Just recently, Troma released 150 films on Youtube for people to stream and watch at their leisure. Along those films was a film I'd looked high and low for but had not been able to find. The film is Garden of the Dead from 1972.
The reason I was interested in this film was because it was apparently supposed to be the first documented instance of fast, non-romeroesque Zombies. 1972 is 8 years before Umberto Lenzi tried the same thing in Nightmare City and 13 years before Dan O'Bannon had his zombies running in Return of the Living Dead!
What struck me as I was watching this film was also that this film was one of the first modern zombie films made after Night of the Living Dead... Period. Released the same year as Amando de Ossorio's Tombs of the Blind Dead* and one year ahead of Bob Clark's Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things, it's one of the earliest instances we have of the "modern" zombie film. As such, it's interested how this film decided to take certain spins which the genre as a whole would later weed out or ignore.
This film has yet to weed out a few elements of old zombie-lore from the pre-Romero times (i.e. voodoo zombies). For instance there's a atmospheric scene where the zombies rise from their graves, hands first of course**. This element was dropped from the genre with the onset of the "modern" zombie who could awake anywhere and at anytime. But here, it remains. Also, the cause of the plague doesn't spread in this film. We have no scenes of people getting bit and begging to be shot by their friends. A staple and almost a must in later zombie films. The main protagonists also discover that the zombies cannot stand light and their skin burn and dissolve when in contact with it. Seems more at home in a Universal or Hammer vampire film rather than a film belonging to the modern zombie films we know and cherish.
The zombies themselves are caused by an experimental formaldehyde which the inmates of a small prison camp breathe in to get high. Transformation occurs first after death. The formaldehyde does not cause death, it only grants life after it. However the zombies themselves wake up with a craving for more of their favourite drug and after dispatching a few unlucky inmates who got stuck on digging duty, they arm themselves to go on a rampage.
The siege element however, is already here, even this close on the tail of NOTLD. The zombies break into the prison camp and in the cover of darkness dispatch a number of sheriff's before the humans decide to hold up in their office. It doesn't play a big part of the film, and there are no extended scenes of survivors pondering their impending doom. The film clocks in at 59 minutes, so there's not much time for anything except the bare essentials. There's no drama here, whatsoever. It didn't learn that from NOTLD.
In fact, there's no main protagonist either. There are a few characters I'd say are eligible candidates for the main hero, but they either all die, are absent from large parts of the film or are simply bystanders in the scenes they are present in - they just happen to be in most scenes. Stuff like that really throws you off, but it's not the last zombie film to be suffering from this problem***.
The film itself isn't very good, a part from a few brilliant shots where the mise en scène outdoes. If you go to 37:00 minutes into the film, which I will link to below, there's a scene where an officer runs out from the camp into the darkness to check out a failed power coupling. He stands, surrounded by darkness and shouts back information to the Warden character, who remains at the gates to the camp. While they are talking, the zombies emerge from the darkness and envelop the lone trooper out in the field. It is shot in a way where we don't see much, because we view it from the safe distance of the prison camp. But the movement makes what's happening all too clear.
There are a few brilliantly shot moments like this strewn throughout, but they mostly convey the feeling that this could have been a real gem of a picture had it been produced with more heart and a better script. As it stands now, it's a pretty boring flick. One of those extreme low budget films where they shoot a lot at night, but can't afford the equipment to lit up the scene.
No, the film is more interesting as a piece of history. But oh, how it is so! Anyone who's interested in the genre should see it. At least once.
*IMDb lists TOTBD's release date as 10 April in Spain (and not until 1973 in the US). According to AFI's page on Garden of the Dead, it was shot over 31 days starting in late May 1972. This means there is a possibility of GOTD being influenced by TOTBD's, but it is unlikely.
**Again, this theme recurs in many 70's, pre-Dawn of the Dead zombie films. Amando de Ossorio's Blind Dead series features these scenes frequently. Bob Clark's Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things has this. Jorge Grau's The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue has a spin on this theme as well. We all remember the zombie rising from it's grave in Lucio Fulci's Zombie Flesh Eater. One of the latest instances of this theme (before the genre becomes self-aware with Dan O'Bannon's Return of the Living Dead) is most likely found in Frank Agrama's Dawn of the Mummy from 1981.
***Although, as already covered, it may well be the first.
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Originally Posted by AcesandEights
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