Son of exploitation filmmaker Albert Band (I Bury the Living [1958]), the Los Angeles-born, Rome-raised Charles Band produced and directed his first feature in 1973, a spoof of Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (1972) filmed in beautiful downtown Burbank. Over the course of the next thirty years, Band fils bankrolled and/or directed a panoply of low budget programmers, including the whimsical soft core Cinderella (1977), the unsettling rural horror film Tourist Trap (1979), the 3-D sleeper Parasite (1982) starring a young Demi Moore and the cult favorite Trancers (1985), which provided an early credit for future Academy Award winner Helen Hunt. Throughout his career, Band established a number of production companies, namely Empire Pictures (which he later sold to Halloween producer Irwin Yablans), Full Moon Pictures and Moonbeam Entertainment, while also founding the pioneer video distribution firm Media Home Entertainment.

To release his films on video cassette, Band founded Wizard Video. A popular brand during the "big box" heyday of VHS, Wizard also handled the distribution of John Waters' Pink Flamingos (1972), Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Meir Zarchi's I Spit on Your Grave (1978), Lucio Fulci's Zombie (1979) and Abel Ferrara's The Driller Killer (1979). Never one to pass up a chance to maximize profits, Band released through Wizard Video a triptych of compilation films, which connected clips from catalog titles under a common theme. The Best of Sex and Violence (1981) was narrated by John Carradine and followed by Filmgore (1983), hosted by Elvira. Zombiethon (1986) was an attempt to cash in on the high profile releases the previous year of Dan O'Bannon's The Return of the Living Dead, Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator and George Romero's Day of the Dead. Though zombies seemed in 1985 to be very much on the rise, a proper craze took considerably longer to assert itself.

Given that Band and director Ken Dixon were working exclusively with Wizard-licensed titles, the fact that they narrowed the field even further to focus on zombie movies makes Zombiethon a bit like nouvelle cuisine - especially when compared to the structurally similar but better funded Terror in the Aisles (1984) from Universal, which included classic clips from Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Psycho (1960), The Exorcist (1973), The Omen (1976), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Alien (1979), Scanners (1981) and The Thing (1982). Zombiethon's roster of assembled shockers runs to only seven examples of the subgenre - two of which are not even zombie movies - while such seminal titles as the Val Lewton-produced I Walked with a Zombie (1943), Ken Wiederhorn's Shock Waves (1977) and George Romero's "Dead" trilogy are conspicuous in their absence.

Following a gauzy curtain warmer in which a Catholic school girl is chased by a zombie into Los Angeles' El Rey Theater bursting with pug ugly revenants, Zombiethon opens with money scenes from Fulci's Zombie. A bit like serving the birthday cake before the vegetable platter, this tack toploads the feature with the best bits - the sundry shotgun splatterings, throat bitings and eyeball splinterings that got the Italian import banned in several countries. After nearly twenty minutes, Zombie yields to yet another monster-and-the-girl vignette and nearly a reel of footage culled from Jean Rollin's disowned Zombie Lake (1981). Sagging in its midsection under the dead weight of Jess Franco's draggy Oasis of the Living Dead (1981), Riccardo Freda's zombie-free Fear (1980) and Pierre Chevalier's transparent gorilla-on-the-loose movie The Invisible Dead (1971), Zombiethon comes back on-target with choice moments from the Ted V. Mikels schlockfest The Astro-Zombies (1968) before fading out at the 73-minute mark.

It would seem that the ready availability of most of the films referenced in Zombiethon during the subsequent DVD era would eclipse any need to revisit it... and yet a look back may leave with older viewers a sweetly nostalgic aftertaste. As television had flipped the script on the primacy of feature films in the 1950s, so the advent of home video allowed TV watchers a measure of sovereignty with regard to their own entertainment. The in-for-the-night inertia of the VHS era, during which film fans often assembled like-minded geeks for tape trades or double/triple/quadruple bills of rare and/or exotic films, begged tolerance for what might have been branded in less forgiving circles unwatchable and interminable. Produced with an eye on the bottom line but with obvious fondness, Zombiethon is best viewed a quarter century after the fact as a product of its time, a relic of the past (at the 42 minute mark there is a glimpse of the West Hollywood's Pan-Pacific Auditorium, seen in such films as Funny Lady (1975), Xanadu (1980) and Miracle Mile (1988) and gutted by fire in 1989) that is best dug up for no better reason than because saner minds have advised so strongly against it.

Producer: Charles Band, Ken Dixon
Director: Ken Dixon
Makeup: David Lady, Joe Reader
Cast: K. Janyl Caudle (School Girl), Tracy Burton (Bikini Girl), Paula Singleton (Gown Girl), Janelle Lewis (Voodoo Queen), Janessa Lester (Young Mother), Randolph Roehbling, Chuck Spero, Mike Groves, Guy Thorpe, David Lady, Laura Lady, Dante Renta, Frank Olechnicki (Zombies).
C-73m.

by Richard Harland Smith