Jerome Guardino | Through the Shattered Lens

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Mondays, I will be reviewing CHiPs, which ran on NBC from 1977 to 1983. The entire show is currently streaming on Prime!

Tonight’s episode is weird.

Episode 3.6 “Counterfeit”

(Dir by John Florea, originally aired on October 20th, 1979)

Ponch is shocked to discover that he’s carrying several counterfeit twenties. He turns the money into the Treasure Department, hoping that it will mean receiving an monetary award. Instead, he’s told that his reward is helping the government crack down on the bad guys. Ha! Take that, Ponch!

That said, you better believe that Ponch is there to help arrest the counterfeiters, who turn out to be a bunch of phony preachers working out of a church. I know that sounds like the sort of thing that could be interesting. But, for the most part, these guys are still just generic CHiPs bad guys, even if one of them is played by veteran screen tough guy Ralph Meeker.

Meanwhile, Ponch goes on a date with a woman and is upset when it appears that she’s shallow and doesn’t want to talk about anything that is the least bit intellectual. That’s our, Ponch! He’s never shallow! Fortunately, it turns out that his date isn’t shallow either. She was just pretending to be shallow to test whether or not Ponch was shallow. And now, it’s time to dance! Wait, what? That doesn’t make any sense. Ponch — when are you going to settle down? Disco isn’t going to last forever.

While that’s going on, architect James O’Hara (played by veteran dwarf actor Billy Barty) becomes frustrated with people assuming that he can’t drive because of his size. He gets tired of all the dumb jokes and the condescending remarks. As a result, he keeps getting into minor accident whenever he drives on the highway. This was a strange storyline, largely because O’Hara’s scenes made up over half the episode despite the fact that he had never appeared on the show before and he barely interacted with the members of the Highway Patrol. A part of me wonders if maybe this episode was meant to be a backdoor pilot for a series about James O’Hara. The other weird thing about this episode is that O’Hara’s frustration over people making fun of his height was often played for laughs. The whole thing just felt well-intentioned but oddly tone deaf.

If you’re keeping track, this episode had two Ponch storylines and a storyline about a guy we had never seen before. Sorry, Baker! If we had any doubts about who was the favored partner as far as this show goes, this episode erased them.

This whole episode just felt weird. On the plus side, there was a lot of nice California scenery and there were quite a few accidents, which is the main reason why most people would have been watching the show in the first place. But this episode really is an example of how a show can get bogged down with a character that we’ve never seen before and that we’ll probably never see again. The episode just never comes together.

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!