Graveyard Story (1990)

Posted on Jun 25, 2003 under "Cold", Horror |

Written and directed by Bozidar D. Benedikt
Starring
- John Ireland
- Adrian Paul
- Cayle Chernin
- Keith Vinsonhaler
- Christine Cattell

Usually, there’s at least one component of a bad movie that rises above the rest and helps ease the pain. It might be a single competent performance. Or good scoring. Or creative set design. Or a nifty idea buried under the sludge of the script. If all else fails, at least an exploitation movie has breasts and explosions to fall back on as a redeeming feature.

But sometimes, there is no redeeming feature. Sometimes, everything about a movie is substandard. Imagine a not-particularly-seaworthy boat. You can compensate for a single notable leak, but if the entire boat simply seeps water at every seam, then all of the petty inadequacies added together are more dangerous than a glaring deficiency.

“Mr. Hunt? I have a message for you — get the hell out of this movie while you still can.”

In other words, some movies achieve a rare form of negative synergism, in which their uniformly mediocre aspects result in something less than the sum of their parts. (Which might just be a roundabout way of telling you that this is a Canadian-made movie.)

And you can be sure that, wherever such a movie exist, I’m gonna end up watching it sooner or later.

The plot of Graveyard Story, such as it is, starts with retired psychiatrist Dr. McGregor (John Ireland), who hires ex-cop-turned-private-eye to help him with the subject of some troublesome dreams. The P.I., Ron Hunt, is played by Adrian Paul, so from looking at the box I expected at least a modicum of entertainment spending ninety minutes in the company of Duncan MacLeod. Little did I know that this was some other Adrian Paul, one whose acting prowess evokes the range and scope of an assistant high school coach. (So much for “There can be only one.”) This was, quite justly, his only starring role. The late John Ireland, on the other hand, was a veteran of well over a hundred films, which would seem to bespeak at least a certain ability; nevertheless, he performs here as if he’d made a bet with a friend of how little acting he could do and still get paid, and dammit, he’s gonna collect that twenty bucks. Their opening scenes of Dr. McGregor vomiting forth huge lumps of exposition for Hunt’s benefit set a tenor for the rest of the movie; Ireland is perhaps restraining himself severely so as not to upstage his costar, while Paul’s performance is consistent with a man who thinks that “Ac Ting” is a city in China.

“No! How can even YOU be outperforming me?!”

Usually, when all of your actors uniformly underperform, you want to blame the director, either for having a knack for casting bad actors in the first place or for lacking the necessary skills to persuade his actors to earn their paychecks. But in this case, Benedikt the director must share blame with Benedikt the screenwriter, as no actor should be forced to work with such a script. I’ve not heard such a tin ear for dialogue since the King, himself, Edward D. Wood, Jr., but Benedikt lacks the questionable plus of Wood’s giddy inanity. It sounds like a script written by a socially reclusive junior high student.

Anyway. Now that I’ve beaten up on the cast and crew sufficiently (wait, I haven’t mentioned the embarrassingly bad keyboard score), back to the story. Single, retired and depressed, McGregor had visited the local smalltown cemetery and been struck by a grave surmounted by the statue of a little girl. The tombstone only says that a ten-year-old girl, Dolly Cooper, had died “tragically” nine years earlier. Feeling an obsessive connection with her to the point of seeing her in dreams and waking visions, McGregor called Hunt to find her family if possible and learn the story of her death.

Hunt visits the church beside the graveyard and speaks to the priest, but not only is the Father too fresh to remember a death nine years ago, but his records don’t even have that name or plot recorded. (No one ever mentions the other puzzling feature of the grave, to wit, the fact that it’s about six feet from the eroded bank of a lake. One good spring runoff, and we’re going to be using the coffins as rafts, folks.) Incredulous, Hunt then goes to the local police station, who also report no child deaths that year. His next stop is at the local paper, which is apparently a one-woman operation — and boy, is THIS woman on the make! She starts making googly eyes at him as soon as he walks in the door, and would crawl into his lap if he were sitting down. (Too bad she can’t act either.) Once he manages to shake her loose, he starts combing that year’s newspaper archive, and discovers that one Elizabeth Cooper committed suicide, after the disappearance of her daughter. (Funny how the cop, who listed off that year’s reported crimes for Hunt, didn’t mention a child abduction.)

“Thanks, but I’ll wait for the paperback.”

Hunt then tracks down Miss Cooper’s employer at the time, Ms. Bluer, who spills the beans, to wit: Elizabeth Cooper and her daughter Dolly came to live with her when Elizabeth was hired on as a housekeeper. Ms. Bluer took quite a shine to Dolly, to the point that some ne’er-do-well drifters working in one of her businesses mistook Dolly for Bluer’s daughter, and snatched her for ransom. Being a couple of knuckleheads, they did it on a Friday afternoon after the banks were closed, and demanded $25,000 by the next day. Elizabeth tried to take then what little money they could scrape together around the house and explain whose daughter Dolly was, but being knuckleheads, they just upped the ransom (and it’s still the weekend, boys). So when Elizabeth and Ms. Bluer showed up at the rendez-vous the next day, they found… a coffin.

Elizabeth insisted they tell no one, because… um… because the plot wouldn’t work if they did. The local priest at the time was Ms. Bluer’s cousin, so he let them bury the coffin that night, and they never told a soul. Well, Elizabeth never did, because she killed herself the next day.

In the meantime, one knucklehead, Vic, ended up in prison for a bank job; the other was never caught. Vic has recently gotten out of prison, so Hunt tracks him to a local tavern, where he plays in a band. (Oh great — a long country rock interlude. That’s just what this movie was missing.) Vic apparently got scared and lit out before his partner did whatever he did to Dolly, so Hunt lures him into helping for the sake of a little payback. And Hunt’s plan?

“Did that altarboy stick a flashlight down the back of my collar again?”

Dig up the coffin. You know, to look for clues. And to find out that, because nobody ever looked in the coffin, what everyone thought was Dolly’s corpse was nothing but a final “we really mean it” ransom note. Whoops.

Oh, and in the meantime, Hunt has gotten McGregor to reveal that Dolly was actually his daughter, which prompts another long flashback, this time of nineteen years past, when Elizabeth was a lusty young nurse hot for some shrinkage, if you know what I mean. (This part is one of the most unintentionally humorous, what with Elizabeth’s overbroad vamping and bad strip-music keyboard score.) He didn’t want to be in the picture for a baby, though, so they split up. And when he found an unexpected Cooper headstone that was just the right age to be his child in the cemetery, he decided it was time to backtrack. And now it turns out that Dolly didn’t die when everyone thought she did… and she might even be alive yet.

Now, what you may not get from the summary above is just how dead boring everything has been up to here (and will be for much of the rest of the movie; I just got tired of telling you about it). Hunt goes here; he goes there; he asks some questions; he gets some answers; he goes and talks to someone else; he sits through another flashback. I know that real private eye work is mostly boring legwork, just like most police work and most legal work and most of the work of all those professions that look all glamorous at 8pm on network television, but that doesn’t mean I need to see every minute of it. At one point, while Hunt was examining the newspaper archives, we cut to a clock on the wall. It ticks. And ticks. And ticks. Before the dissolve finally came, I almost panicked: We’re going to wait while he goes through the newspapers in realtime! It doesn’t quite get that bad, but the whole movie suffers from editing that refrains from cutting a lot more than it should.

Yo, I don’t think we look Italian enough. Find some marinara sauce to dribble down my shirt, wouldja?”

By the end, you should know, Graveyard Story is no longer a graveyard story. We’re suddenly dealing with Italian mobsters, a nine-year-kidnapping, and a shoeshine boy/man. There’s even — gasp! — some action near the end. In fact, what with fisticuffs flying and the sudden introduction of an electric guitar into the soundtrack, I almost thought someone had changed the channel on me. But no, there’s Adrian Paul, non-acting as hard as a man can non-act. And things are still (just barely) happening for stupid reasons. Must still be the same movie.

The fianl nail in the coffin is the deus ex machina reappearance of Nosy Reporter Girl to save the day. Remember her? Waaaaay back in the smalltown newspaper scene? She vanishes entirely from the movie until the last thirty seconds, in which she both saves the hero and arranges for the bad guys to be captured. “Surprise! It’s me! I’ve been following you ever since our scene together, and you never noticed, you big strong detective, you!” One would think that, at the very least, our illustrious writer/director wouldn’t want the very last thing we see in the movie to be the piss-offiest part. But maybe that explains why no one ever let him direct a movie again. Not even a Canadian one.