AKA : revenge of the dead people & the Dead People
Tag Lines: In order to live, they will take you one by one ... and no one will hear you scream!
Terror you won't want to remember - In a film you won't be able to forget
Meet Albert. Albert likes good music, motor trips by moonlight, and...eating human flesh. Albert is one of the...(Dead People)
Once this art house / horror film, released in 1973, was feared lost and only a handfull of people remembered this gem brought to the cinema by the people who went on to do HOWARD THE DUCK amongst other things.
This film looks like many of the films DAVID LYNCH became famous for later and the Art house stuff does not detract from what was a proto zombie flick.
The story takes place in the California coastal town of Point Dune, where a reclusive artist named Joseph Lang (Royal Dano, KILLER KLOWNS FROM OUTERSPACE) lives and works in a large house on the beach. His daughter, Arletty (Marianna Hill, SCHIZOID), having received a series of increasingly strange letters from the old man, has come to Point Dune to check on his condition. The letters and his diary all lead us to believe that he has either gone insane or has been taken over by evil forces. She, of course, discovers that he has mysteriously disappeared, but is even more alarmed at the strange people who populate the town, all of whom seem to be suspicious of her.
Some time in the past a strange blood moon had turned the locals into raw meat eating maniacs waiting for the second coming of.. well we are never too sure if its Satan or Jesus or maybe the pizza delivery man, whatever. The locals wait for the second coming by building bonfires on the beach and staring at the surf whilst bleeding from the eyeballs, very nice.
Three drifters roll into town and having been turned away from the towns motels turn up at Lang's apartment seeking shelter. The drifters are an odd crew, these being the mysteriously inquisitive aristocrat, Thom, ( Michael Greer - THE ROSE), and his attractive “travelling companions” (lovers), Toni (Joy Bang - PLAY IT AGAIN SAM) and Laura (Anitra Ford, an ex wheel of fortune bimbette also in INVASION OF THE BEE GIRLS). Out of place is never seen as a bad thing by me as long as it doesn’t hinder the enjoyment, and these three characters definitely enhance the film, with Toni and Laura adding a sexy side to the movie. However, it is not only the eye-candy that the two runaway bombshells provide that makes them an enhancing feature, but it is also their strange and unclear reasons for being here? In fact, why is a lady-killer like Thom so interested in Pointe Dune? Thom’s interest in the “Blood Moon” seems unnatural and unlikely. Perhaps he shares the same obsession with the moon and the ocean that the residents in Pointe Dune exhibit or is he the returning Messiah?
Both the girls meet suitably gory deaths, one in a supermarket full of zombies munching on raw meat from the freezer cabinet and the other in a cinema, also, full of zombies watching a western. Great deaths but the gore is minimal reflecting maybe the cinematic mores of 1973.
The film is disjointed and you get the feeling that the story does not follow the scripted idea, there is a series of random flashbacks hinting at cannabalism and satanic ritual however they seem at odds with the plot and add nothing of substance. At other times this seems like a version of SALEMS LOT, and maybe STEPHEN KING saw the movie before he published the book in 1975. It makes sense that he would have been writing this when the film was first released.
There is a great cameo appearence by Elisha Cook Jnr (ROSEMARY'S BABY)as the town drunk.
All in all a beautifully shot fim , the interiors are covered by amazing murals and at the end of the day I didnt feel I'd wasted 90 minutes of my life despite the lack of pace in the middle of the film
3 moons and possibly a beret.
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