The 1972 film, Garden of the Dead, takes place in a prison camp that sits out in the middle of what appears to the bayous.  The prisoners spend their days working on the chain gang, breaking rocks and cleaning highways.  The tough-as-nails guards spend their days watching the prisoners and carrying around their rifles.  This is the type of prison camp where the prisoners are all talkative and boastful and the guards all wear sunglasses and every day is just like the next.

A group of prisoners are trying to brighten things up on the chain gang by using some experimental formaldehyde to get high.  I’m sure that won’t lead to any complications!  When the prisoners later try to escape from the prison camp, they’re quickly captured by the guards who proceed to violate all sorts of laws by gunning the prisoners down and then ordering the other prisoners to bury the dead bodies in the prison camp’s garden.

That night, the dead prisoners come back to life as zombies.  Does this happen because they were getting high off of the formaldehyde or is it because the chemicals themselves were leaked into the garden?  The film doesn’t make it particularly clear but it doesn’t matter.  What’s important is that they’re now zombies.  You really don’t need a whole lot of explanations when it comes to zombies.  The dead prisoners are still obsessed with getting high and they start to kill everyone in the camp as a part of their effort to get their precious formaldehyde.

I’ll just admit right now that I absolutely love Garden of the Dead.  Some of that is because Garden of the Dead is a very short movie, clocking in at barely an hour’s running time.  It was a film that was obviously designed to be the second half of a double feature but no matter!  That short running time means that there’s no need for extra padding and the action move quickly.  The film ends before the viewer gets bored with the somewhat repetitive zombie action.  Seriously, we need to normalize 50 minute films.

Another thing that I love about Garden of the Dead is that it is full of foggy bayou atmosphere.  The film itself was obviously shot on a very low budget and on very cheap film but the grainy images actually contribute to the film’s nightmarish feeling.  The film captures the feeling of being isolated in the middle of nowhere.  One reason why the zombies in this film are frightening is because there’s literally nowhere safe to hide from them.  Even if you can get out of the prison camp, you’ll still have to brave the wilderness that surrounds it.

Finally, I liked that the zombies in Garden of the Dead were smarter than the average zombies.  Instead of just stumbling around and trying to eat every living thing that they met, these zombies worked together to get what they wanted.  I especially liked the spazzy zombie who was always running around the prison camp and jumping and yelling at everyone.  These are zombies who clearly enjoy being zombies and it makes Garden of the Dead all the more effective.

Garden of the Dead is a grindhouse gem!

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