"Zombiethon" (1986) d/ Ken Dixon

Much coveted of late among handle bar-mustachioed genre collectors of the day are the vhs releases from Wizard Video, often packaged in oversized cardboard boxes with eye-grabbing art. Back in the early to mid-eighties, when I was very much obsessed with such things myself, Wizard, as run by B-movie staple Charles Band, was certainly among my favorite companies, my small box copy of Fulci's Zombi (1979) was among my first purchases, as was my big box H.G. Lewis' 2,000 Maniacs! (1964), which was released under the Force label (File Under Useless Info: pre-dating the big box Continental release, which had a gory screenshot instead of the original poster art that Force chose). Thirty years later, I sat down to a later Wizard release, in tonight's review, Zombiethon, a compilation of genre clips much like the company's others, The Best of Sex and Violence (1981) and Filmgore (1983), that I'd last seen thirty years ago as an impulse rental at one of my local video store haunts, drawn in... by the big box and the excellent art. What else?


You don't find roses growing on stocks of clover, so think it over.
After watching a grown woman in a schoolgirl outfit being chased by a low budget zombie into the El Rey Theater in Los Angeles, she finds herself surrounded by a low budget zombie audience, intent on watching splattery highlights from zombie movies that just so happened to be available for purchase, in most cases, on Wizard Video. It all starts off promisingly enough, with Fulci's Zombi (1979) providing neck-bitten cops, zombie v. tiger shark, Olga Karlatos' eye v. wooden splinter, and Auretta Gay's toothy tracheotomy at the mouth of the wormy eyed poster zombie highlights. It's mostly downhill from there. A robotic-looking cyborg zombie harasses a sunbather and then Jean Rollin's dreadfully inept Zombie Lake (1980) is next, and many underwater full crotch shots of aquatic tarts about to be fatally dunked by green-skinned nazis follow. If you weren't goose stepped to sleep by the last clips, Jess Franco's amateurish Oasis of the Zombies (1982) also provides some nazi zombies, rotten for all the wrong reasons.


"I was turned to steel in the great magnetic field when I traveled time for the future of mankind, y'know..."
Next to enter the living dead-packed theater on Wilshire Boulevard for a linking segment are a young woman and her small daughter, after which Riccardo Fredda's Fear aka Follia omicida (1981) serves up some nightmarish giallo weirdness and precious little zombie action. Fake bats, fake spiders, a chainsaw, perhaps, but not a whole helluva lot of zombies. Things don't improve from there, with Chevalier's Dr.Orloff's Invisible Monster aka/ The Invisible Dead (1970) as the next film to be featured. Was that a fucking invisible gorilla I just saw? Franco is again represented, with scenes from his 1973 effort, A Virgin Among the Living Dead, a notoriously incoherent mess, further butchered by cuts, where he appears in a supporting role, roaming the halls and spouting nonsense to a severed chicken head. After more corny rubber-masked zombie gags at the theater, it seems only fitting that the unfulfilling compilation wraps up with excerpts from Ted V. Mikels' Astro Zombies (1968), a movie that  neither John Carradine's three thousand dollar contribution nor Tura Satana's bountiful bobblers could save.


Take a coffin, built for two, add a girl and a ghoul, that's a game for me and you now!
I'd already seen or owned all but one of the movies featured in Zombiethon by the time I'd seen it (more historical minutiae: I screened it with 1986's David DeCoteau's Dreamaniac as a double bill, as they'd both turned up on the shelves the same day) so my enthusiasm for the production was terse at best, to begin with. In the end, it lasted slightly longer than my attention span after throwing their Atari release of Halloween into the ol' wood grain 2600 console when I was fourteen. Thirty years later in the era of dvd and Blu-ray, I'm no longer excited by the lure of Wizard's catalog (certainly not replacing them on vhs for a hundred a pop, either), but that doesn't stop me from occasionally biting on Charles Band's disc releases, as a trip down Nostalgia Road, to a time when that huge box full of lurid imagery actually did mean the world to me. On the scale, one Wop sounds about right.


I sit and wonder, why oh, why you left me, oh Sandy...

"Filmgore" (1983) d/ Ken Dixon

Growing up as an avid horror nut in the pre-Blu ray eighties, few things rivaled a glorious big box VHS tape glaring out at you from your shelves of video-based mania, and by the time tonight's review was released, I was already familiar with the Force Video label from the big boxed 2,000 Maniacs(1965) that'd I'd mail ordered off of the back of an ish of Fangoria. Force also distributed stuff like Jess Franco's Female Vampire (1973) and 1986's Zombiethon compilation, both of which we'll eventually get around to looking at here, I'm sure.  That this was a compilation of clips from various effective (and not so effective) genre hits of the day, hosted by the screamiest of dreamy brunette scream queens, Elvira (who I'd always preferred to look at over schlocky hosts of the era like Commander U.S.A. and Zacherle for reasons that should be obvious to anybody that's male and alive), only hastened the time between fumbling with the video tape and popping it into the ol' Panasonic top loader in the parlor...


Elvira's(Cassandra Peterson) always been a top log in my pile of "Would."
After several rapid fire miss and miss Forry-styled puns from the Mistress of the Dark, with her trademark neckline that dips like Dallas Cowboy Walt Garrison used to in chewing tobacco commercials of the seventies, we're treated to a twenty minute edit of H.G. Lewis' Blood Feast (1963), from Ancient Weird Religious Rites to a fitting death for garbage. Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) follows, with twenty minutes of grainy VHS glory, then Elvie graciously googly eyes us into Abel Ferrara's Driller Killer (1979) before 1976's Drive-In Massacre is inventively edited around Elvira's flirty cut ups. Ted V. Mikels' Astro Zombies (1968) comes next, with machete-wieling Astro-men, John Carradine filling laboratory beakers with dry ice, and Tura Satana filling a cocktail gown with...well, Tura, naturally. And we're only halfway home.


"So...what do you want to do on our next date?" asks Fuad Ramses (Mal Arnold).
Next comes 1970's Carnival of Blood, with it's H.G. Lewis-styled eye gougings on the ultra-cheap, and Rocky Balboa's brother-in-law. Even a twenty minute edit is too long for this. The murky Dr. Jekyll's Dungeon of Death (1979) follows, with it's basement of martial arts cat fights-in-velour jogging pants and then it's the micro-budgeted charm of Don Dohler's Fiend(1980) which segues into H.G. Lewis' 2,000 Maniacs!(1964), and finally, we see the lowlights of Snuff(1980), which include the updated inserted mutilation ending that's really the only reason anybody'd ever wanna see the movie in the first place. Hasty video titles scroll over a shot of Elvira holding a candle in front of an oversized demonic prop. Two hours?? Where does the time go.


Tura firma: Dig the peerless pins on that deliciously dangerous dish.
Director Dixon would churn out a handful of these clip compilations (thinly disguised as documentaries) throughout the early eighties, like Wizard Video's big box The Best of Sex and Violence (1981), Famous T & A (1982), and the aforementioned Zombiethon (1986), before helming Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity the following year. Cassandra Peterson would score big with Movie Macabre, which ran from 1981 to 1984 and showcased her Elvira character doing much of the same; cracking jokes, and flashing cleavage, between commercial breaks in B-movie action. The series would be resurrected for one season in 2010-'11. She would also star in her own cult movie vehicles, Elvira: Mistress of the Dark in 1988, and Elvira's Haunted Hills (2001).  Tonight's review could have used a whole lot more Elvira, and a lot less B-sleaze, most of which hardcore fans have seen multiple times before, and in my opinion, the reason it merits a lone Wop on the ratings scale.


Another victim falls prey to Orange Cruel-lious.