I’m excited about a lot of what Severin has for sale, but beyond excited for these two movies.

Raiders Of The Living Dead: A regional New Hampshire film with a synth score that was reedited with new footage by Sam Sherman with that iconic Independent-International Pictures logo at the start of the show?

If you’re wondering, “Is it weird?” My answer is, “Would it be on our site if it wasn’t?”

While filming on this movie originally began in New Hampshire by co-writer Brett Piper as a movie called Graveyard, it was finished by writer-producer Samuel Sherman, the man who formed Independent-International Pictures with Al Adamson.

In an abandoned prison, a doctor is using executed convicts to form a labor force of the living dead. Meanwhile, Jonathan (the one-time Flick and future adult actor Scott Schwartz) has turned his dad’s LaserDisc into a laser gun and decides that he should hunt down zombies with the help of his girlfriend, grandfather, a reporter and a librarian (who was played by Zita Johann, the female star of Universal’s The Mummy, lured out of retirement by Sherman).

There are three versions of this. A sixty-minute version by Piper called Dying Day, an initial take on the footage by Sherman called Dark Night and then Raiders of the Living Dead, which is one of the best carny movie titles ever.

Now scanned in 2K from the negative of the final release version, the Severin release has over 4 hours of new & archival Special Features – including two previous cuts in their entirety – that reveal the full ROTLD saga.

The Dead One: The Dead One is a significant movie because it’s one of the first two zombie films made in color — the other is Dr. Blood’s Coffin — and it was made outside of the Hollywood system in New Orleans. It mostly played in Southern drive-ins, in Mexico and the UK before it disappeared for 41 years.

Shot in Eastmancolor and Ultrascope, a form of Cinemascope from Germany, The Dead One has a cool looking zombie and otherwise would be an unremarkable film other than the fact that it’s a Barry Mahon film and stands out from the rest of his output, which is either falls into the disparate genres of nudist films, roughies, propaganda movies or children’s films.

Actually, the poster for this would like you to know just how remarkable this movie is, saying that The Dead One is “The Greatest VOODOO Film Ever Made – Filmed on Location in New Orleans Where VOODOO was introduced to the New World.”

A zombie is haunting the plantation of Kenilwort and is commanded by Monica Carlton (Monica Davis, who is also in Mahon’s 1,000 Shapes of a Female, Rocket Attack U.S.A. and She Should Have Stayed In Bed), the mistress of the decaying plantation.

This is probably the most restrained Mahon film I’ve seen. It played double bills for a long time, a filler for drive-ins that would run late into the night while what happened in the steamed up cars looked a lot like the other movies Barry was known for making.

You can buy both of these movies alone or as part of the Independent-International Appreciation Society Bundle, which comes with the Independent-International Pictures Logo T-Shirt. It’s a $76 value that’s only $68.

You can get these movies tomorrow at midnight from Severin.