A fistful-of-nickels budget American zombie film from 1980!?! Oh, I’m in!
So, apparently, a meteor strikes a houseboat and turns all aboard into zombies, who in turn, eat all the alligators. And when they run out of alligators, they start to eat the locals of this small Florida town. We, the viewers, tune in after all of the alligators have been missing for a couple of months, and the first resident is taken. A local reporter, a fish & game warden, and a couple of police, (pronounced PŌ-lice,) investigate as incidents increase in frequency.
What we get from this is a snapshot of small-town redneck Americana on par with Boggy Creek, (minus the budget and acting skills.) Some of the accents are amazingly horrible, but they’re dialogue seems genuinely swamptrotting, hillbilly lingo, and as convincing as one can expect when recited by actors of the stature of non-professional-bordering-on-terrible (with the exception of Buster Crabbe, in his last role, as the hard-nosed sheriff.)
Weak premise, bad acting, and amateur special effects aside, this is a surprisingly straight-forward and easy story to follow. The misleading, (and frankly, stupid,) name, ‘The Alien Dead,’ only implies that the undead were caused by the meteor. No aliens were employed in this film whatsoever! This is a strictly a zombie movie.
And those zombies here are mostly Romeros, (slow moving, and flesh eating,) but no transference of zombism by a bite was shown, and a zombie was killed but a speargun shot through the chest, so the Rules of Romero are not firmly followed.
Also, these are semi-sub-aquatic zombies, reminiscent of those Nazi zombies in 1977’s ‘Shock Wave,’ (on which The Alien Dead’s director/screenwriter Fred Olen Ray also worked!) This does make for some fairly bloodless kills, but the movie does not fear going for some attempt at gore.
And HOLY MOLY!!! Bonus points for being the first and only zombie movie for a ‘death by fro-comb' scene!
Filmed on an incredibly low budget, (allegedly $12,000.US dollars,) and went straight to drive-ins or VHS, The Alien Dead had bad acting, (again, except for Buster Crabbe!) bad special effects, a weak explanation for the outbreak, unengaging characters, poor film quality, and was clearly aimed at fans of recent late 70s zombie films, but somehow, despite all of these flaws, (or who knows, maybe because of them,) I enjoyed this movie a lot. The corny yokels with their redneck dialogue being overacted by Acting 101 dropouts somehow… worked for me. And I would rate this higher than the score it received when held up to my Zombie Movie Review Rubric - That heartless device scored it at a 1.2 points out of a possible 4. And maybe it deserves that grade, I mean, it WAS really bad. But I liked it!
Check out this YouTube trailer for yourself:
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