Buried Alive - Sepolti vivi

What you'll think of "Buried Alive" will strongly depend on what you expected up front. If your mind is set for an insignificant but at least non-boring slasher full of gratuitous nudity, gore, and clichéd situations with dumb teenagers, well then you certainly won't feel cheated. If you were hoping to see an above-average and innovative horror movie, then - and I'm sorry to say - you're are just not good at managing expectations; - and it doesn't matter if you based your judgement on promising names on the film poster like Robert Kurtzman ("Wishmaster") or Tobin Bell ("Saw").

Sometimes the plot pretends to be reasonably ambitious (with native American family curses) and crazily perverted (with hints at incestuous desires), but it's fundamentally a banal slasher with sexy sorority coeds parading around barely dressed, loud-mouthed but cowardly jocks smoking soft-drugs, and a geek with glasses providing you with all the required information. Together, they all go to a godforsaken cabin in the desert where it takes an awful long time to get hacked up by a zombie hag who's the first wife of two of the party members' great-great grandfather. Oh, Tobin Bell also stumbles around as unhygienic gold digger who refers to himself in 3rd person.

The battle-axe action is decent, the girls look delicious, and the ending is nicely twisted. The only thing left to say is that the blonde actress negotiated the terms of her contract quite badly. She must take her clothes off all the time, show everything, and die a painful death, whereas the brunette only puts her rear end on display and gets off lightly.

'Buried Alive' seems too-good of a title to be placed on this piece of garbage. The cover art; though cheesy and unrealistic, actually looks half decent compared to the movie. The logo 'Dimension Extreme' is placed on top of the cover as if the film was somewhat 'too extreme or intense' to be shown in theaters.

I have lost a lot of interest in Dimension Extreme films mostly because they release films like this. 'Buried Alive' is a failed attempt to bring back a once promising genre (horror) and revive it into something new.

The main problem I had with this film is that it never truly finds itself a climax or a theme. It doesn't decide whether its a witchery film, a slasher flick, or a spiritual horror movie. I'm not saying that all horror films need to set one theme, but when the story gets so confusing and the plot gets all twisted up into nonsense, you kind of need a set theme to rely on. The movie tries to save itself by bringing up some foreign Indian voodoo symbolism story but by then, you realize that the movie just got too ridiculous to continue watching.

The poor acting did not help the movie either. The best performances were probably by Steve Sandvoss and Lindsey Scott. They both made their characters presentable and easy to understand, specifically Lindsey Scott's character who I found humorous and enjoyable. As for Tobin Bell, he played the dirty Lester character fairly well but my main issue with him is that we are so used to seeing him as the man behind Jigsaw that he ultimately fails in bringing a new character into life. All other actor's screwed up in some way or form. Their acting was really poor (mhmm...Leah Rachel) and it was hard for me to have any sympathy for them when they got butchered by the old ugly witch.

The gore and screams were minimum. I felt that the movie took way to long to explain the story that it waited till the very end to give us the blood-thirsty gore (which wasn't much to have been waiting for). The old witch that was killing everyone off was ridiculously stupid and did not even scare me one bit.

All in all, this is the typical stereotype horror film that doesn't offer anything new to the horror genre. It's a pathetic attempt and in the end, we're left with a horrible ending that does not resolve anything. I am being generous by giving it a 2 star rating, but thats only because of the two all-stars of the film.

Buried Alive: 2/10

Watch It or Miss It: MISS IT!

Two college students Rene (Leah Rachel) and Zane (Terence Jay) invite their friends (Erin Lokitz, Lindsay Scott, Steve Sandvoss and Germaine De Leon) to their family ranch for the weekend somewhere in the desert. Which like any college students, they just want to have a wild party and getting laid. The Caketaker (Tobin Bell) is been trying to look for gold in the house. He accidentally digs the dead body of a old witch. Her spirit wants revenge and one by one, they are killed by this vengeful ghost.

Directed by Robert Kurtzman (The Demolitionlist, The Rage, Wishmaster) made an pretty dull, lifeless supernatural slasher horror film with some neat special effects and good production values can't save it. Most of the college students are pretty unlikeable in the movie expect for Scott as the cute blonde. Only Bell seems to be having any real fun with his supporting role, he is the only one to give some class in this movie. Kurtzman's previous features are more fun than this. Especially he's one of the best make-up artists around and he owns an independent film production titled "Precient 13". Which he is named after John Carpenter's cult classic "Assault on Precient 13". Too bad this premise is very uninteresting and even Horror fans will find boring. (* ½/*****).

I went out to the video store to get myself something to watch besides the boring drama films that keeps showing on TV all day long, and so I found buried alive, it wasn't boring just very uninteresting, the pace is extremely slow and I would sum up the storyline, but the whole sorority thing, the one guy on a treasure hunt and the ghost story thing makes it a little confusing, because judging from the cover you'd expect a horror film but its over shadowed by a very slow storyline consisting of very dull and stereotypical characters, although the cast isn't bad but they should'vie considered something other than this, and the gore effects are very forgettable and not as well done as in many of the good horror films

Overall, a good horror film is one that scares you so much you lie awake at night still thinking about it, a bad horror movie is one that bores you so much you fall asleep during the day and you won't even remember it the following day, so consider getting something like saw if want to see Tobin Bell at his best, or vacancy for mixture of 80's horror with a modern twist, because this won't satisfy horror fans very much.

3 out of 10

Buried Alive was directed by a man who is pretty known in the genre, Robert Kurtzman and while his work as a special effects artist is pretty respectable, his work as a director is definitely expendable, at least in this movie. You have lots of pretty bad effects and actors that can't act, add to that that the plot is not really interesting and the pacing definitely has issues. Also for some reason two of the female characters are taking their clothes off in every chance they get for some reason and don't get me wrong I don't mind nudity in horror movies at all but it just felt so out of place and unnecessary that it really made me uncomfortable. One of the very few and things that is enjoyable in this movie is that it is starring Tobin Bell, but even he is more of a side character. While this movie is not completely terrible or complete trash it's definitely not recommendable in my opinion. [4,1/10]