Durable B-movie actor John Saxon marks his feature directorial debut--sort of--with DEATH HOUSE, an ugly mutt of a motion picture.
Rewrites and postproduction difficulties show clearly in a tangled plot that begins with down-and-out Vietnam vet Derek Keillor (Dennis Cole) hired as a chauffeur by patriotic crook Vic Moretti (Anthony Franciosa). In no time Derek beds the mobster's sexy blonde movie-actress moll, and an angry
Moretti frames the hero for murder, getting him sent to a hellhole of a prison, where the sleazy story detours into an AIDS-inspired horror-conspiracy scenerio.
Fanatical Colonel Burgess (Saxon, doing a takeoff on Oliver North) has been covertly conducting grisly experiments on death-row residents with the lab-created HV8-B virus, initially a behavior-altering disease that will turn the average lifer into a drooling, kill-crazy lunatic ("Imagine an army
like that!" beams Burgess). But the HV8-B strain has some bad points: it's highly contagious--spread by body fluids--and victims transform into putrefying cannibal zombies. When a contaminated prison chaplain accidentally drips slime from his nose into a communion chalice, HV8-B spreads through
the cellblock, causing a convict revolt led rather improbably by the colorless Derek. Though Burgess favors the idea of a man-made plague "toughening" America, he brings in troops and puts the penitentiary under armed quarantine.
It remains for the courageous 'Nam vet to fend off the zombies, his rebellious fellow inmates and Vic Moretti, while a sexy blonde biochemist-turned-investigative-TV-reporter named Tanya (Tane McClure) labors to find a cure, although Derek comes up with the vaccine first. He and selected survivors
(the token heroic Black guy gets killed at the last minute, as usual) reach freedom through a secret tunnel, and Burgess is dismembered by zombies as bombs blow the Death House to bits. But the virus reaches the outside world via an infected Burgess henchman.
In an autobiographical chapter of his 1992 book The New Poverty Row, cheapie filmmaker Fred Olen Ray takes credit (sic) for much of DEATH HOUSE, claiming he was brought in to doctor up the fraught efforts of novice helmer Saxon. "There was no script per se. I was handed a piece of paper from which
I created the entire climax of the picture." Yet three writers are listed onscreen, perhaps a noble gesture of sharing the blame. From its grotesque, paranoid politics to loving closeups of bloody wounds to gratuitous nudity (heroine McClure gets her grand unveiling in a dream sequence), this
toxic sludge is lowbrow cinema on a high plane indeed, though one must admire the use of "Chemical Warfare" by the Dead Kennedys as a closing theme.
Perhaps the kindest interpretation of un film de John Saxon is that its commando hero balances Saxon's 1980 European-made opus CANNIBALS IN THE STREETS, in which returned Vietnam vets were themselves psychos with a lust for human flesh acquired during war duty. DEATH HOUSE was done in 1988, but
escaped to the public on home video in 1992. (Violence, profanity, sexual situations, adult situations.) leave a comment
