Burial Ground (1980)

If you dig through the horror section of your local video store, you're most likely to find at least a few obscure Italian horror movies that rip off George A. Romero's horror classic "Dawn of the Dead." I happened to scroll across "Burial Ground" and picked it up since it sounded like an interesting enough film, with the cover box promising "unspeakable, explicit horror!" Its quite an odd little movie indeed; a zombie film with mucho splatter and a few unusual twists.

Directed with creepy style by Andrea Bianchi, the films plot consists of a daffy professor who invites a group of people out to an old cemetary, hoping to show them a discovery he's stumbled onto. Little does he realize, he has unleashed a herd of zombies from their graves and they're hungry for human flesh. After munching on him, the invited guests make their appearances but it doesn't take long for them to find out the professors discovery and they try their best to escape from the abandoned cemetary to avoid becoming a feast for the zombies.

There really isn't much plot or character development (the story is so simple that it doesn't matter), but I'm glad to see that it cuts to the chase fast and doesn't pull out any stops. The zombie makeup makes the actors look as creepy as possible and there's plenty of flesh munching to make any gorehound happy. I also got a kick out of that quirky techno score in the background, which adds to the wackiness of the proceedings. Like "Nightmare City" (an enjoyably bad Italian film), the film makes the zombies a little smarter this time around and even get to use some handy gardening tools this time around to pick their victims off, which was a fresh little idea.

The human characters remain an idiotic bunch that aren't at all smart when facing off zombies and keep making serious mistakes as the movie progresses. The over-the-top dubbing made them quite funny to watch though. The most bizarre and talked about themes in this film is regarding the perverse sub-plot involving a slutty mother and her incestrous son. The final moment (which I can't spoil) should make even a hardcore horror buff squirm.

Since there are loads of Italian Romero ripoffs like this one, I can't complain too much about it. Bianchi does a respectable job with the content, although the lighting in this film was absolutely
terrible. Some scenes are so grainy and dark that I had to turn up the brightness on my tv screen when viewing the film.

If you're looking for a serious plot or any intelligence, you might want to skip out on this one, but if you liked Lucio Fulci's "Zombie" and other cheesy, stomach-churning zombie films from Italian, this one is right up your alley.

Rating: **** out of *****

Review by Adam Eshack - (c) 1/21/02