BURIAL GROUND - THE NIGHT OF TERROR

Also known as : Le Manoir de la terreur, Le notti del terrore, Burial Ground: The Nights of Terror, Zombie 3, The Zombie Dead, Zombie – Nattens Terror

With movies like The Beyond (1981), Zombie (1979), and House by the Cemetery (1981), legendary Italian horror maestro, Lucio Fulci, is without a doubt among the elite of Italian horror cinema. But when you move beyond these world famous classics, you’ll manage to find even more flesh-eating mayhem in the form of Italian sexploitation-director Andrea Bianchi and his movie Burial Ground which turns out to be one of the more entertaining and outrageous entries into the zombie genre.

Professor Ayres (Renato Barbieri) obtains a tablet from an ancient Etruscan cave. He proceeds to hack at a cave wall, while a stone mechanism activates behind him, and as he turns around he sees a zombie slowly walking towards him and within seconds, several more overpower him and eat him.

A group of people arrive at the huge country mansion where professor Ayres is staying: couple Evelyn and George (Mariangela Giordano and Roberto Caporali) with Evelyn’s thirteen year-old son Michael (Peter Bark), and other couples Mark and Janet (Gian Luigi Chirizzi and Karin Well), and Leslie and James (Antonella Antinori and Simone Mattioli). George asks where the professor is, and the butler and the maid tells him that professor Ayres often is gone from dusk till dawn The party doesn’t seem to take further notice of the missing professor and they all go to bed after dinner.

The next day, James and Leslie head outside to make out. Mark photographs Janet around the estate, while George shows Evelyn the artifacts that professor Ayres had unearthed from the caves. In the house, the butler Nicholas and the maid Kathleen witness several bulbs exploding due to some strange electrical interference, and then, suddenly countless zombies emerge from the caves and into the mansion.

While Janet and Mark make out, a zombie rises from the ground and grabs Janet. They both flee the zombie, as do James and Leslie when they witness one emerging from a stone crypt. Several zombies encounter Evelyn, George and Michael in the cellar and George attempts to shoot them with his gun, while Evelyn and Michael escape. The zombies eventually overcome George and devour his innards. From hereon the living dead are rising in numbers as Evelyn, Michael and the rest of the party can only barricade the mansion and hope to survive the attack from these ghastly flesh-eaters.

The earth shall tremble, graves shall open,
they shall come among the living as messengers of death and there shall be the nigths of terror.

Profecy of the Black Spider

As you can see, the film is pretty simple and basically without a plot and any deeper meaning. It’s essentially a zombie film combined with a high body count. You have the simple set up placing disposable bodies in an old mansion, and then you have the zombies who work their way through them one by one. Unlike the zombies we’re used to, these undead aren’t shy about using various items as weapons, like axes and shards of glass, which I guess make them a unique breed of zombies. The first twenty minutes of the film is pretty bland as we simply witness some of the socialites’ boring conversations during the first night of their stay. But after that, the film becomes a true tour de force of zombie mayhem and it rarely takes a break from the bloodshed and destruction, allowing you to breathe.

This also means that Burial Ground is in no way a character drama like for instance Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) which also sports racial and social undertones. Instead, all the characters in Bianchi’s film are purely disposable bodies with one purpose only; to fuel the gore sequences.

In Romero’s zombie flicks, the humans are at the center of the story – it’s the humans that are the main characters and the ones the audience are rooting for. It seems to be the exact opposite in Burial Ground, namely due to the one-dimensional and identity-less characters. That doesn’t mean that the characters are directly terrible – they’re just not noteworthy, although Michael and his mother Evelyn played by the beautiful Mariangela Giordano stand out. Michael is notable because he’s a 13-year-old boy that’s being played by a then 25 year old Peter Bark, who was an adult dwarf. Furthermore, the character’s lines are dubbed by an adult trying to sound like a 13 year old boy, so this character really makes you raise an eyebrow or two. Evelyn and Michael have a weird and quite bizarre relationship. Michael sees his mother have sex and later in the movie he feel her up and kisses her, and ultimately expresses his lust for breastfeeding.

But the film’s greatest asset is not this weird mother-son relationship – it is undoubtedly the zombie designs and the gore effects, as these are especially well done and masterminded by special F/X make-up artist Gino De Rossi, who have worked with Lucio Fulci several times. De Rossi’s zombies look like literal rotted and decayed corpses, and they’re covered with maggots, dirt and decaying discolored skin. So even though I’m a huge all-time fan of Romero’s zombies, I’ll have to say that the zombies in Burial Ground also look very cool and appealing. Furthermore, the special F/X offers up a noteworthy brutal decapitation and an eye gouging, so there’s no doubt that gore fanatics will find a ton to like here, as it’s one of the more disgusting zombie flicks out there.

So despite the missing plot, the lack of any deeper meaning and the goofy acting, Burial Ground is indeed highly enjoyable and entertaining, and as a fan of zombie films, one can’t go wrong with this one.

DVD:

The DVD reviewed is a region 2 released by Another World Entertainment. The feature is presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen and looks very good and sharp considering the film’s age and print. It’s a given that the image holds grain and a few scratches, but with an old movie like this, its part of the charm.

Audio comes in Dolby Digital stereo and with both the original Italian language track and the English dubbed soundtrack.

Sadly the special features on this disc are limited to a few trailers for other Another World Entertainment releases, but there is a nice and informative booklet with a great layout inside the DVD case, written by Jesper Moerch, which is well worth your time.