You might not believe when you hear this (if you’re listening anyway). Still, some thirteen billion years ago, the universe created formaldehyde, forming from various asteroids at the birth of our known solar system. Being around for such a long time, it would be assumed others would have discovered this ball of cosmic gas. Still, it wasn’t until a German scientist, who was tired of dead bodies exploding before his very eyes, truly understood the value and need for such materials (talk about an explosive supernova). Although readily available in the cosmos, the place to find this chemical would be in a mortuary, where recently deceased individuals are filled with the chemical so as not to “Big Bang” all over the galaxy! Though never having experienced something like this (and praying in the mortuary chapel I never will), I do understand what it feels like to have your mind blown after watching a pure red-blooded all-American B-movie, much like the headache-inducing cheapy-creepy shlock classic The Corpse Eaters, so hideously boycotted at the time the producers felt the need to add in clips of a doctor puking into a barfbag to warn audiences of the hideous sights they were about to feast upon (if full, you can also use your popcorn bucket)!
This film does get to have something engraved on its tombstone as being one of the first Canadian gore movies (take that Bob Clark) to come out of the great white north, but before busting out the chisel and hammer, the history of the film has a few toe tags to answer for. Written, produced, and financed by a teenager named Lawrence Zazelenchuk, who made the film on the bones he collected from owning a defunct Canadian drive-in, this production was certainly lensed with pure spirits and hearty dispositions of local theatre actors and wannabe Cronenbergs who felt they could make a keepsake on a budget of $36,000. They were gravely mistaken. Wooden performances, delinquent film lab bills, and going through not one but two directors to embalm their masterpiece to the screen, Zazelenchuk soon learned he should have gone into the lucrative funeral business instead of getting buried by the movie industry. Stiff acting (someone make sure they’re breathing), bonkers plot points, and pretty neat make-up effects by (you guessed it) Zazelenchuk can’t save something that was autopsied on the slab before not going out to theatres. Once Zazelenchuk retorted some loose change from the furnace, he did premier the originally stitched together longer version at his drive-in to mild success, but after sealing a deal with a disreputable distributor, who only bought the film for a tax write-off (no, it wasn’t Warner Brothers), the film was shelved for almost twenty years. When they unearthed the negative in the mid-90s, only an hour of this celluloid delicacy remained for the viewing (instead of flowers, please send donations in honor of the Vancouver Film Institute to prevent such undertakings from coming alive).
Before the credits roll, an announcer boldly states, “Attention Please. The motion picture you are about to see contains some very stomach-upsetting scenes. The producers (again, and only, Zazelenchuk) feel a moral obligation to warn every ticket buyer about this fact – this movie is rotten!” (Okay, maybe they didn’t say the last part, but as the guy in the green coat barfs, you know they were thinking it). As what remains of Zazelenchuk’s epic tome begins, it’s been pretty profitable times for the local mortician, who loves to theorize and contemplate the pillars and depravity of the boy he is URNing to bury as he drives around the cemetery near his funeral home in his 1970s Cadillac hearse. Without checking his blind spots, he misses a group of hippie-dippie swingers who decide to not only raise the dead with a séance in the graveyard but raise a few other things to help them get through the cozy evening. They end up raising the recently buried dead, who are starving from all those hours wasting away to nothing, bloodthirsty to eat at Joe’s legs and arms! Will our counter-culture swappers run away before it is too late, or will they wake up and vault away to safety? You’ll have to arm yourself with a crowbar and crack open a moldy VHS copy, buried deep within the crypt of forgotten classics (for a good reason).
Scattering the ashes in fifty-seven minutes (“I just went to the bathroom, what’d I miss?” “The entire movie, pal!”), when the distributors nailed the lid on the film’s coffin, Zazelenchuk sold his drive-in and bought a hotel where he allegedly drank himself to an early burial at the age of thirty-six. The film can be seen on most streamers from the movie recently rising from its cobwebby tomb in the Saint Ed Wood Public Domain Cemetery (ashes to ashes, dusty film cans to dusty film cans). If there is anything we can learn from this film it is the next time you walk in a cemetery at night to raise some hell (and meat-gnawshing zombies), before you kick the bucket, make sure you take a final look up to the stars filled with formaldehyde and as the zombies rip apart your flesh, be respectful and show proper graveside manners.
