Burial Ground (1980)

Posted on Oct 02, 2002 under Horror |

aka Nights of Terror, aka Zombi 3 [another one?!], aka Zombie Horror, aka The Zombie Dead

Directed by Andrea Bianchi
Written by Piero Regnoli
Starring
- Karin Well
- Gian Luigi Chirizzi
- Simone Mattioli
- Antonietta Antinori
- Peter Bark

The key to enjoying an Italian zombie flick is so simple, it’s almost a Zen thing: Remember that you’re watching an Italian zombie flick. Heaven knows, aside from a couple of notable exceptions, zombie movies aren’t really near the top of the heap for quality, and we all know that the Italian film industry has traditionally thrived on cranking out rip-offs and knock-offs of genre movies. Thus, just as you don’t go into a WW2-era Three Stooges short looking for deep introspection on the horrors of war, just as you don’t go into a porno expecting a realistic role model for complex interpersonal relationships, so too there are things you just shouldn’t expect going into an Italian zombie flick:

A special effects budget.
Likeable characters.
A coherent storyline.
Good taste.
Professional dubbing. (Not really the fault of the film’s producers, but it’s still a fact of life.)

Once you’ve lowered the bar to the appropriate range for the genre, then Burial Ground ain’t too bad a way to waste an hour and a half. Just be sure to check your brain at the gate, like the characters do.

“And why do I meddle in things best left unmeddled? That, I can tell you in one word — TRADITION!”

The gate in question is around an Italian villa, which also happens to be built on top of an Etruscan burial site. A solitary professor (Renato Barbieri), who looks like a cross between Rasputin and Tevya, is excavating and finds a plaque which, once translated, causes him great shock and amazement. He immediately goes back to his underground dig and starts chipping at the wall from which the plaque came, and apparently the plaque had read “DO NOT EXCAVATE HERE OR ETRUSCAN ZOMBIES WILL CHEW YOUR SORRY CARCASS” because a stone rolls back and stinky corpses gang up on the hirsute archaeologist.

‘Course, that’d be a damned short zombie movie if the fodder consisted of a solitary academic, so we get our baker’s half-dozen immediately. The villa belongs to George (Robert Caporali), who has apparently recently married Evelyn (Maria Angela Giordano). I say apparently, because Evelyn’s son, Michael (Peter Mark), doesn’t look anything like George. Truth to tell, Michael’s father may have been some kind of gnomish incubus, because Michael looks like a bizarre freak of nature, and the way he clings to his mother is scarcely wholesome. (And it gets worse.)

Our other Dead Meat characters, with their distinguishing characteristics, are

- Leslie (Antonella Antinori, also brunette like Evelyn, but cuter) and James (Simone Mattioli, the only one with a moustache). Wait a sec! An Italian movie from the mid-’70s, and only one character has facial hair? Well, I guess the professor tips the scales, since he had enough facefur to part out some to all of the other men, plus all the women, and still have enough not to turn heads at a rabbinic convention.

- Janet (Karin Well, blonde) and Mark (Gian Luigi Chirizzi, skinny but thinks he’s tough).

Born To Be Kibble!

Everyone’s up for a weekend of R&R at George’s recently bought and remodeled villa, which significantly has no phone. Instead of saying, “This is entirely for plot convenience,” George claims it’s so that the villa can be a relaxing place to get away from it all. Like, say, the fire department in case you have a fire at the villa. No, we’ll just let our two recently-hired servants deal with it on their own.

I should note that all through their arrival, plus all night long (as Leslie finds great-grandmother’s lingerie in a trunk, Michael walks in on his mother getting intimate with George, and Leslie dreams that everyone’s going to die hideously), the zombies are apparently milling around waiting for marching orders…

…Which come the next morning, as everyone decides to go and, ah, explore the scenery. Mark goes out to take some pictures of Janet, which soon becomes a full-borne makeout session. Leslie and James don’t even bother with an excuse; they just spread a blanket and start sucking face. (Boy, the missus and I have got to go on one of those Etruscan holidays. We’ll just have to pick a villa that isn’t overrun with the living dead.) Evelyn and George are saddled with Michael, though, and don’t want a repeat of last night, so they instead decide to examine the artifacts that the professor’s amassed in his workshop. (Everyone’s used to the professor disappearing for days at a time. No one goes looking for you when you’ve developed a habit for three-day benders, I guess.)

Etruscans wore ascots?

Only about ten minutes in, then, and we get what we paid for: Zombie attacks! And graciously, the zombies have decided to attack during daylight hours, where we can get a good look at them (the nighttime and interior shooting, which comprise a good part of the film, are almost criminally underlit). And they look… well…

See, here’s the thing. I can tell they’re cheap; most of the makeup is accomplished with crude, dirt-covered masks that only bear perfunctory similarity to actual human anatomy as far as tooth and bone placement, etc. Their dress is almost entirely made of burlap, and looks suspiciously like painter’s smocks (more costume coverage means less makeup). And yet, there’s something primally rotted about them. I can’t help it; I like ‘em. I’d much rather watch actors in paper-mache masks with wriggling maggots spirit-gummed to them than any number of well-sculpted, far-too-clean-to-be-menacing foam latex appliances (I’m thinking of Return of the Living Dead Part 2 right here).

Most of the rest of the movie could be told in far less time than it takes to watch, as each couple has a run-in with multiple zombies (apparently every dead Etruscan ever was buried right here), usually resulting in some disbelieving gaping (and loving closups of wriggling maggots) before they get the clue to run. Evelyn, George, and Michael get themselves trapped in the professor’s workshop, and George’s gun allows us plenty of shots of huge gooey holes being ineffectually shot into the undead. Evelyn and Michael escape; George becomes the first victim, as zombies tear his torso open and chow down on his innards.

“Hey, wait — maybe if we PULLED on the door…”

The rest all regroup and (after Janet runs afoul of the worst-placed bear trap in history) try to make their way toward the cars. Look, I’m thinking, it shouldn’t be that hard to outrun them; they’re dead, and they’re unarmed. After the first couple show up, I’m sure that reaction of stunned horror would fade, and you wouldn’t have to stop and stare at every individual shuffling corpse that wandered into your view, would you? But now they’ve delayed enough that, by the time they get to the parking area, zombies are guarding all of the cars (pretty smart for having just awakened from a two-thousand-year dirt nap), so everyone rushes into the house and locks the door.

Which isn’t as good an idea as it sounds, as a huge villa it a lot harder to board up and fortify than a dinky farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania. Plus, the zombies are getting smarter, to the point of using projectile weapons and garden tools to pull the maid from a second-story window and chop off her head. They also manage to get their hands on some axes, and it doesn’t help anything that our victims forgot to board up a few picture windows. Soon Evelyn gets herself gobbled, and then Michael gets gobbled by the revived Evelyn. (This is after Michael made some pretty unequivocal sexual advances toward his mother. “Unwholesome” doesn’t even cover it anymore.) Zombies do get dispatched by fire or gooey head-bashing, but there are simply more dead Etruscans than live Italians.

Now, I’ve not made too many jokes at the expense of our hapless protagonists’ intelligence; heaven knows, if I were confronted by scads of undead members of a long-vanished civilization (who thus can’t sue the producers for defamation), I know I’d have something of a period of adjustment. But when Mark straight-facedly suggests, “Let them come in — maybe it’s something inside that they want!”, I just wanted to reach into the screen and slap him. Thanks for thinking outside the box, Mark — now just cast your mind back to when you were getting hot’n'heavy with Janet, and that first zombie grabbed your foot. Where were you? Inside the house? No, I think not.

Zombé.

Not that Mark gets much of a chance to bring his hare-brained scheme to fruition; the zombies soon avail themselves of a battering ram(!). (Pretty soon, they’ll be mechanically advanced enough to hotwire one of the cars and drive it right through the door.) The remaining lives ones — let’s see, that’s Evelyn, Janet, Mark, and James (the butler got himself eaten by the zombie professor) — make a break for it cross-country. (No one stops to notice that the cars are pretty much unguarded at this point.) Do they strike out up the lane, to the main road and civilization?

Hardly. Instead they sleep in an outbuilding and in the morning slog across fields until they see a monastery. The monks seem pretty reticent about being seen, and James soon finds out why — the “monks” are all undead Etruscans in black robes. (Seems we’ve added the concept of disguise to the zombies’ repetoire, as well as ripping off the look of de Ossorio’s Blind Dead. The survivors get themselves trapped in a dead end room, Zombie Michael comes back and bites his mother’s breast off (all together now — “EWWWWWWWWWWWW!”), and everyone gets et. The end.

The plot seems almost perfunctory; there’s no real rationale for the dead to rise, nor any motivation for killing and eating the living a la the Blind Dead movies; it’s more of a “We’re zombies, that’s what we do” thing. It’s unassuming, unambitious trash cinema. But we knew that going into it, so as long as it lives up to the lowball standards of the genre, I can’t fault it.

Frankly, I’d love to see where a sequel would go. Given the increases in intelligence the zombies exhibit, I suspect that by the end of another ninety-minute installment, the dead would be running things, and doing a better job of it, too.