October Edition #7: BURIAL GROUND: THE NIGHTS OF TERROR

Director: Andrea Bianchi   
Screenplay: Piero Regnoli
Starring: Karen Well, Gianluigi Chirizzi, Peter Bark
Release Date: 1981

Okay, so I’m gonna  get this out of the way right now. Andrea Bianchi’s BURIAL GROUND: THE NIGHTS OF TERROR is not a very good movie. It’s not even a little good. It’s bad. Real bad. The acting is over-the-top, the dubbing is atrocious, the special effects are abysmal, and the story barely even exists. And I fucking loved it. Why, you ask? I can’t exactly pinpoint what it is about this piece of excrement that I dug so much, but if you’ll allow me to grasp at straws for a moment I just might be able to come up with a few reasons to recommend it.

 BURIAL GROUND is a hodge-podge of everything that usually does and does not work in most Italian horror movies. What works in the flicks’ favor is an omnipresent sense of doom that hangs over the entire picture, as well as the ample nudity and gobs of gooey gore.  What little plot there is involves three couples visiting a villa in the Spanish countryside that is besieged by a flesh eating army of decaying Etruscan corpses. The only explanation we are given as to why this is happening comes in a brief opening scene in which a professor with a silly beard ventures into an archaeological dig after reading some ancient scrolls and is promptly devoured by the zombie horde.

Peter Bark: The last thing you see before you die.

The characters are all shallow caricatures, existing merely to spend the first half hour getting naked, and the rest of the movie getting killed. None of them have any sort of arc save for Michael (Bark), the ten year old son of one of the women in the group, who looks to be going on forty. That’s probably because Michael is played by a 26 year old dwarf actor made up to look like a little boy. The effect is freakishly bizarre and entirely unconvincing. It’s hard not to laugh watching this obviously mature adult run from zombies while screaming “Mama!” in scene after uncomfortable scene. But that’s not even the weird part. No, the filmmakers thought it would be a cool idea to add a little cheap shock value to their movie, so Michael is given some severe mommy issues, namely that he is intensely jealous of her new lover and desperately wants to suck on her tits, even going so far as to spy on the two of them mid-coitus. At one point in the flick, after a particularly brutal zombie attack, the two of them actually start making out. Just typing that last sentence makes me hate myself a little. Yep, this movie goes there. All the way there. Michael’s story culminates in the pictures final moments when, after discovering him zombified, his distraught mother finally allows him to have at her breasts, which he promptly bites right off. So, yeah, I just watched a movie where a full-grown dwarf playing a child bites off a woman’s tit.  I don’t think I’m being at all hyperbolic when I say that it is the greatest scene in film history. Nope, no exaggeration at all.

Sweet dwarf man/child on mom action.

Gore is plentiful, with gallons of grue, spilled intestines and exploding heads, but not an ounce of it looks in any way convincing. All of the head shots are filmed in super slo-mo, highlighting the fact that many of these heads are actually made of Styrofoam, or at least a  similar substance. The zombies themselves are actually kinda cool. They’re apparently all monks, dressed in robes nearly as decayed as themselves, and they work in groups using weapons like axes, hoes, a bear trap, and at one point a battering ram to get into the villa and feast on their living prey. My favorite kill involves a maid who goes to close one of the upstairs windows. One of the undead fiends throws what looks like a railroad spike at her hand, impaling it to the side of the house, rendering her immobile and allowing a few of his ghoulish pals to reach up and very slowly slice her head off with a scythe. It’s pretty fucking horrible to watch, and is one of the few scenes that isn’t unintentionally hilarious.

About that. The tone of this movie is all over the place. After the initial kill of the professor, the previously brooding score is replaced by some inappropriate smooth jazz that kinda sounded like a riff on the theme from “The Odd Couple”. Then we get about a half hour of the three couples roaming the grounds of the villa, spouting off terrible dialogue like “This cloth smells of death”, and all of them ready for some intense sexing. In fact, there were so many sexings happening at once that I briefly feared I might be watching one of those gory porno , or “gorno”, movies I’ve heard of. Considering the filmmakers’ obsession with incest, necrophilia didn’t seem like too far of a reach for them, but thankfully it never goes that far. Then again, the kid WAS dead when he bit his mom’s tit off. Y’know what? I don’t want to talk about that anymore.

Awesome.

So yeah, the tone is schizophrenic to say the least, but once the zombie mayhem starts it settles down into an appropriately grim atmosphere. The music shifts to a mix of theremin and synthesizer. My roommate in the other room thought I was watching a 50’s alien invasion movie just from hearing the score, which is oddly fitting with the gloomy apocalyptic mood set up in the final act.  These zombies may be extremely slow moving, but like death itself, no matter what you do they will always inevitably get you in the end. By the film’s climax it has become abundantly obvious that there is no escape for these characters, and while I couldn’t give less of a shit about any of them, I was still slightly disturbed by the way things played out. This movie might be goofy, but it is extremely mean-spirited. This singularly nihilistic attitude went a long way towards swinging my opinion in the flick’s favor.

It’s movies like BURIAL GROUND that make me question the validity of a numeric grading system. Everything about it reeks of cheapness, from the sets and costumes to the lighting and film stock. If I were to show it to any friends or acquaintances they probably would count me as neither by film’s end. But despite all of that, I actually kinda loved it, and am eagerly looking forward to popping it in again. It’s cheesy fun that slapped a big, goofy grin on my face for much of the running time and featured enough elements of pure, honest-to-God horror to earn a recommendation from me.

My Rating:
Not Applicable, but just for the record, I really fucking liked it, warts and all.