aka Revenge of the Living Dead, aka Zombie Graveyard

• Directed by “Benjamin Clark” (aka Bob Clark)
• Written by Benjamin Clark and Alan Ormsby
• Starring
  • Alan Ormsby
  • Valerie Mamches
  • Anya Ormsby
  • Paul Cronen
  • Jane Daly

I got kinda sidetracked the night I planned to watch this; before I realized it, it was 11:30pm. Everyone else had long ago gone to bed, so in an effort not to disturb them (you never know how much yelling and screaming there’ll be in these movies) I watched it on the little TV in the Cold Fusion Media Center, instead of the big set out in the family room.

Well, there was indeed much screaming. However, it was mostly me, yelling and pleading with the movie: “For the love of Pete, will you please get on with it!!” I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a movie that so perversely avoids, for as long as possible, actually telling the story.

“Whaddaya mean, I look like I should have a fake French accent?”

We open in a misty graveyard — far too promising a beginning, believe me — as the old caretaker spies a dark figure standing by a grave. He approaches, only to have dead eyes turn on him! A second zombie leaps out of the darkness, and the two cart off the caretaker’s inert form.

Meanwhile, a boat comes to shore, and we’re introduced to the most odious, annoying, thoroughly unenjoyable cast of characters ever. I mean, ever. I challenge anyone to come up with a worse bunch of pissheads to spend an hour and a half with. I Still Know What You Did Last Summer? Nope. Prison of the Dead? Hardly. The Blair Witch Project? Don’t make me laugh — these idiots make the three lost filmmakers look like the Waltons.

Our cast is headlined by Alan (Alan Ormsby), who is ostensibly a film director; all the other characters are in his cast. He wears the ugliest pants in all creation, and a moustache and beard stolen from a street artist in Paris. He talks like that guy in your high school musicals who was supposed to sound upper-class and hoity and failed miserably, and his forced evil laugh gets annoying really, really quick.

The rest of the cast aren’t even that interesting. There’s Paul (Paul Cronin), the token stronger guy; Jeff (Jeff Gillen), the fat guy; Anya (Anya Ormsby), the wacked-out New Age type; Val (Valerie Memches — are you getting the trend yet?), the Jewish mouth, and Terry (Jane Daly — ooh, what a break from the pattern), Paul’s girlfriend, and the only halfway attractive person of either sex. And there may have been one or two others; honestly, with everyone wearing butt-ugly early Seventies fashion, they all kind of blurred together.

“The ghosts speak to me, and the ghosts say I should have these canned goods!”

Why Alan has brought his cast to this island (it’s an island, by the way) is never explained; he obviously didn’t come to shoot, as no one has any filmmaking equipment. (In fact, the project for which he has assembled the cast is never discussed.) Maybe it’s to sample the ambience, or to browbeat them some more. Whatever the reason, everybody already has a favorite activity to fill the time. They snipe at each other. Constantly. Non-stop. Bitch, bitch, whine, whine, snark, snark, gripe, gripe. Again, it’s already old within the first sixty seconds — which means there’s only another five thousand, one hundred sixty seconds of more of the same to go.

And this isn’t just dialogue as other things are happening, no — this is the movie. Long sections are nothing more than characters insulting one another and complaining for minutes on end. Which means that my plot summary, absent the pointless bickering, may seem awfully short. Appreciate your good fortune; the movie seemed to warp the laws of temporal mechanics, allowing for a tortuous version of time dilation effective on a stationary body (me).

So. Ten minutes into the film, Alan manages to lead his cast to the graveyard, all leaning stones and mist in the midst of gnarled trees. The island was once a resort, which is why they have a cemetery there. (The actual resort facilities never make an appearance. Imagine that.) There’s also a caretaker’s house, to which Alan leads them to break in. They set up shop there, then Alan takes them back to the cemetery, where he pulls out a dusty old grimoire and puts on a sorcerer’s robe that he apparently stole from the theater department. We’re going to raise the dead, he announces! And everyone is apparently so desperate for work in his movie, they don’t tell him exactly where he can stuff his grimoire.

The dig up the freshest grave and open the coffin — and when Jeff reaches in to drag out the body at Alan’s bequest, the corpse reaches up and grabs him by the throat and –

Somehow, I don’t think “Live long and prosper” is the appropriate sentiment at this juncture.

<peterfalk>Don’t worry, it’s not a real zombie. I’m telling you this because you might think that the plot is getting under way. It’s not. This “zombie,” as well as the other one who comes bursting out of the trees, are both just people with make-up on that Alan planted there earlier. All of this made Jeff pee his pants, but aside from that, there’s no danger here.</peterfalk>

Oh, Alan, such a card. For reason which he never really explains (he’s a director, he doesn’t have to justify his sensibilities), he had these two made-up friends (who, by the way, are very very obviously gay — how’s that for comedy?) dig up the actual occupant of the coffin, one Orville Dunworth, and set that body aside while one of the guys took his place. In fact, these two jokers are the two “zombies” we saw in the first scene. And the caretaker, who actually lives in the house that the troupe has taken over? Oh, he’s trussed up and gagged, leaning against the same tree that Orville the Corpse is leaning against. That’s right, folks, Alan thought this pointless little joke so integral to the evening’s festivities that he actually conspired to commit assault and breaking-and-entering for kicks.

Blah blah blah, Alan still purposes to raise the dead, and Orville (Seth Sklarey, in case you care), is a likely candidate, so Alan drapes him over his own tombstone and then reads from the grimoire a long-winded prayer to Satan to raise the dead.

And nothing happens. I mean, more so than the entire movie up to this point. The dead distinctly don’t rise. (Although I guess we better have a loooooong sloooooow pan across the headstones just to be sure…) So then Alan launches into a tirade against Satan, calling him all sorts of unsavory things. Then Val (she’s the Jewish one, you remember) calls Alan all kind of unsavory names, and then she takes a stab at calling Lucifer out. (There went another ten minutes.)

“Right here? A little higher?”

With no walking dead, Alan settles for the next best thing (the still-dead dead), and has Orville carried back to the cabin while the two gay ghouls refill the gravesite. Once back at the cabin, Alan starts treating Orville like his best friend, and has Jeff marry them, and when Terry objects to the weirdness and pointlessness (you go, sister!), he makes her apologize to Orville or else she’ll lose her role in the movie. (Seems to me that this whole weekend adventure should be rock-solid evidence as to why none of these people ever want to share an elevator with Alan, much less take direction from him on a guaranteed ill-fated movie project.) All of this is becoming some weird and completely unentertaining precursor to Weekend at Bernie’s.

Oh, and Anya is also freaking out — she’s more than a little burnt-out to begin with, and she starts saying a whole bunch of stuff about ghosts and respecting the dead and starts calling Alan “eee-vil,” which I think was his goal all along…

So. Finally. We’re a full hour (!!!!) into the running time of the movie. Now, wasn’t there something supposed to happen in here, something that’s usually considered a sine qua non for the whole zombie-flick genre?

Oh yeah, that’s right — how about THE DEAD FINALLY RISING FROM THEIR DAMNED GRAVES?

Which they finally do, attacking the two gay guys still burying the empty coffin. One they do in immediately, the other gets away with a mortal wound and manages to get to the caretaker’s house before expiring. The zombies get the caretaker, too, who has been sitting trussed up this whole damned time. And I’d like to point out that the makeup on the “actual” zombies isn’t appreciably better than the cotton’n'latex on the faces of the gay ghouls.

Well, the dead all come loping down the path to the house, so it’s time to do a Cliff Notes recap of Night of the Living Dead: Our [cough] protagonists manage to board up the entrances in about twenty seconds flat, and then Paul hatches a plan to get back to the cemetery, where they left the shotgun (which was in the big box with the grimoire and the robe — the latter two items were brought back to the house, the box and the gun were inexplicably left behind.) The scheme is for the others to unboard the front door as a distraction, while he slips out the back.

Remember the tragic break-for-it in Night of the Living Dead? This is sorta like that, except instead of being tragic, it’s just pitiful. Paul makes it maybe a half-dozen steps before zombies eat him.

Come on, dude. Rise from the grave. Or moan. Or even twitch a little. Anything.

It’s finally at this point that somebody has the great idea to look in the grimoire — after all, that’s what started this all. (Bet Paul wished they’d thought of that before he became zombie kibble.) Alan finds a spell to reverse the reanimation, but it requires the “sacrifice corpse” (i.e., Orville) to be returned to his grave before it’ll work. Alas, they can’t, so he just reads the spell anyway, hoping for some kind of effect, and it does something, because the dead all kind of wander off as if completely disinterested. (Boy, I can relate.) So the survivors try to make a break for the boat through the cemetery, but it turns out that the dead simply retreated a bit, and now that their prey is in the Great Outdoors, it’s buffet time.

So Alan and one of the women (I swear, I don’t remember which one — they’ve all got long dark hair, and I didn’t care about a one of them) make it back to the house and run upstairs; the dead start storming up, and Alan pushes his companion down the stairs to slow them down. He gets to his room, and bolts the door…

…And remembers that this is where he stored Orville, who apparently doesn’t like being the butt of a thousand inane jokes. Chomp. The end.

Looking at this movie across the yawning gap of almost thirty years since its initial release, I can only say this: It looks like it sucked to begin with, and it hasn’t aged well. Between Alan’s garish clothes and the electronic “ping, poong” soundtrack, one never has a moment to forget that this was shot during that famous era when Taste in all forms was dead and forgotten. And even without that, dear heavens — listening to these cretins is almost unbearable. This is one of those movies where, had my VCR eaten the tape, I wouldn’t have felt like I missed anything.

Director Benjamin (aka Bob) Clark has managed to make a living for himself since that time, and most of his output has been at least measurably better than this best-forgotten (and thus inexplicably re-released) mess. His high point has probably been helming the perennial favorite A Christmas Story, while Porky’s, Black Christmas and Murder by Decree are also held in fond memory by some, though I daresay each is held in esteem by a different demographic. (He also directed Deathdream that same year, with which this movie share more than a few members of cast and crew.) On the other hand, he’s also been the nut behind the wheel on such forgettables as The Bimini Code and Turk 182, as well as the oh-so-reviled Baby Geniuses. So while this movie may be his worst outing, it certainly isn’t a completely alien occurance.

I should also point out that co-writer and star Alan Ormsby has mercifully spared later audiences his on-screen presence, remaining behind the scenes as the writer on such movies as The Substitute. And The Substitute 2. And, lest we forget, The Substitute 3. Insert your own joke; my brain’s too tired.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 10
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 2
  • Jane Daly (Terry) played “Varria” in the TNG episode “The Most Toys”
  • Robert Phillips (Roy — who? I don’t remember) played the Orion officer in the original Star Trek pilot “The Cage”