I must admit that I have this strange grudging respect for the ridiculously prolific and chronically ham-fisted schlock movie master Fred Olen Ray. Sure, a majority of Fred's flicks are total crap, but I still admire the tireless, albeit hopeless Mr. Ray for trying again and again and again to produce a halfway decent picture. I honestly think Fred gives his proverbial all to any given Grade Z dreckfest that he labors on; the key problem is Fred's so-called "all" doesn't amount to diddly squat quality wise. Still, like I said before, at least the guy tries.
"The Alien Dead" was Fred's second disastrously woebegone foray into pure cinematic sludge right after the still unreleased "The Brain Leeches" and it's probably one of the all-time worst pieces of witless'n'worthless celluloid swill Fred has ever regurgitated upon a hapless, unsuspecting public. the banal, no big freakin' deal plot copiously rips off both "Night of the Living Dead" and "Shock Waves": A fallen meteorite causes a bunch of bayou bumpkins to plumb mutate into ferocious, rot-faced, amphibious cannibalistic zombies who attack and devour lots of totally deserving hillbilly dorks and dorkettes in a heretofore sleepy and uneventful Florida swamp hamlet. Useless backwater sheriff Buster Crabbe (who looks amazingly trim and fit in his unfortunate final filmic fling) basically just takes up space and acts dumber than a tree stump. It's up to both snoopy newspaper reporter Ray Roberts and earnest game warden Mike Bonavia to save the day.
Spectacularly shoddy and ramshackle, this agonizingly abysmal clinker represents an ungodly apotheosis of incredibly pitiful cinematic crumminess. We've got fumbling, clueless direction from the always dependably dreadful Mr. Ray (who also cameos as a doomed hick hunter). Then there's a sorry cast of washed-up has-beens and understandably obscure never-wheres who couldn't act their way out of a moldy wet paper bag. The choppy editing, lousy cinematography (the frequent excruciatingly slow fade-outs are especially crude while the strenuously drawn out slow-motion zombie attack is downright sad to behold), poor, scratchy, badly synced sound, lame, phony minimalistic make-up f/x, and comparably dismal (extremely less than) special f/x (the crashing meteorite resembles a large orange flair) are uniformly pathetic. Several cornball, intensely unlistenable country-and-western songs whine away on the soundtrack and a watery, off-key, annoyingly droning score likewise inflicts a massive headache on the luckless viewer. The really horrible campy dialogue, equally terrible and faltering attempts at deliberately dumb humor, and a wholly insufferable bunch of obnoxiously stupid redneck characters further diminish any entertainment value this turkey might have possessed. Keep your eyes peeled for an astonishingly obvious continuity gaffe involving a three-pronged pitchfork which magically sprouts an extra fourth prong after an old lady zombie gets impaled on it. Of course, there's plentiful, but weak gore (a dog snacks on a bisected corpse, zoms graphically nosh on limbs and entrails, victims spit up mouthfuls of blood as they're being snacked on, that sort of lame, humdrum nonsense) and even a little sprinkling of gratuitous female nudity courtesy of a skinny-dipping chick who gets assaulted by a zombie while swimming topless in a lake. In short, Fred Olen Ray's singularly screwy, cheerfully slipshod, and blatantly cruddy film-making anti-style is richly apparent in this early masterwork. In fact, if hideously maladroit cinematic offal was indeed a kind of warped, deviant and degenerate quasi-art form, then this smokin' stinkeroonie would be its proudly putrid platonic essence.
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