Burial Ground (1981)

aka Nights of Terror/Le Notti del Terrore/Nights of Terror
Studio: Media Blasters/Shriek Show
Theatrical Release: July 9, 1981
Blu-Ray Release: June 7, 2011
Review by Craig Sorensen

Burial Ground has to be one of the cheapest, stupidest and strangest zombie films ever made.  I mean, don’t get me wrong, I fucking love it, it’s just a little hard to justify my love of it.  There are so many weird things going on in this thing that I’m always entertained.

So, Professor Ayres has made some kind of discovery in some kind of ruins or crypt or something near his mansion.  I’m not sure what that discovery is exactly as the movie isn’t really clear on this point.  Anyway, so he finds some kind of stone with some symbols carved in it.  And then he goes back to the ruins/crypt and is eaten by some zombies.

So sometime before this he invites three couples (one of which has a son in tow-more on him later) to his mansion to reveal this monumental discovery.  I’m not sure who these people are or why he invited them but I guess that’s not important because the movie wastes no time trying to explain.  They’re just there so shut up.

After a couple of truncated sex scenes everyone wakes up and goes outside to make out.  Then the zombies show up and try to eat them.  They all run to the mansion and try to board it up Night of the Living Dead style (only with some twigs and firewood).  Of course the zombies eventually get in and eat a few people.

I don’t really want to give too much else away but I’m sure you will probably see most of the twists and surprises coming.  Of course this isn’t a very original concept.  There aren’t really a whole lot of those in the zombie genre (with a few notable exceptions of course).  Burial Ground does carve out a niche though through great atmosphere and good old-fashioned weirdness.

The locations are really great and do most of the heavy lifting in this film.  The mansion is a big, old world Italian mansion so really all you have to do is light it dimly and you’re halfway there.  It really adds a great old-school, Italian gothic feel to the proceedings.  You also get a crazy 1970’s abstract electronic soundtrack, which in my opinion is always a plus.

And the cast, holy shit, the cast.  First of all, every male character just seems off to me.  OK, so you’ve got Roberto Caporali running around in his tight red sweater and toupee, Gian Luigi Chirizzi is your slightly balding leading man (I guess?) and Simone Mattioli and his affable mustache.  And to top it all off, the great Peter Bark playing the young child Michael.  Bark is a 25 year old man playing at least a 10 year old.  The image of Peter Bark, also wearing a toupee as well as his stylish mom pants, playing a child is certainly a strange one.  I don’t want to give too much away from his performance, as I’d like to think that there are some people seeing this movie for the first time still.  The female side of the cast is much less strange.  But in keeping with Italian film standards, all are kind of hot.  Especially Mariangela Giordano.  She is the most well known actor in the film (well maybe outside of Peter Bark) and she does a very good job with the overly silly dialog and situations.

I have to talk about these zombies as well.  These are some of the sorriest looking zombies I’ve ever seen.  These are the kind of zombies that most filmmakers would stick way back in the background to fill out a crowd scene.  Bianchi shoots them in close-up.  You can see the actors nose sticking out of the mask in a few shots.  It’s covered in a black stocking so it could be worse I suppose but still, it’s supposed to be a rotted away hole in a corpses face but there is a big black nose shaped thing sticking out.  Some of the zombies literally look like someone threw modeling clay on the actor’s face a few minutes before the camera started rolling.  And where the hell are all these corpses coming from?  Some of them are just popping out of flower beds.  I mean, I can accept zombies wandering out of a crypt but why are there bodies buried a few inches under the grass all over the garden?

I know that it seems like I’m being overly harsh but I really do enjoy the film.  All of these things add up to an almost surreal, dreamlike ambiance.  It’s kind of like being trapped in a nightmare.  Why are all these people here?  Who are these people?  Why are they all so strange?  What is causing the dead to rise?  Why is this 30 year old guy playing a 7 year old?  The movie makes no attempt to answer any of these questions and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Now, about this transfer.  I don’t know what’s up with it.  OK, first of all, I think that the colors are good.  I’ve always thought that the previous versions of this film were muddy and overly dark.  That’s not the case here.  The film’s color scheme is mostly earth tones so I’m not saying that it’s real colorful but everything seems to look more true to how I imagine the film is supposed to look.  Reds in particular really pop.  But I don’t know what’s going on with the grain.  It just doesn’t look like film grain to me.  It looks like video noise.  I’m certainly not opposed to a film looking grainy.  I like grainy films.  I will try to avoid a disc if I know that they’ve filtered out all of the film grain.  But this, I’m just not sure what I’m looking at.  It’s got a thick layer of chroma noise all over it.  Even during some of the daylight scenes, which I don’t think should be that grainy.  I’m not a telecine expert so I couldn’t really begin to tell you what’s going on here.  But this doesn’t look natural to me.  Audio is fine.  Nothing too special but it gets the job done.

Disc extras include a trailer for the film, some silent outtakes and two interviews.  The outtakes are nice and include quite a bit of nudity.  I’m really surprised that it was cut out.  It’s not that explicit and I would assume that it would help sell the film.  The interviews with producer Gabiele Crisanti and actress Mariangela Giordano are ported over from the previous DVD version.  They're decent enough I suppose.  No Peter Bark interviews though.

I guess I’d recommend getting this if you don’t already have the DVD.  The movie is awful but fun so it’s always good to have around for parties at the very least.  The outtakes are nice but I don’t know if that’s enough reason to upgrade.  The transfer is weird and a few times was distracting for me.  I guess if you think that’s not a big deal then go ahead and get it.