(1970)
Overall: MEH
Writer/director John Hayes made a hefty number of genre and exploitation films throughout the 1960s and 70s and Dream No Evil, (The Faith Healer, Now I Lay Me Down to Die), is a more personal one. It was allegedly inspired by his own sister who was brought up in a religious convent only to later suffer from mental illness. The material may hit closer to home for Hayes, but the movie itself is regrettably dull. Though it opens with a child having a nightmare, nothing else remotely of interest to horror fans arrives until past the halfway mark. For the drive-in movie crowd of the day, that is a generous amount of "making out in the car" time. Hayes's cinematically toys with some psychological aspects around a troubled woman with severe daddy issues, but his direction is persistently bland. The talking just goes on and on and on, which would be forgivable to a point if there was an interesting pay-off. Suspense-less and comatose-inducing, it is as forgettable as they get.
(1972)
Overall: MEH
There are several redeemable qualities to co-writer/director John Hayes' Grave of the Vampire, (Seed of Terror), a movie that is still ultimately bogged down by some of the usual low-budget genre mishaps. Based on the novel The Still Life by David Chase, Hayes' maintains a serious mood which affords little if any humor. He also keeps things atmospheric at regular intervals, particularly in the opening cemetery sequence which is as appropriately fog-ridden and creepy as any from the era. The music is refreshingly low-key as well and there is a striking moment where a woman cuts her breasts in order to feed her newborn and partially undead baby. While the narrative features such surprises here or there and it jumps ahead several decades unexpectedly after the first act, the production cannot afford enough riveting moments to keep the momentum going. William Smith is awkward once he is introduced as the main character, maintaining a cold demeanor until he unintentionally camps it up in the finale and coming off jarring in conjunction with the rest of the tone. Other aspects of the script do not add up and it concludes more puzzlingly than shocking, but it is also just unique enough amongst other vampire films to recommend.
(1972)
Overall: WOOF
On paper, the premise for John Hayes D-rent zombie cheapie Garden of the Dead, (Tomb of the Undead), should wield wacky results. Yet unfortunately, the movie does not understand what kind of movie it is, becoming a dull mess in the process. Shot in Topanga Canyon for only enough money to afford fog and some undead makeup, it concerns a prison chain gang who become addicted to formaldehyde, gets punished by their warden for failing to report a botched escape plan, and then said escapees come back to life as groaning corpses who are hellbent on snagging some more formaldehyde to get high on. What sounds like a goofy comedy is instead played straight for some ill-conceived reason, with no humor anywhere, either intentional or unintentional. While the high-as-a-kite zombies look nasty and also run, talk, and formulate plans, Hayes does nothing clever with them. They also die by normal gunfire wounds and not exclusively from a shot to the head, raising the question of how they came back to life in the first place and why the first time that they got killed was not enough but the second time did the trick just fine. At least it is less than an hour long.
(1977)
Overall: WOOF
Scoring Christopher Lee and equipped with a plot about aliens taking over a small convent and disguising themselves as priests and nuns in order to rid the universe of humankind, one would think that there was enough to work with here to warrant some schlocky fun. "Fun" is the main thing that is lacking though in the D-grade Charles Band production End of the World; a disaster movie that is actually a disaster. Coming from Band, the lack of quality is hardly surprising and Lee was still a working actor who needed a paycheck as much as anyone did in the late 70s, but even with one's expectations adjusted accordingly, this is as lazily handled as it gets. Kirk Scott and Sue Lyon are wooden AF in the leads and hardly anything happens to them for the first half of the film, until they finally run into Lee and his clergy of extraterrestrial visitors who simply explain their plan and make nice with them. The plot slams home the point that there is danger facing planet Earth, but as far as showing any evidence of that danger, there was no budget for such a thing. Instead, we have a plodding waste of time with unnecessary shots going on for ages, everyone talking and talking and talking, minimal production values, stock footage, a blippity-bloopity soundtrack, and one brief shot of an alien mask.
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