Alien Dead, The (1980)

Directed by Fred Olen Ray
Written by Martin Alan Nicholas and Fred Olen Ray
Starring
- Buster Crabbe
- Raymond Roberts
- Linda Lewis
- Dennis Underwood
Produced by Fred Olen Ray and Chuck Sumner

Fred Olen Ray is a remarkable character. Aside from being a prolific B-movie director, he seems to have a genius for making movies that are “bad,” and apparently intentionally so; can you really tell me that titles like Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers or Attack of the 60-Foot Centerfold are meant to be taken seriously? But the majority of his movies are almost completely enjoyable. I suppose one could attribute that to his level of enthusiasm, a love of movie-making equalled perhaps only by Ed Wood himself. (As one of his first projects, Ray tried to collaborate with Wood — before the rest of the world “rediscovered” him — and made a short to show to investors; alas, the project never came to fruition.) According to a bio I read, Ray has an engineering degree from Brown University, but chose instead to follow his filmmaking dream and has been doing so ever since.

In case you can’t tell, I’m stalling, because I really don’t want to get to the review of The Alien Dead, which is most likely his first film (the IMDb lists The Brain Leeches (1977), but I can find no evidence that it was a released feature, unless it’s a misunderstanding of one of The Alien Dead’s alternate titles, Swamp of the Blood Leeches). Why? Because, despite what I’ve said in admiration of the man above, this movie is bad. Really bad. Swamp-gas-in-an-elevator bad.

We open with a couple in the Florida swamp, searching for the alligators that have been mysteriously sparse since the mysterious sinking of a houseboat months ago. Their dialogue is cute; they refer to each other as “Mr. Griffith” and “Mrs. Griffith,” and Mr. Griffith uses erudite language in a laid-back southern drawl. Unfortunately, the charms of this scene are severely undermined by technical problems: murky film stock, static camera, and obvious studio redubbing. The scene is finally cut short when Mrs. Griffith wanders out of the panel and gets herself chomped by something that Mr. Griffith swears is not a gator.

We then get to meet some of the main characters, to whom Mr. Griffith runs: Reporter Tom Corman (Raymond Roberts), the shaggy-haired “modern man” who, we know right off, will uncover the mystery and go unbelieved; Deputy Campbell (Dennis Underwood), the requisite backwoods fat-ass who’s also a dead ringer for Travis Tritt; and the puffed-up Sheriff Kowalski, as played by Buster Crabbe. (That’s right; Buster Crabbe, the man who was both Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, plays a sheriff at age 70. Gotta admit, he looks about twenty years younger. But despite the fact that he’s the only competent performer in this mess, he’s not given any of the “good” lines — i.e., even those that qualify as good compared to the rest of the script.) Naturally, the law enforcement types completely ignore this clear report of a death, if not a homicide; only the reporter shows interest, and even he puts off any investigation until tomorrow morning. Wouldn’t you like to be a citizen so brusquely brushed off when your wife has just been devoured?

(Meanwhile, we start with the background victims. A girl from the newspaper office returns home after dark, goes out to her garbage cans, and is grabbed by a scuzzy man in bad zombie make-up!)

Next day, Tom goes out to the swamp and meets backwoods “beauty” Shawn Michaels (Linda Lewis) and her father Emmet (George Kelsey), who gives Tom a hilariously confused rendition of the requisite old-timer exposition scene involving someone shot down in “the Big One,” germ warfare, and ancient Indian legends, all culminating in a mutant possum called “Possotac”. (All of this over a meal of possum, by the way.)

That night, we get our second throwaway victim: a girl upset with her pool-playing boyfriend goes home alone, and is stalked by a zombie.

Things quickly start going downhill (I mean, even further downhill) from here. As more bodies pop up, Tom and Shawn manage to see zombies popping out of the swamp, but naturally no one believes them. Instead, the sheriff declares that it’s a “renegade gator” (what’s that? a gator who doesn’t know to stay on the reservation and run a casino?), and puts a bounty on it. The upshot, naturally, is that the zombies are given so much more fodder. Them, and so many swamp-bathing beauties that I almost believe skinny-dipping to be the Florida state sport.

A note here: One of the great budget-savers of these set-piece killings is that they can largely be filmed without bothering to mike them, or even foley in background noises; just spooky music and the occasional dubbed-in scream at the end. (Note to filmmakers using this technique: Remember to dub in the scream. We’ve got several scenes here where the mouth opens, and apparently air comes out, but there’s nothing but the musical score to keep us company.)

I suppose this is a good time to talk about that score, which is evenly divided between little hillbilly guitar riffs and random plunking on a Moog synthesizer. That, and a country ballad playing on a car radio (and filling in for the un-miked action, of course) as a couple on a drive have engine trouble, pull over, and get chased through the woods by a handful of zombies.

We don’t mean no harm to you good people on the earth;
We only want to show you what you could be worth.
We just want your body, we already have a mind.
So if you will cooperate, you’ll be helping all mankind.

There won’t be any more hard times, and everyone will come into the red.
First you must let a little one dominate inside your head.

We promise that the strong will live, but the weak will have a ball;
Sickness will leave forever, there’ll be happiness for all.

Which I suppose is the best clue we get as to what is causing the dead to rise — that and the flashback we get from one girl who Reporter Tom tracks down, the only living witness to the houseboat sinking mentioned at the first; her story is that a really fake-looking meteor fell on the houseboat, knocking it to pieces and killing all occupants, and turning her boyfriend on the shore into some weird radiation-burned thingie.

I’d like to say that there’s a resolution in here somewhere, but there isn’t; Emmet gets et, as well as the game warden who’d joined the party, and Tom and Shawn survive in a rowboat, beating the dead away from the side. They survive the night. That’s it. There’s no grandiose solution to the problem of the dead; neither is there closure to the personal stories of Tom and Shawn, or even the end of this particular chapter (as one can see in the endings of Romero’s Dead movies); they just survive the night and wake up in the morning in the boat. The end.

Right about here is where I usually make some smart remarks about the quality or non-quality of the movie under discussion. But smart remarks aren’t forthcoming. It’s just a bad movie, period — technically on the level of Nail Gun Massacre, and only marginally better in entertainment value. It’s the kind of amateur auteur movie that were produced in every locale of the U.S., and which usually fade into complete obscurity. The only reason that The Alien Dead still has any sort of availability at all is the later success of Fred Olen Ray in his subsequent endeavors.

I’m just glad that he got better. The world doesn’t need another Greydon Clark.