- Directed by Gary Sherman
- Written by Ronald Shusett and Dan O’Bannon
- Starring
- James Farentino
- Melody Anderson
- Jack Albertson
- Lisa Blount
With John Carpenter’s The Fog getting the DVD re-release treatment right now, can Dead & Buried be far behind? The movies are quite similar in their setting and atmosphere (between these two and Humanoids From the Deep, one can almost imagine an early ’80s conspiracy to destroy the tourist trade in northern seaboard towns). Director Gary Sherman never managed to generate a personal following like Carpenter did, and it’s a shame, because Dead & Buried is a far superior movie to The Fog.
“I seem to have wandered into a calendar.”
We open on the idyllic seashore, where a vacationing photographer (Christopher Allport) is taking in some local color. On the beach he meets a pretty local blonde girl (Lisa Blount), and after some chatty banter she starts modelling for him. All’s going well, she’s giving him some pretty definite signs (like whipping her shirt open) — too bad it’s interrupted when a circle of locals surround him and, with the blonde’s help, beat the snot out of him, tie him to a post with a fishnet, and snap pictures as they douse him in gasoline and set him alight. Welcome to Potter’s Bluff, yet another sleepy little town with a hideous secret.
By the time that one-man sheriff’s department Dan Gillis (James Farentino) and the ancient town mortician/coroner Dobbs (Jack Albertson) arrive, the immolation’s been fixed to look like a fiery traffic accident in the photographer’s VW van. To their shock, they find that the badly burned body isn’t dead yet — a fact proved by the startling scream it utters when touched. (Yeah, I jumped.)
“Yes, it smells very nice. Can we talk about the crime scene now?”
What Dan doesn’t know, as he commiserates about the terrible accident with locals in the one-horse diner, is that almost all of them (watch for Robert Englund in a supporting role) have faces we recognize from the murderous mob.
The case would probably closed as an accident involving an unidentified transient, except that that night, a wino fisherman — again, not a local — finds himself on the wrong end of some meathooks on the dock, and this time the non-accidental nature of the death is left pretty obvious. Dan’s facing the distasteful prospect of a serial killer in his little town.
“I’m… DARKMAN.”
However, having a Masters Degree in Criminology, Dan does manage to do some investigatin’. He checks the hotels to see if anyone’s checked in without checking out, and tracks the missing photographer to his luggage — everything but his name. And the hotel owner’s other lead isn’t any more comforting: That the photographer had been visited in his room by Dan’s schoolteacher wife Janet (Melody Anderson — hey, that’s Dale Arden!).
We leave Dan to his suspicions of infidelity while we see more murders and attempted murders take place (including the blonde slipping into the hospital to finish off the bandage-wrapped photographer with a hypo through the eye). A particularly long sequence involves a family of father/mother/son stopping to ask directions, getting into a wreck, and ending up in a creepy abandoned house with people prowling around outside. It’s a nifty scene, fueled by the very real menace to a child, and it exemplifies one of the features that sets this movie apart: Sherman isn’t just content to entertain you with spookiness. He honestly wants to scare you. And the cherry on top of this scene: The gas station attendant who volunteers to reopen the garage to fill their tank is none other than the charbroiled photographer, hale and hearty and a full partner in the town’s little secret.
Yeah, but you should see the mosquito I hit last summer.
Obviously Dan’s out of his league, and his life just keeps getting weirder. He hits a running figure on a night patrol, and discovers to his horror that the victim has left his arm in Dan’s grill — still wriggling. He discovers a book on witchcraft and voodoo and a ceremonial dagger in his wife’s underwear drawer; she claims she’s teaching it in her gradeschool class (what wacky-ass standardized tests do they have in New England?). And Dobbs, usually the best person for Dan to bounce ideas off, is getting increasingly unsettling as he rhapsodizes about the miracles he works with disfigured corpses, making them even more perfect than they were in life. And he gets plenty of opportunity to exhibit his skills, as gruesome corpses kill turning up… and unbeknownst to Dan, keep ending up after the funeral as citizens of the fine community of Potter’s Bluff.
Given that I’m reviewing this as part of Month of the Living Dead 2, it would be reasonable of you to assume that zombies are indeed involved, but the word never comes up, probably to keep us from assuming that any of the standard sets of zombie lore (the voodoo beliefs, the Romero mythology, etc.) apply here. While you can guess the broad outlines of the plot, the story doesn’t follow the low-water path worn by zombie films before it. Instead, we get a movie that honestly wants to frighten us. That’s the second time I’ve mentioned that, which I think tells you how the effort impressed me. Whether it be a gross-out scene, a shock (including one of the best set-up “springloaded something-or-other” scenes ever), or simple empathy with Dan’s growing confusion, it’s a movie that unsettles as a prelude to soften you up for real scares.
Let’s list things you DON’T want to find in your wife’s underwear drawer…
Kudos, by the way, to Farentino for rising to the occasion when he’s called upon to act (as opposed to simply rolling out the “gruff toughie” routine he’s built his career on). In the last twenty minutes, Dan keeps getting hit with appalling discoveries that he wishes desperately he didn’t have to believe, and these scenes are made genuinely disturbing as much by Farentino’s reactions as the revelations themselves.
As usual, a “town with a secret” movie relies on far too many unrealistic premises (was the New England tourist industry really so nonexistent twenty years ago? and why is the small-town cop always the last to know about anything?). But as far as the genre goes, this is one of the better examples, with just the right touch of Lovecraftian overtones — not surprising, as co-writer Dan O’Bannon gave us the original script for Alien (in which the creature was described as cephalopoid), directed The Resurrected (an adaptation of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward) in 1992, and gave us the script for Bleeders in 1997.
Some Notable Totables:
- body count: 8
- breasts: 2
- explosions: 0
- ominous thunderstorms: 0
- actor who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 7
- Bill Quinn (“Ernie”) played Dr. McCoy’s father in Star Trek 5
- Ed Bakey (“Fisherman” played “First Fop” in the classic episode “All Our Yesterdays”
- Glenn Morshower (“Jimmy”) played “Ensign Burke” in the TNG episode “Peak Performance,” “Orton” in the TNG episode “Starship Mine, the navigator in Star Trek: Generations, and “Guard #1″ in the Voyager episode “Resistance”
- Michael Pataki (“Sam” played “Korax” in the classic episode “The Trouble With Tribbles” (and reprised the role in the DS9 episode “Trials and Tribble-ations”), and “Governor Karnas” in the TNG Episode “Too Short a Season”
- Tony Cecere (an uncredited extra) did stunts in Star Trek 2
- Bill Couch (stunt co-ordinator and stuntman) was the stunt co-ordinator on both Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Star Trek 2
- Bill Couch Jr. (extra/stuntman) also did Star Trek 2 stunts
