Morti e sepolti

Sheriff Dan Gillis (James Farentino) has a nice life with his wife, the teacher Janet Gillis (Melody Anderson), in the small coastal and friendly town of Potter's Bluff. When visitors are mysterious killed in the town, Sheriff Gillis investigates the cases carefully and finds that dead people are reanimating and coming back to life. Dan finds a book of witchcraft and voodoo in his wife's drawer and he suspects that she might be practicing black magic. Dan meets the coroner-mortician William G. Dobbs (Jack Albertson) and learns the dreadful and surprising secret.

"Dead & Buried" is a cult-movie with a creepy atmosphere and a surprising end. The plot has flaws, with lack of explanation for many situations. Why should Dobbs let the sheriff investigate further and not disclose the truth about him in the beginning? My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Os Mortos Vivos" ("The Living Dead")

Note: On 26 March 2015, I saw this film again. Note: On 10 Dec 2019, I saw this film again.

Horror story full of tension, thrills , chills and restless terror. The writers of alien, Ronald Shusett and Dan O'Bannon , bring a new bizarre terror to earth . Suspense/horror film set in a small coastal town in Rhode Island where, after a series of gory murders committed by mobs of townspeople against visiting tourists, the corpses begin to come back to life . Bouts of insanity in the populace , realising a plague of murderous madness that are leading several grisly killings . In the little town some people begins to kill and rioting, and things really start going to hell with this sudden death-wave . The strange events drive its victims mad before killing them, with a difficult line between normal hysteria and actual insanity . Meanwhile the sheriff Gillis ( James Farentino married to Melody Anderson ) is investigating the weird deeds , but has no tracks to what's going on. Fortunately, the coastal small New England town has a magnificent mortician named William G. Dobbs (Jack Albertson) , who is glad to take care of these deaths which is good for his business . The puzzling seems to be resolved at the creepy final packed with twists and turns .

This one is of the highest earning horror movies of the 80s and contains a good cast as James Farentino , Melody Anderson and special mention to Jack Albertson as the mysterious undertaker . Furthermore , early apparition of the future terror icon as Robert Englund and film debut for Lisa Blount . It's a solid movie , a terror story plenty of suspense and intrigue in which the victims seem to be coming back to life. Film itself takes place from point of sight the sheriff and the mortician . The living dead appearance is the high point of the movie , they deliver the goods plenty of screams, shocks and tension . The horror moments are compactly made and fast moving . It packs tension, shocks, thrills, chills and lots of gore and blood . There's plenty of moments of gore and a number of scenes that are quite horrifying , resulting to be definitely the spotlight of the film the surprising ending . This gory chiller is well made by Gary A. Sherman . Gary is an expert on action genre as proved in ¨Wanted : dead or alive¨ , ¨Vice squad¨ and terror as ¨Death line¨ , ¨Poltergeister III¨ , and ¨Dead and buried¨ , this one is his best film . Rating : 6,5 , good horror movie .

This is a real sleeper, although the presence of screenwriter Dan O'Bannon's ('Alien') name in the credits automatically assures us we are in for a treat. And this is most certainly the case; 'Dead and Buried' is a real class act. James Farentino is excellent as the bewildered sheriff of the small American fishing community of Potter's Bluff. And the opening scene, in which an unsuspecting photographer is burned alive in broad daylight, still shocks more than twenty years after the film's release. To reveal too much of the plot would be to spoil the surprise; suffice it to say that it involves a series of bizarre and brutal murders investigated by Farentino's character.

Stan Winston provides some great special makeup effects; witness the particularly gruesome sequence in which a man is embalmed... while still alive! Also, Lisa Blount appears as the seductive young lady on the beach in the opening scene (she can be seen in 'John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness'), and watch out for a fledgling Robert Englund before he rose to international stardom as serial killer Freddy Krueger in the 'A Nightmare on Elm Street' franchise. 'Dead and Buried''s final twist is really kick-ass and wonderfully macabre, and it wraps up a creepy, atmospheric outing. Definitely worth a look.

Recently I rented 'Bleeders', one of director Gary Sherman's newer films, and remembered this movie from my past while reviewing it. So, I dug through our video collection until I found it.

'Dead & Buried' is a surprisingly good movie. Released in the time where there was either one murderous main person (Freddy/Jason/Micheal Myers) or a strange pervert slaying half naked teenage girls (Slumber Party Massacre, among others), it was a surprise to see a large group of people get in on the killings. This somewhat original idea is probably one of the most appealing points of the film.

The story goes somewhat like this: strangers keep on getting killed as soon as they show up in the small town in which the movie is set. The local sheriff is somewhat baffled about what's going on -- he's a new cop, so he isn't used to dealing with murders. All this time everyone's acting a little strange: his wife seems to be developing a strange addiction for voodoo and the local mortician seems to enjoy preparing bodies for burial a little too much. When the cop finally starts to realize what's going on, he learns why his town is a little different than most other ones.

Any horror fan would enjoy 'Dead & Buried'. It's should be known as one of the few horror movies from the early eighties that doesn't make you want to crack up laughing. Zombie film fans would probably find it quite interesting as well, as long as they don't expect the run of the mill green skinned 'Bloodsuckers from Outer Space' zombies.

Gary Sherman's film Dead & Buried, from a script by Alien writers Ron Shusset and (the late) Dan O'Bannon, is a strange creature of a movie. It's meant to reel in the horror movie crowd, but it's for a crowd of another time period. That is, at least, the filmmaker's intention, and it's the kind of horror movie that might have been made in the 40's (maybe Val Lewton would've produced it, though probably never showing a death on screen), and has a mad mortician, calmly and chillingly played by Jack ("Grandpa Joe" from Willy Wonka) Albertson, bringing back people from the dead and having those dead go after tourists or passerbys who have the dumb luck to travel into town.

Sometimes the gore is meant to be emphasized, like with the death of the fisherman or the doctor who gets acid poured on him. The latter of these is a terrible scene, not just because Stan Winston wasn't involved in the effect (you can tell), but because it's done too much and the camera lingers a little too long. Dead & Buried is helped by it being surreal: the opening scene where the guy is photographing on the beach, comes across the woman and starts to take pictures "for Playboy" and then is overcome by a horde of people also flashing pictured and filming and is killed by fire, is something out of a pure nightmare (you almost expect someone to wake up, but no one does). When it sticks to this dead-undead thing, of the hints at witchcraft and the eerie performances by the Sheriff's wife and some of the townspeople like Robert Englund, make it worthwhile.

Dead & Buried is not what you expect, which is a good and not-so-good thing. It's low-budget and atmospheric, and its ending is a bit of a WTF twist that seems unnecessary. But there's a lot of interest here, a lot of weird effects with cameras and crowds of the undead. Just don't go expecting the usual flesh and guts show, despite what the film's own distributors thought at the time.