Le manoir de la terreur

This is one of the most brilliantly funny movies in the history of film. It displays humor that is so complex, and it's so unbelievably fall-on-the-floor-until-you-can-no-longer-breathe-and-your- friends-have-to-dial-9-1-1-but-they-can't-because-they can't-breathe-either-and-you-all-end-up-suffocating-funny that it should not be missed. What's almost as funny are some of the other reviews on this site. People actually admitting to being scared by this unintended laugh fest. The soundtrack is the stuff Academy Award-winning scores are made of. I want to turn that kid who played Michael into a cult hero. I know he's no longer living because I think he had that aging disease. I love the 40 year-old man who dubbed Michael's voice with that soprano-mock-child voice. Paper machet zombies always liven up a film that wears it's no-budget aesthetics proudly on it's sleave. What may be the funniest thing of all is that I own this movie(not the rights, just the video, although I could probably afford the rights.) The blurb on the box says that it's about a "group of jet-setters and a mysterious professor that we don't see too much of." Priceless. This is a rare movie to find at rental stores, but if you look hard enough, it may pop up and your searching efforts will not go unrewarded when you find it. You can trust me on this one. To quote the professor at the beginning, "I'm your friend."

Zombies attack three couples in Italy after their Burial Ground is disrupted in this entertaining horror flick from 1985.

We first see a man who seems to be digging around and exploring a burial ground site. While chipping away at the stones on the site, he appears to let out some vicious zombies who kill him. Meanwhile we see that a group of 30-somethings head up to a large mansion for the weekend near the burial site where the zombies attacked.

It isn't long before the dead start rising from the ground as grotesque zombies and roam the grounds of the large property. After all three of the couples are attacked during broad daylight but the undead creatures, it becomes a battle to stay alive and survive the night. They barricade the mansion to keep the zombies out, but the zombies in this one prove to be very strategic in their attack...

I found Burial Ground to be a very fun zombie flick! One of the main positives for me was the fast pacing of the movie. The zombies attack the group at the 20 minute mark of the movie, making pretty much the entire duration about the humans barricading themselves in the house for safety. Very fun to watch. The acting was pretty strong (it was the dubbing that was problematic). I thought Maria Angela Giordan as Evelyn was the strongest and led the way with her over the top dramatics.

The film quality and picture is very poor. I have the old 80's Vestron Video VHS, so perhaps there is a better quality version out there. The picture is dark and murky, with some of the night time scenes next to impossible to see clearly. Another thing which was low quality was the dubbing and whoever some of those voice over actors were. It was comical at some points. The gore was there, and gave a lot of blood and guts, but was nothing spectacular.

Despite those negatives, Burial Ground is a high entertaining "so bad it's great" Italian zombie flick from the mid 80's. I highly recommend giving it a watch if zombies are your thing.

6/10

I first saw this in the late 80s on a vhs. Revisited it recently. Three couples and a demented, creepy kid of one of the women get invited to a castle situated in the woodlands n away from civilization. Unknown to em, the host who is a professor has accidentally unleashed an evil curse thereby summoning up the dead from their graves.

The best part about this film is that it doesn't waste time, the zombies arrive instantly n the film maintains tension throughout.

Those were the days when zombies were slow as snails with decayed teeth n almost blind but still able to relish human bodies.

Wait till u see the zombies in this film who display high levels of intelligence. They work as a team to break into a castle. They even carry different weapons, using tools, axes to chop through doors n they even shoot knives with accuracy n climb pillars. These zombies even kno how to put someone into a woodcutter machine but the kill is never shown.

I was wondering how Michael reached the model factory. We have Mariangela Giordano showing off her tits, the masturbatory nun from Malabimba. (An amazing milf).

Pietro Barzocchini, who played the creepy kid is really freaky and his character disturbing and sick with an unhealthy Oedipal and incestuous relationship with his overly doting mother.

The maid's decapitation with a scythe is shown in a poorly lit scene n one cannot make out what is goin on.

Burial Ground is an Italian bonkers mix of audio horror, vile imagery and gutsy character work.

In the best manner, Burial Ground does all it can to make you feel uncomfortable. Forgetting the slow march of the decaying filth following the cast, the cast themselves are playing some of the most egregious characters ever committed to film. Each and every one of them seems wrong in some way. The framing of the violence, often in close up, with the camera remaining long after the skin's been torn, or the skull cracked makes for seat squirming viewing. The zombies, with live maggots and worms and eyes falling out of sockets, stir nasty feelings of disgust as they shamble and stumble and lay seige to the mansion.

In it all, though, is a sense of beauty. The grounds of the mansion and its interior are epic. The cast, even though they're being terrorised all night, look absolutely stunning in their pearls and perms and high neck sweaters. The blood flows like paint on a wet canvas.

But the kicker, the reason to watch this film, is the final scene. In a moment built up over the runtime, we get one of cinema's most depraved and insane developments ever committed to in film. A real horror crowd pleaser that I'm sure if played at any late night horror show would get whoops and gasps and screams of delight from the audience.

The term "so bad it's good" is one that gets used a lot these days, but I personally feel it really should belong to a special sort of bad movie that is naively unaware or ignorant of its own lousiness, and it has to be entertainingly bad, and have bad acting, bad pacing, bad special effects, and for me 1981's Burial Ground is one movie that definitely lives up to all of that in spades! It's about a horde of zombies that are unleashed after a mad scientist unearths an old stone tablet or something, and they proceed to terrorise a group of jet-setting swingers who had been invited to the old man's sprawling gothic villa, but these are not just your garden variety zombies - They're Italian zombies! A lot of the old zombie splatterfests of the early eighties and beyond were basically all just carbon copies of Romero's classic trilogy, it was zombie movies galore, and some of the most colourful examples came out of the Italian film industry, and Burial Ground, for better or worse, is one of the most bizarre offerings of that whole era! If you're looking for plot you've come to the wrong movie because this is one of the most plotless exercises in celluloid ever to be seen, and the structure is quite meandering and nonsensical, as virtually every scene is just a very tepid zombie onslaught as the slow as molasses zombies, who all wear the exact same silly monk outfit, awkwardly shuffle their way towards the victims as they try to fight back and keep them out and it's the same scene drawn out over and over again... It gets like a fever dream after a while because most of what you're seeing is so very monotonous and weird! It's like they didn't even know how zombies are supposed to work, I mean you ever see a zombie with a pitchfork, or use a battering ram? Burial Ground has you covered! That doesn't mean this fetid pile of zombie dung is totally without a certain tacky charm though, the dubbed performances are so unnatural and hilariously robotic and the spaced out music and goofy nightmare logic that drives the whole thing is so random, and that it's taken so seriously only makes it more unintentionally funny. L do just about like it, I guess, but it sure verges on being intolerably boring a whole lot, and it could have stood to have been a little more creative with its story, as it's got all the prerequisites for a great Italian zombie flick, the over the top gore, the noticeably shabby zombie masks, beautiful naked ladies, but for all that it never quite emerges as a low budget gem or even gets going. My favourite part of the movie and I think a lot of its fans is, is how in order to get around the child actor labour laws the producers opted to use an adult little person named Peter Bark to play a twelve year old boy, a rather freaky looking little person I might add, and it doesn't work for a second, he had a half-man half-child thing going on..but that's what made it so wonderfully strange and hilarious! And also just to make things even weirder, little Michael has an unexplained unhealthy attraction to his mother, and there's one breast scene that you will not soon forget! This is a remarkably terrible film that is somewhat endearing despite its many faults, it's a guilty pleasure if ever there was one.. So if you haven't had the pleasure before and you're in the right mood for some major low budget old school zombie horror movie cheese with a side of hammy robot acting, Burial Ground is the tasty morsel you're looking for, it's very crummy, but I must admit it's fun! You have been warned! X.