Fright Night of the Living Dead (1986)

Directed by:

Josh Eliot

Gary (director / editor / co-writer Eliot), Alvonne (Alvonne Robinson) and Brian (Brian Wayne, who also wrote) are three roommates living in a large white house in the small New England town of New Bedford. Brian goes to take the trash out, which for some reason involves him first going into the basement. Something that we never see then attacks him off-screen and he emerges with puncture wounds on his neck before transforming into some pasty-faced cannibal-vampire-zombie thing (hence the title intentionally bringing to mind two popular horror flicks from the previous year). When his two roommates return home, he attacks and partially eats them and transforms both of them into creatures, as well. Despite being monsters, the trio continue to talk and bicker with one another, smoke cigarettes and whine about where their next meal will be coming from. Since he's the "leader," Brian can exert mind control over the other two.

We then meet a few other characters, starting with a bride-to-be (Mary Bolanos) waking up in a panic about her bridesmaid possibly not showing up to her wedding. That ends up not mattering so much when the vampire-zombies burst into her bedroom, stab her to death with hedge clippers, cut off her arm and eat her. Another girl named Lana (Katiuska Bolanos) then starts panicking because she hears a news broadcast about zombies. She calls up her neighbor Tracy (Tracy Ousdahl) to warn her there are "Three living dead killing people" on the loose, to which her friend responds: "What ah ya talkin about? No way! Living dead walkin' around? What? You've been reading too many... What are... You've been watching too many movies Lana!"

Tracy soon comes to regret her flippant attitude when the monsters come after her. They chase her around her house and through the woods and then kill her neighbor. Tracy bumps into news reporter Paul (Paul Madden), who's been bitten one of the ghouls, and has sex with him about two minutes later. The two then go to the home where the outbreak started to kill off the vampires. As for how they know who the vampires are, where they live or to go directly into the basement, well, your guess is as good as mine. There are a few heart stakings and a (non-)surprise transformation for the reporter, plus a "one year later" final scene featuring a Realtor and a prospective buyer getting slaughtered, including an ice pick to the head.

Shot on video for 300 dollars and filmed over the course of several years, this 46-minute, made-it-up-as-they-went-along amateur film played at the San Francisco Video Festival in 1986 but never received a home video release. In fact, it wasn't seen again until late 2020 when the director re-edited it, re-scored it to remove copyrighted music and added new credits and video effects (mostly terrible CGI blood splatter to "enhance" the murders when they would have looked much better without that) to it. He then uploaded it to his Youtube channel. Because of the degradation of the colors over the years, it's been turned into a black-and-white movie.

I had no clue who Eliot was prior to viewing this but apparently he's best known as a very prolific (over 150+ movies per iafd) maker of gay and bisexual adult films, usually for the company Catalina Video. Seems he stopped making films altogether in the mid-2000s. He also made the genre short Behind Blue Eyes (1980) while a student at the San Francisco Art Institute.

★1/2