Réincarnations

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.

It didn't occur to me until my later years, when I became an avid 'credit reader,' to make the connection between DEAD AND BURIED and two other low-budget gems that totally blew my mind: the earlier, gorier (but not by much) DEATH LINE, released in the U.S. under the appetizing title RAW MEAT, and a nasty-but-nifty little cop thriller called VICE SQUAD, which has the distinction of sporting quite possibly the smarmiest, most memorably evil performance that Wings Hauser ever gave in his entire career.

The gore ante has been upped so much at the movies nowadays, that you literally have to take the top of somebody's head off to get a rise out of the audience, (see HANNIBAL). But there was a time, either when we were more naive, or when lower budgets demanded it, that directors of low-budget horror fare knew that if you were going for the gross-out, you had to make it effective to scare the bejesus out of moviegoers. Gary Sherman was one of the few talented directors who knew this, and he went to town on my nerves with this, which I saw for the first time on video many years ago.

Some of the plot points maybe as murky as the atmospheric photography is at times, but one thing is certainly made clear: TV-friendly character actor-turned-spooky-town M.E. Jack Albertson is definitely up to no good. Travelers and transients who are innocently passing through the little, picturesque seacoast town where he plies his trade, are being found horribly murdered, only to be resurrected...as townies! Voodoo is somehow involved, as are some of the most violently graphic dispatchings commended to film for that time period.

James Farentino and Melody Anderson, known mostly for TV movie appearances (and in Melody's case, FLASH...aaaa-aaahhh!) do serviceable jobs as the town sheriff and his wife, who become more embroiled in the mystery than they'd like, and Robert Englund joins the proceedings, usually making his formidably creepy presence more than welcome, (until he came into his own as Freddy). But this is definitely Albertson's baby, and he relishes breaking out of his casting niche after all those episodes of CHICO AND THE MAN. Good thing, too, since it was one of his last performances. Sadly, as it is with most talented character actors, he was never recognized for his stage work as much as what he left on film, but his D&B role is a nice antithesis to the kindly Grandpa George in WILLY WONKA.

Also: Dan O'Bannon wouldn't be able to catch the lightning-in-a-bottle he captured with ALIEN again, until his severed-tongue-in-cheek rendering of RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, his playfully amped-up homage to George Romero's masterpiece.

FOOTNOTE: D&B's releasing woes had nothing to do with its low-budget status. The original releasing company, Vestron, went belly-up and had to file for Chapter 11 more than once, leaving movies like this in limbo until the legal problems could be satisfactorily settled. It took a while for the video release, but it was worth the wait.

Oh, and no matter how mind-boggling the gore gets, you'll still want to watch it twice, just to see how you missed being clued in on the head-spinning climax!

"Dead & Buried" is a classic horror "small town with a secret" film, this time concerning a tiny little seaside town called Potter's Bluff. The formerly peaceful community has suddenly been plagued by a series of grisly murders for the town sheriff Dan (James Farentino) to investigate. Creepier still, the murder victims reappear as walking, talking, friendly townsfolk. And what does the eccentric town mortician (Jack Albertson) have to do with it?

This rarely talked about flick, above all else, is a masterpiece of atmosphere...moodily lit, foggy, with a genuine sense of claustrophobia as the horrors seem to be closing in closer and closer to Dan's own home and family, especially the strange new habits his wife (Melody Anderson) has taken up lately.

All of the actors are solid enough, but Jack Albertson steals the show as the eccentric, big band loving Mortician Dobbs. In one of his final performances, he delivers a character whose unsettling realism and reverence for the dead will make you completely forget his also classic turn as the kindly grandpa in "Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory". Rather than just play this character, he inhabits his psyche and becomes Dobbs, and it shows.

Everything from the low key bits of airy score music to the often slow and dreamlike pacing of the plot, is dedicated to heightening the viewer sense of disconnection and dread, leading up to a well known sort of "twist" climax, which in this context doesn't seem hackneyed.

My only real problem with this film is that the pacing can sometimes seem jarring, with little connection to scenes preceding it, almost to the point of breaking the well crafted mood. Also, the climax was a bit too abrupt and a few more seconds of that final anguished scene would've done a lot to increase the film's overall impact.

I'd still highly recommend "Dead & Buried", as a solid reminder of what imaginative and well made R rated horror used to be, before the parade of dull remakes and tamed to PG-13 bore fests that now clutter the genre.

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.

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.