained Heat), and Vendetta were all released that year. Reform School Girls was by far the highest profile film of those three. I remember it playing in the theatres, and I managed to catch it on pay TV a little later. I also bought the soundtrack L.P. which featured Wendy O. Williams (who also starred in the movie) and Etta James (who did not). I found out about Vendetta by reading Video Trash & Treasures by L.A. Morse. He gave it a decent review, and I was eventually able to track down a copy on VHS. 

What I liked best about Vendetta, was that it was a bit of a variation on the usual Women in Prison formula. WIPs are usually about an innocent woman going to jail (often because of a man). This happens in Vendetta, but the innocent woman dies in prison near the beginning of the movie. The remainder of the film focuses on the dead woman’s sister, who happens to be a tough, high kicking Hollywood stuntwoman named Laurie (played by Karen Chase). Laurie gets herself sent to the same prison where her sister died ON PURPOSE in an effort to find out who killed her sister, and to get revenge. And if there’s anything I like almost as much as a Women in Prison yarn, it’s a good revenge story. In fact, it could almost be called a vigilante story, as the police, prison officials, and other powers-that-be, seem unable to solve Laurie’s sister’s murder – or even to acknowledge it as a murder – so it’s up to Laurie to take the law into her own hands. And I do like vigilante stories.

I’ve watched Vendetta (1986) several times over the years, and was very pleased to recently pick up a Blu-ray edition from the good folks at Shout Factory. The film just seems to get better with age, and certainly this is the best it’s ever looked and sounded. It may not be the most famous WIP, it may not be the most loved WIP, it may not even be the best WIP – but it is definitely a #NotQuiteClassicCinema classic, and one one my personal favourites. I would be happy to watch it on any (and every) #FridayNightAtTheHomeDriveIn.

Friday night at the home drive-in: Caged Men Plus One Woman AKA I’m Going to Get You… Elliot Boy (1971)

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I first read about Caged Men Plus One Woman AKA I’m Going to Get You… Elliot Boy in Gerald Pratley‘s book A Century of Canadian Cinema. I’d been working on a a research project that had me searching for obscure Canadian crime films, and Pratley’s book had been a good source of unfamiliar titles. Unfortunately, a surprisingly large number of them were impossible to track down. In some cases, I wondered if the movies had ever had a real release. Pratley saw them, so they must have played a festival, or had a premiere screening somewhere.  But it seemed like some of them had never secured a real distribution deal, and simply vanished. Others may have been distributed, either theatrically, or on VHS back in the day, but were now totally out of print and/or circulation. Continue reading →