Burial Ground (1985)

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

When Truffaut waxed lyrically about the policies of the author(tarian) director back in 1954, he could not have imagined that twenty-six years later, a certain Italian fringe exploiter would take such policies to obscene heights of personalising as is most evident in this seminal contribution to psychotronic cinema, BURIAL GROUND: THE NIGTS OF TERROR.You just can't make this stuff up, not all of it at least. You can't even replicate it or even do that much justice writing about it. Like with all the best of it's kind, BURIAL GROUND is not much a movie as an experience, taking place in the pink universe right along Reality TV and those free DVD's you get with top shelf mags where amateurism actually aids verisimilitude and the lack of standards (and self-respect) creates a circus of tension and unease that good preparation and methodical professionalism just simply strips away from a project and leaves it to the editing room to pick up the pieces. In short, BURIAL GROUND is cheap, technically rough, cynical and is as pervy as Italian exploitation comes and that's why i like it.Written by Piero Regnoli whose other credits (all from just the previous year of BURIAL GROUND) include Lenzi's "infected people" film NIGHTMARE CITY, a rip off of an Ozploitation rip off, PATRICK VIVE ANCORA and THE FASCIST JEW ??? Quite a... Resume.Lensing the affair was Gianfranco Maioletti who had a tepid TV and Doco career after his work here. Not surprising as for an Italian piece, this is a FLAAATT looking film.Producer was Gabriele Crisanti, who seemed to have climbed his way up from production designer and ended up producing content that attempted to have it's cake and eat it too with both international and blatantly domestic appeal such the aforementioned Patrick cash-in, Soft and Hardcore such as some Canterbury Tales rip offs (It you're gonna, you might as well take from THE master) and of course a Spaghetti Western or three. Oh and a little ditty called GIALLO A VENEZIA!!! This, Guy.Mr Bianchi should need no introduction (to a person who would buy a BURIAL GROUND blu-ray in the first place) as he sports one of the most off the wall, insane filmography's of any industry outsider, regardless of continent, only rivalled in his homeland by Mattei. Rap Sheet: WHAT THE PEEPER SAW (1972), CRY OF A PROSTITUTE (1974), MALABIMBA (1979), COMMANDO MENGELE and MANIAC KILLER (from when Italy couldn't handle him anymore!) (1987) as well as the Fulci produced (and cut and pasted) MASSACRE (1989) and of course some down and dirty stuff in-between.BURIAL GROUND was arguably Bianchi's finest hour, though not his craziest. We are at a time in genre archaeology lets call it where a man such as Bianchi becomes very interesting to us whereas in previous eras, BURIAL GROUND would have been a mere footnote in Fanzine back catalogues. Call it scraping the barrel, or a more enlightened generation realising and wanting more from genre history than archaic taboos and petty politics revolving around who stole it better, though those needs still are both fed in NIGTS. Nonetheless, Bianchi is growing a following and hopefully soon an interview with this man surfaces.Now the film finally. The plot is about some ageing socialites having a getaway at someone's relative's country manor. Unknown to them is that said relative caused a zombie uprising and until it's too late, they come face to face with the undead. BURIAL GROUND combines an avant-garde score (Yes), a lot of kink (some welcome and some not so much), nice 'n' crunchy zombie makeup, unfathomable directorial choices, great locations, a meandering pace, did i mention Peter Bark? Ah yes. What, The mother loving... ???? Why? Why?THIS, is what made the movie famous, i understand, we might not have a blu-ray of this otherwise. But for me, it's just too messed up and ruins the experience for me. Which is so annoying because it's so hard to find exploitation pictures as good as this one gets. Those that confidently display sex AND violence (KILLER BITCH), live up to the trailer and then some (MASSACRE MAFIA STYLE) as well as wet the appetite for the, yes, more accomplished works it's 'emulating' (ZOMBI 2). BURIAL GROUND, for the most part is one of the best and most satisfying examples of this. I have all the time in the world for the rest of the film, but no love for Peter Bark and Bianchi for that matter as incest seems to be a theme that runs throughout his films. It wouldn't be so bad if Bark wasn't meant to be playing a twelve year old! It's trash that turns transgressive with a casual two step which is either a cheap attempt at provocation or something more insidiously personal. I mean, as the excellent mini video essay on Bianchi's career on the 88 Films release explains, he did this kind of thing before in his debut PEEPER. A nod for the fifty people who remembered that film or is it just his obsession? God knows and not knowing is what makes BURIAL GROUND a sour experience for those questionable four minutes concerning that mom and son special time sub-plot. Though i do admit, the tit biting was quite laugh inducing, if not just out of relief.Apart from those dour moments though, there's still a lot of lingerie as well as carnage against the flesh on display and in the end, Oedipus dwarf is not enough to stop BURIAL GROUND from being a fun, frilly ride.96% of this film Highly Recommended.

Intelligent zombies, nudity, gore, awesome Italian villa, terrible (dubbed) dialogue, creepy Oedipal man- child... So worth the $1 I spent to buy the DVD. If you have any appreciation for cheap Italian movies, this up your alley. Set-up is straight forward-Scientist poking around animates corpses, they attack him, then go after a pack of visiting couples who mostly have sex with each other or run from zombies. You owe it to yourself to find this movie, at as low a cost as possible, and dig deep into this flick with some friends and some drinks. And since IMDb thinks I haven't written enough, I'll compliment the film on the creative ways the living characters die, but dock the flick a couple points for an abrupt ending.

This is when a slew of Zombie films were coming out, and a lot of them were low budget knockoffs of Dawn of The Dead. Dawn of The Dead itself wasn't that big of a budget, but that movie is the greatest Zombie film ever made, so it doesn't matter. You've really seen it all before when it comes to this one, except the Zombies have aging makeup with maggot infested bodies. This movie can be pretty controversial at times. Director Andrea Binachi gives us an incest subplot between a mother and daughter. Michael (Peter Bark) who plays the son was around 30 years old when this happened. So that makes it even weirder. Bark is a creepy looking kid; Michael has a sexual desire for his Mother, and let's just say; it's rather creepy. Look out for that scene near the end with the breast. I won't spoil it, but it's one of the more shocking things I've seen. The characters themselves are nothing special. They basically get ridden with atrocious dubbing and run and scream a lot. That's the problem with Italian Zombie films, is you really have nobody to root for in most of them. The gore flows like wine as to be expected, and the effects aren't too shabby. I didn't care too much for the Zombie makeup, but it wasn't bad. My main problem with this movie is the ending itself. It is extremely anticlimactic. It tries to be ambiguous, but it ended up pis****** me off more than anything else. I also have gripes with the pacing in the middle. There are too many scenes with zombies staggering around and the actors doing nothing of note. It became very redundant. Final Thoughts: Nothing original here, except for some rather shocking incest, but it does have moments of cheesy entertainment. I would recommend Zombie Holocaust over this one, but this one is good for a few laughs as well. 4/10

Are you tired of explanation in horror films? Here's an Italian zombie flick, full of all of the requisite flesh munching, that never dwells too long on that pesky exposition that might otherwise intrude on all of the fun.Director Andrea Bianchi ("Strip Nude for Your Killer") dives almost right away into the gory set pieces, as a nosy professor creates trouble for his associates by opening a crypt, unleashing a zombie horde that proves to be very relentless in their efforts to make meals out of our various chump victims.Now, these zombies are some of the ugliest one may see in this sort of thing, and are pretty damn smart to boot, being able to manipulate weapons and tools. And our fated-to-be-zombie-dinners human characters sometimes don't try very hard to save their worthless butts. You add to that some typically hilarious work by the actors doing the dubbed in English voices, deliciously ridiculous English dialogue ("You're getting a raise from me, all right, but it has nothing to do with money!"), great music (by Elsio Mancuso and Berto Pisano), an attractive bunch of ladies (Karin Well, Antonella Antinori, and Mariangela Giordano), a generous dose of sex, and some very entertaining masks and makeup effects, and it creates an often quite funny and fairly action packed flick worth checking out.But no review of this movie would be complete without mentioning the reason why it should have a reputation & following: perhaps THE greatest depiction of an Oedipal relationship in the history of cinema, as the extremely memorable Peter Bark (who indeed bears something of a resemblance to director Dario Argento) plays a young man who laments the passing of the days when he could suck on his dear mothers' breast, and gets to relive this experience before the whole sordid story is over.Slip this into your DVD and/or BD player and be prepared to have some good laughs and thrills, done in that irresistibly wild Italian fashion that always guarantees a good time.Eight out of 10.