cinema history class: burial ground

Session: Welcome to My Nightmare, Week 2
Movie: Burial Ground (1981)
Directed by Andrea Bianchi

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL

Plot:
Zombies lay siege to a mansion where a bunch of hedonists have inexplicably decided to have a party.  Hilarity ensues.*

Reaction:

In his introduction, Keith said, " Check your brain at the door. This is not gonna be an intellectual think piece."

He wasn't kidding. This thing spends very little time jumping into the zombie action, and there's very little exposition. So, while it's easy to follow what's happening, it leaves one wondering why it happened. Why did the zombies attack the mansion? Why were these jet-setting hedonists hanging out there? The fact that so much was left unexplained was the major reason that I didn't rate this any higher.

That said, there is a lot to recommend Burial Ground. Most notable was the creepily miscast Pietro Barzocchini (AKA Peter Bark) as the teenager, Michael. Bark was in his mid-twenties, and his face looked older than that, but he presumably got the role because he was short and of slight build -- from a distance he could pass for a kid. But between his weird expressions (Star Trek's Charlie X comes to mind) and the downright bizzare incesty nature of the character, he was the most memorable thing in the film.

The special effects were -- well, I don;t want to say well done, but they did do a good job of serving their purpose. And we can see the slasher genre developing here. While we're on the subject, it's worth noting that this movie featured strong cooperation among the zombies. They work together to cut a woman's head off with a scythe. They work together to use a battering ram. And in lots of other instances they go beyond the simple limited thought processes that we usually see in zombies. I do have to wonder, however, why, when they have a man in their clutches and can easily bite him, they feel the need to drag him to a huge miter saw.

As I noted, more stage-setting and explanation would have gone a long way toward getting me to appreciate this more. But the action was really well done, and I couldn't help liking it a bit.


Ratings:

Me: 6
Dave: 9.5
Ethan: 6
Joe: 9.9
Sean: 3 out of 4