| "When
the moon turns red, the dead shall rise!" says
the tag-line on the cover of the 2004 Umbrella R4 DVD
release. Well, red moons prove to be irrelevant, but
the dead definitely rise. Burial Ground
is a full-on zombie flick, one of the Romero/Fulci-inspired
Italian gorefests of the 1980s, seen now uncut, in widescreen
and glorious colour. And as gory, sexploitative Italian
zombie epics go, it's not bad. Not up to Fulci, of course,
and nowhere near Romero, but not nearly as awful as
previous poor-quality video releases of such films (and
ill-informed reviews) had lead me to expect. There's
no plot to speak of, however, and little character development.
Not much subtlety either. So if that's what you look
for in your zombie movies, forget it. Go and see Shaun
of the Dead instead.
What
Burial Ground does have is some of
the scabbiest, most gruesomely decayed zombies ever,
and director Bianchi lets you see them up-close-and-personal
right from the start. He knows what you're watching
this film for. Yes, there is a vague (very vague) back
story offered to explain why the dead rise, and some
character dynamics to fill in the gaps, but it's all
purely cosmetic. It doesn't matter. What matters is
zombies. Lots of them. Clawing up from the earth. Stumbling
around with inexorable awkwardness. Ripping out throats.
Tearing off limbs. Eating fist-loads of bloody intestine
(and the odd liver). Making attractive women run, hide,
scream, bare their breasts. There's lots of dismemberment
and evisceration in this one. And along the way we're
given plenty of close-ups of the many and varied semi-skeletal
zombie faces and green-oozing bullet holes -- because
the film makers want you to appreciate the glorious
work of their make-up team. This is where the money
went. And they want you to appreciate it.
The
story gets moving by contriving to gather a group of
attractive Italian actors together in a large, gothic
mansion under mysterious circumstances (thanks to a
disturbingly bearded archeologist who has violated an
ancient burial site), kicks things off with a bit of
good-natured sex and nudity.... and then it's zombie
action all the way. Until, naturally, there's no one
left who isn't splattered across the carpet or shambling
about living-dead fashion. The carnage ends on a perverted
sexual note as well, if you like that sort of thing
-- an infamous scene in which a distraught mother offers
to comfort her young now-dead son (played by weird 25-year-old
Peter Bark) by giving him what he has wanted most throughout
the film: her breast to suckle. Silly woman! What does
she think her zombified cannibalistic offspring will
do when a breast is shoved in his mouth?
All
in all, this is pure, inexcusable zombie muck-'n'-mire--
and there's no other justification for it. In an interview
included on the DVD, producer Gabriele Cristanti says
that "mixing horror and sex was very popular at
the time". Well, in these more blasé times
the sex seems pretty tame, but the gore is still over-the-top.
And it offers a visceral ickiness that no CGI equivalent
could better. In fact, even though this film is over
20 years old, the brain-splattering and dismemberment
is still rather effective. The zombie make-up looks
good too, despite the fact that we are sometimes overly
conscious of layers of shredded latex.
In
an interview included on the DVD, lead actress Mariangela
Giordano (whom Cristiani describes as the only one of
the cast who was a known actor and had an ongoing career),
when asked about the film, comments: "That's the
one with the zombies, isn't it?"
Indeed.
|
BURIAL
GROUND: THE NIGHTS OF TERROR
aka
Le Notti del Terrore; Nights of Terror; Zombie Horror;
Zombie 3 |
