This early '70s zombie film clocks in at just under 60 minutes, as though the makers were acutely aware of the fact that very few people would waste more than an hour of their life on such poorly directed, badly acted, poverty-stricken garbage.
The setting for Garden of the Dead is a prison work camp, where the inmates make formaldehyde, loading barrels of the stuff onto flatbed trucks for transportation. Some of the prisoners huff the vapours for kicks, which has unexpected results after they are shot while trying to escape: they rise from the dead to attack the living.
Not only has Garden of the Dead got the kind of plot that could be written on the back of a matchbook, but it also suffers from extremely low production values that make the whole thing look cheap, nasty and unconvincing. The prisoners dig a tunnel to make their bid for freedom, but the whole camp is so flimsy, they needn't have gone to such trouble: a decent kick to the front gate would knock it down, while the wire fence (all 6ft of it) has huge gaps that all but the fattest of prisoners could squeeze through. As for the zombies, I've seen little kids trick-or-treating with scarier make-up.
I guess, in the annals of zombiedom, the film is groundbreaking in the way that its undead leap and run, use tools (one of them swings a mean pickaxe!) and talk, but this really isn't reason enough to watch. Garden of the Dead is one for zombie movie completists only.
The setting for Garden of the Dead is a prison work camp, where the inmates make formaldehyde, loading barrels of the stuff onto flatbed trucks for transportation. Some of the prisoners huff the vapours for kicks, which has unexpected results after they are shot while trying to escape: they rise from the dead to attack the living.
Not only has Garden of the Dead got the kind of plot that could be written on the back of a matchbook, but it also suffers from extremely low production values that make the whole thing look cheap, nasty and unconvincing. The prisoners dig a tunnel to make their bid for freedom, but the whole camp is so flimsy, they needn't have gone to such trouble: a decent kick to the front gate would knock it down, while the wire fence (all 6ft of it) has huge gaps that all but the fattest of prisoners could squeeze through. As for the zombies, I've seen little kids trick-or-treating with scarier make-up.
I guess, in the annals of zombiedom, the film is groundbreaking in the way that its undead leap and run, use tools (one of them swings a mean pickaxe!) and talk, but this really isn't reason enough to watch. Garden of the Dead is one for zombie movie completists only.