Garden of the Dead 2002 Horror Movie Review

Garden of the Dead (1974) This super low budget zombie flick almost makes it past the entertainment finish line, falling just short, unfortunately. Speaking of short, the movie certainly is, clocking in at only about 58 minutes. The story has a bunch of prison inmates working outdoors to produce the prison’s big export: formaldehyde. A bunch of the prisoners have taken to sniffing the formaldehyde when the guards aren’t looking (which seems to be most of the time) and since the scrutiny is so light, the same prisoners have already dug an escape tunnel by the time we meet them. On the night they plan to use it, they take out a guard and steal his shotgun, but sadly, a misstep by one inmate leads to the shotgun going off, which alerts the rest of the guards, which leads to several more shotguns going off, which leads to a bunch of dead escaped prison inmates, which leads to a large shallow grave, which leads to…the dead inmates getting up as zombies!?!? That formaldehyde must have had some special ingredients, to say the least. The newly minted zombies grab a shed full of gardening tools and decide to kill everybody they meet. Eventually the remaining guards and inmates team up to battle the undead invaders. Who will survive and what will be left of them? As mentioned, this one almost makes it , with the positives being the brief running time, some decent makeup work on the zombies, the one female in the cast being 70’s cute and a couple of genuinely creepy moments along the way. On the downside, even running less than an hour this actually starts to drag a bit in the final fifteen minutes, the acting is pretty nonexistent, and with all the kills being handled in wide shot as the zombies whack their victims a time or two with their implement of choice, a complete lack of gore or the expected gut munching from the walking corpses actually work against the movie. I’m not for wallowing in the red stuff as much as I used to be, but the violence in this movie is on the level of a stage fight in an elementary school play. Still, if you are a walking dead completist, you’ll want to check this one out, others would be well advised to steer clear.