Wherever exploitation movies break ground, John Saxon is there. When Bruce Lee stars in Enter the Dragon, there he is, backing him up as Roper. As Mario Bava creates a proto-giallo in The Girl Who Knew Too Much, he stars. Early slasher film? Look to Saxon in Black Christmas. Want a Star Wars clone? There he is as the Darth Vader of Battle Beyond the Stars. Eighties horror sequel madness? He’s the big name in A Nightmare on Elm Street. And he’s back as Craven and Argento deconstruct the slasher and giallo genre with New Nightmare and Tenebre. 

Yet for all his work in film, John Saxon only directed one movie: 1988’s Zombie Death House. The original director bowed out at the last minute, so Saxon agreed to both act in and direct this film. He’s since claimed that the producers imposed more car chases and gore than the script asked for, so what ended up on the screen didn’t live up to his true vision. That may be because they only had nine days to write this movie and the producers demanded that it be like The Godfather. 

Who knows what that vision may have been, because what emerges starts as a mob crime drama. Dennis Cole stars as Vietnam vet Derek Keillor, a man who may have won medals in war, but found no opportunities at home. Cole had a decent run as a guest star on plenty of TV shows, but was probably better known for marrying Charlie’s Angels star Jaclyn Smith. He also shows up on an episode of Unsolved Mysteries, as his son Joe was shot to death in a crime that remains, well, unsolved. That’s one of my favorite episodes, as Joe was Henry Rollins’ roommate, so it just seems so odd to have a punk icon and Robert Stack on the same show. 

But I digress. Derek can only find one job: limo driver for mafia boss Vic Moretti, played by Anthony Franciosa from Tenebre. Our hero can’t help but fall for Vic’s woman, Genelle. He pays for his impudence by getting set up for her murder — Moretti drowns her in the bathtub, providing an opportunity for nudity — and sent to death row at Townsend State Prison. 

That’s where the real story begins. Government agent Colonel Burgess (Saxon) has taken over the prison from a henpecked warden — his wife literally tells him she plans on dumping him in front of their cherubic daughter and skateboarding son — and begun to subject the prisoners a genetically altered version of a virus called HV8B.

Who would invent such a thing? Oh, just Tanya Kerrington (Tane McClure, the only actress I know who was in both Legally Blonde and Death Spa), who was once a scientist but is now an investigative journalist.TK, as Tanya wants to be known, is here with her cameraman trying to bust the Colonel’s use of prisoners as test subjects. She picked the right day for this, as ten minutes after she arrives, the zombie virus makes everyone go bonkers. 

This is a film of amazing coincidences. Like how Derek is jailed alongside Moretti’s brother Frankie, so he uses him as a hostage to lure Vic into the prison. That’s when the first zombie shows up, using a modified sleeper hold to rip off a guard’s head before being shot hundreds of times. Oh yeah — somehow Ron “Super Fly” O’Neal shows up in this mess, too.

Credit where credit is due — Saxon is awesome here, a total maniac who wants to create an American army that can win wars like Vietnam, so he creates a zombie plague that makes people do insane things. That seems like a good idea, right? And Franciosa chews every bit of scenery he gets near, like the scene where he kills his brother’s jailhouse lover.

All of the maneuverings of the plot do allow for a very Carpenter-like storyline to emerge: everyone in the prison has been infected and therefore quarantined. Can they survive the siege both within and without the prison?
There are some moments of lunacy — a lunch lady zombie hoarding Twinkies in a scene that predates Zombieland by a decade or so and a dream sequence near the end that exists only so we can see TK nude — but things don’t descend to the level of a Nightmare City as you’d hope. 

I do wish Saxon had directed more films, though. And I really wish his script for an Elm Street sequel called How the Nightmare Began had been made. It concerns therapist Frederick Krueger being blamed for a series of murders that have been really committed by the Manson Family. You have no idea how much I wish that movie got made.

Zombie Death House isn’t a movie that many celebrate. I wouldn’t even know about it if Saxon hadn’t directed it. But here I am, at 5 AM, watching it and celebrating the fact that it contains a heroic child skating through a maximum security prison and running across an infected lunch lady feverishly hoarding a stack of Twinkies. I mean, you have to love that someone convinced the Dead Kennedys to give them the rights to “Chemical Warfare,” which plays over the closing credits. And only in the 1980’s would filmmakers figure out a way to get the film’s hard as nails biochemist/investigative journalist heroine naked by the end of the movie. 

If this ever gets rediscovered, celebrated as a hidden gem and released as an expensive blu ray with multiple slipcovers like so many other lost 80’s movies, remember that you heard about it here first.

UPDATE October 21, 2024: Lance was about to record this for Unsung Horrors with Erica and wrote to ask, “I wanted to check in with you and your crazy ways of finding facts about films. Do you happen to know who the original director was that bowed out before Saxon took over? Do you have any insights into the production of the film? I found a few things online but this thing is quite the mystery (which I actually like haha). Thanks!”

This took me down a rabbit hole online and when I realized that Retromedia released it on DVD, I thought that Fred Olen Ray may have something to do with it. I asked Jenn Upton, who edited Fred’s book Hell-bent for Hollywood f he said anything about working with Saxon.

Here’s what Jenn shared:

“John Saxon starred and directed the prison-zombie film, but he just, for some reason, struggled with the finale. They shot the finale three times before someone finally said, “Look, this isn’t working.” They called me, and said, “Could you come down and help us out?” I said, “Okay,” because the producer, Nick Marino, was a friend of mine. I went down and I shot a sequence where the heroes are escaping from this prison and coming out in Bronson Canyon while ziombie-inmates try to kill them.

John Saxon, who I effectively replaced as the director, had to continue on the show as an actor in these scenes and I’ll admit it was very uncomfortable, but he was extremely professional. John and I talked a lot about what we were
going to do.

The writers, producers and director had not prepared any means whatsoever for these people to escape from the prison into Bronson Canyon. They hadn’t even considered how to achieve it.

At lunch time, they handed out sandwiches to the cast and crew that arrived on three-foot-screenlike plastic serving trays.

I asked the caterer, “Can you leave me three or four of those?”

I took them and made a little tunnel exit from three plastic bread trays held together with nothing more than a thin piece of wire, like pipe cleaners. There were enough trays for the top of the tunnel and two sides. We sat it on the ground and the actors crawled out through the three bread trays into the cave.

The shot showed just a little bit of the bread trays, and then you would see the actors crawl out. That’s how they got from the prison into the cave. It probably seemed ridiculous to everyone at the time, but it worked. The audience only sees what the camera shows them.

We shot the end of the movie in Bronson Cave at night while the director of House of Wax, Andre De Toth was visiting. He wore a pirate’s patch because he only had one eye and also had his neck in an impressive-looking brace. He tripped over the generator cables in the dark and took a bad fall right in front of me. I was very concerned for him, but from the state of things I believed this sort of mishap had happened to him many times before.

Andre was around a lot because he was also friends with Nick. He later directed a great portion of Nick’s even lower budgeted Terror Night (1987.) Michelle Bauer told me that Andre directed all of her scenes, even though he vehemently denied ever working on the film.

Nick watched my Death House footage and then, liking what he saw, he decided he needed more action. He concocted a new scene that would shoot in the back alley behind the adult video company, LA Video, the parent company of Camp Video. In the new storyline, LA Video honchos, Salvatore Richichi and Jim Golff played gangsters selling plastic explosives shaped like dashboard Jesus figurines.

A car races down the alley, smashes into them, blows up, and a kung fu fight breaks out with the hero, Dennis Cole. All in a night’s work.

I did that additional scene as well, and at the end of the day I never thought to ask, “Hey, am I getting paid anything for this?”

The answer was no. Three days. I spent three grueling days on that movie and didn’t get a dime. Not a fucking dime and I probably didn’t get any credit either. I don’t remember and I don’t want to.”

Fred also added: “On Moon in Scorpio, Gary Craver did direct and called action and cut but when I got to Death House, I decided that I wasn’t going to go down that route. And I did not let Saxon be involved in the directing at all. He was involved as an actor only and we got along fine, but I did things my way and I called action card. And did the shots the way I wanted them without any input from him at all.”

Make sure that you buy Fred’s book, Hell-Bent for Hollywood, on Amazon.

Thanks to Lance and Erica for asking and Jenn for her help, as this is some movie archaeology that got to the bottom of a fact that people always report and it may not be the whole truth.