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Burial Ground (1980)

Dir: Andrea Bianchi

This stupendously cheesy film from director Andrea Bianchi gets right down to business from the start with a beardy weirdy professor who is studying Etruscan magical practices involving the dead creeping around the ancient catacombs in the grounds of his remote villa and getting chewed on by some undead uglies for his trouble. It seems our foolish professor has somehow resurrected the dead Etruscans (although the viewer is never told how. Perhaps this was purposeful though, wouldn't want just anyone going around making zombies) and now they are on the roam for some food, and as luck would have it some Italian is just about to be delivered...

Three couples, Mark and Janet, James and Leslie and George and Evelyn (who also bring their extremely strange son Michael along) arrive at the villa to visit the professor. They are informed by the servants (a butler type figure and a maid) that the professor has not yet returned and to make themselves at home, and make themselves at home they do! Within a few minutes the couples are all getting down to some cliché ridden bedroom antics! Some people have no manners.

Mark and Janet (who have been having creepy dreams about the villa) head outside so Mark can take some photos of Janet in various cheese cake poses. They soon get bored with this though and decide to carry on what was started in the bedroom. Badly dubbed moaning follows as they roll around a bit on the grass, when suddenly something stiff pops up. Janet is not amused though as it's one of our crazy looking zombies, dangling worms from its eyes and eager to munch. As they flee, Janet's foot gets clamped in a mantrap! Now that's what I call garden security!

Meanwhile George, Evelyn and Michael are snooping around one of the out-houses (where George also teaches Evelyn how to shoot a gun he happens to be carrying around with him!!) when more of the zombies stagger in and attack them. Before you know it everyone is having their day spoiled (and sex interrupted) by a veritable horde of the undead and their visit has turned into a fight for survival...

 

One of the most well loved of the Italian zombie flicks, Bianci's film is packed with what connoisseurs of fine trashy splatter appreciate most, namely bucket-loads of blood, gore, flesh eating, gut ripping, foolish characters, silly dialogue, nudity and strangeness!

The zombies are without question some of the most bizarre ever seen. They range from the dried up and almost mummified, to almost fresh looking corpses. Some have one or two perfect eyes set in a completely rotted face (these guys are a hoot) and virtually all of them are covered in loads of maggots and worms. Must have been hell for the unfortunate actors. These guys move with the usual plodding zombie stomp we all know and love but have a few added extras. They use tools, weapons, plan attacks and even climb up walls! One even has Ninja skills and throws a nail into the hand of the unfortunate maid (who even after the zombies' attack still serves everyone drinks on a silver tray! Now that's what I call dedication to the job) from a distance up to the first floor at night! The sequences showing the zombies rising up are suitably atmospheric as they crawl out of the earth, pop out of flowerbeds and stumble around the dusty catacombs.

The gore (by Umberto Picistrelli) is extreme with lots of gut munching and slopping around of innards so essential to the plot. We even have a re-enactment of the famous zombie eye splinter scene, but highly inferior, as a victim has their head slowly pulled towards a broken window to have the shards of glass stick into their face. There is some fun splatter when the zombies are snuffed as well; they squirt out green brown mud blood that makes a nice, more realistic, change. We also have some satisfying skull crunching as our heroes smash in zombie heads with rocks. But the most famous gore scene has to be the incestuous nipple munching as a deranged Evelyn lets her zombiefied Son, Michael (who we shall get back to) suckle at her breast! An amazingly bad taste scene that is a deserved fan favourite.

Talk of Michael brings us to the cast. Specifically to Peter Bark who plays the twisted son. Never in the history of film (or even the history of mankind in general) has such a creepy, bizarre and down right unnerving 'child' been seen! He looks like a shrunken middle aged man (with an amazingly bad bowl haircut) who has a serious heroin problem! In reality Bark was actually in his 20's!!

And Bianchi and his writer (Piero Regnoli) give him a suitably strange character in Michael as well. He is completely fixated on his mother to the point where in one scene he starts to kiss her on the lips, fondle her breasts and puts his hand up her skirt while saying "I love your breasts so much Momma", nice. Out of the rest of the characters only Evelyn (played by veteran genre actress Maria Angela Giordano) stands out, due mostly to her scenes with Michael and in her excellent bouts of anger as she hacks off zombies' heads! Giordano was married at the time to "Burial Ground's" Producer Gabriele Chrisanti, who treated her very shabbily in their films together. She was stabbed with a poker between the legs in "Patrick Still Lives" and had one of her legs cut off before being thrown in a fridge in "Giallo a Venezia", think he was trying to tell her something?

We also have to suffer some of the worst voice acting ever heard as the characters seem even dumber than they already are with hysterical dub jobs. The dialogue they spout is also cringe inducing. Sometimes rubbish like "Oh Mark, I'm terrified Mark", in this case said by Janet, is heard when there is no actual shot of her even speaking. Unnecessary fearful moans are also added and it makes you wonder just how much of this has been forced upon the film without Bianchi's knowledge. But the dialogue does gives us some wonderful memorable lines. During the above mentioned bedroom antics Leslie flounces around in her underwear in front of James who utters the romance filled words "you look just like a little whore. I like that in a girl" Freaky Michael has some choice moments as well. Upon finding a rag he rushes up to Evelyn spouting "Mother, this cloth, it smells of death". Indeed.

The music by Elsio Mancuso and Burt (?) Rexon is also strange (what in this film isn't) consisting of cheesy Jazz, weird sci-fi noises and melodramatic violin and trumpet crescendos.

The cinematography is ugly and consists mostly of static set ups and in your face close ups of characters and zombies with little or no background on show. But there is one impressive scene where Michael is filmed framed by the bloodied remains of the face-slicing window before a zombie head rises up to block our view. It's a nice, ominous sequence.

But this type of set up is rare, and overall the movie is rather poorly made and it does show you just how much class Fulci and his crew brought to his famous zombie films. It's the kind of trash designed for horror festivals and alcohol fueled get together's (you could add another half cleaver to the rating that's for sure) watched outside of these environments however the movie tests the patience of the viewer with it's inane scripting, and half hearted direction.

But as a gory, violent, sleazy bit of horror film fun it's hard to fault.
It certainly delivers all the wonderful stuff trash hounds love to chew on, including a great ending. It has to be said that even in the rip-off world of Italian exploitation films "Burial Ground" is a unique moist slice of horror cheese.
What it does, it does with a delightful balls out attitude; it's just that with greater care it could have been so much more