Zombie Buffet

As I sketch in my sketchbooks I usually have trash playing on the streaming box connected to the television. Despite having a number of pay channels I scored during Black Friday specials, I tend to tune into TubiTV which is a free channel supported by advertising. The commercials become tedious, but most of the streaming channels now rely on ads whether they are free or not. At least Tubi is honest about it.

Tubi also has a deep library of the kind of crap I enjoy. Yes, it does have A-list movies that most normal people can enjoy, but it is stacked deep with Grade B to Grade Z schlock that I should be ashamed to admit that I’ve seen much less enjoyed. It reminds me of the mom-and-pop video shops that heralded the dawn of the home video revolution back at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s. Their shelves were stocked deep with a lot of stuff that features prominently in Tubi’s library.

That’s where Corpse Eaters (1974) comes in. I had never heard of it until I saw the movie’s spectacularly trashy theatrical poster for sale on eBay, and I knew I had to hunt the movie down. Fortunately for me, it was available on Tubi.

If the trivia on IMDB is to be believed, the producer who owned a drive-in theater up in Canada scraped together $36,000 to make a zombie siege film a la Night of the Living Dead or Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things. He probably watched those films; noted their box office takes compared to their meager budgets and thought “how hard could it be?” He gathered his hippie, stoner friends and probably paid them in weed and cases of Molson beer in lieu of actual salaries. It could be made so cheaply that it would be impossible to lose money! It was going to be fun! Let’s put on a show!

The movie starts out with a gimmick disguised as a public service announcement warning that some of the scenes are so gruesome that they will offer the audience members who have weak constitutions the opportunity to avert their eyes. The warning is footage of a middle aged man desperately trying not to vomit. This is your warning! When this guy shows, look away or you may be traumatized for life or at least lose the snacks from the concession stand!

There’s a lot of tedious padding in a funeral home in the beginning, but the story doesn’t start until the partying quartet of Canucks show up. Being young, stupid and Canadian, they drink a lot of Molson’s, boat around a lake, listen to a transistor radio, swim, and screw. It’s summer and there is no hockey so what else is there to do? Eventually they run out of beer and grow weary of their other activities so they engage in a spirited debate as to what to do with the rest of the day. They talk of buying pot and/or seeing a really boss rock show, but nobody has the bread. Eventually they decide on a thrifty but questionable alternative of hanging out in a graveyard.

What follows is a ripoff of the aforementioned Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things. The Canadians cram into a mausoleum, and the leader of the group improvises a demonic invocation as if he were faking an oral book report in high school. It must have been a slow day in hell because his improvised entreaties to the prince of darkness work! Soon the zombies sprout from their graves, and the two couples are beset by shambling hippies and draft dodgers dressed in suits from Goodwill and slathered with gray makeup.

The gagging man from the film interrupts the action to stifle vomit and warn us that something disgusting is about to happen. He could have saved the effort because the zombies make the motions of chowing down on actors splashed with stage blood and what looks like canned cranberry sauce. Mannequin appendages drenched in stage blood are thrown in for effect. IMDB suggests that there were gore scenes cut and forever lost from this movie, but I don’t think there was anything more ambitious or well done than what was included in the version I saw.

There is an escape, a trip to a hospital and a return to the funeral home which is where I started to lose interest and concentrate on my sketchbook. I would look up occasionally and see a few more instances of the gagging man, some zombie mayhem and the sad possibility that it all may have been a dream. I am a little foggy on these details, but I don’t think I’ll be returning for a second view to confirm what happened.

The undertaker winds up in a nuthouse at the end. Was it all a dream?

Corpse Eaters did its job which was to fill the bill of what was probably a horror triple feature at drive-in theaters. It was probably trailed or was followed by some other cinematic atrocity that nobody seated in an automobile was really watching either. I don’t think they were doodling in sketchbooks.