Le cimetière de la terreur

The premise is tried and true. A group of young people break into an old and spooky abandoned house looking for nothing less than a good time. Just a night of booze, babes, boom box, and, of course, black magic. They, naturally, end up waking a dormant evil force which proceeds to terrorize and kill anyone drinking, fornicating, or trespassing in its lair.

Sound familiar yet? It should. It's been the plot to countless other horror films including Night of the Demons, The Evil Dead, and Hell Night. Now add Cemetery of Terror to the list.

I think this movie ranks up their with its contemporaries, though. It utilizes all the best techniques of a certified 80s horror gem. It's got plenty of blood and carnage, good plot, great atmosphere, and takes place on that wonderful horror movie time of the year: Halloween. The evil antagonist in this film is a superbly terrifying super-human Satanic slasher named Devlon who could easily give Michael Myers a run for his money. I don't recall Mikey selling his should to Satan, after all. And, as if Devlon wasn't enough for you, throw in a Necronomicon-type book which summons an army of zombies into the mix. Because what good is a spooky old cemetery in a horror film if you're not going to use it?

Made for Mexican audiences and filmed in Texas,this movie is definitely worth looking into if you are a fan of all-out 80s slasher gore fun. It effortlessly compares with a lot of great American horror trash cinema classics. So bring on the booze, babes, boom box, and black magic and let's party!

My review was written in July 1985 after a Times Square screening.

"Cemetery of Terror" is an okay Mexican horror picture, made last year and currently playing the U. S. Spanish-language theater circuit.

Quite easy to follow without any English translation, Texas-set story concerns a mad Dr. Cardan (Hugo Stiglitz), plagued by nightmares of zombie attacks, who forges (in English) a court order to release a corpse from the morgue to his custody. Unlike the local pragmatic police captain, Cardan is a believer in Satan who is convinced the corpse is one of the undead about to wreak havoc.

It is Halloween and by a strained coincidence, three teenage couples out on a date at a spooky mansion next to a cemetery find a Black Book of satanic rituals. They need a corpse to carry out a Black Mass (with the book's aid) in the cemetery and, as a prank, head to the morgue and steal the same corpse Dr. Cardan is seeking.

The ritual proves effective, bringing the corpse back to life, whereupon the zombie kills all six teens, accompanied by gore effects. Better makeup work is used on dozens of other varied zombies who subsequently rise from their nearby graves. Several children, including the police captain's kids, visit the cemetery and are barely saved from a horrible fate by the lameduck arrival of Dr. Cardan. Fortunately for them, Cardan is played by Mexican star Hugo Stiglitz (who previously battled atomic zombies in 1980's "City of the Walking Dead") and he comes up with a new and temporarily effective method of fighting the undead by simply punching them on the nose. Ultimately, the zombies are destroyed by burning when the kids toss the Black Book in a fireplace.

Picture provides a good atmosphere and some solid scare, with its oddest element (common to some other Mexican films) being the Texas setting where all signs are and visuals are written in English but everybody speaks Spanish. Cast is adequate, featuring some new generation talent such as Andres Garcia Junior (the spitting image of his star father) and Rene Cardona III, whose dad and grandfather have directed dozens of action pictures over the years.

The Sexy Erika Buenfil, Edna Bolkan and Jackie Castro along with their boyfriends go to a house in the middle of a cemetery, where one of them finds a book that says how to bring the dead back to life, so soon the boyfriends convince the girls to steal a body from the morgue (they are medicine students) but the dead guy turns out to be the one of a psycho killer, eventually the perform a ceremony and before you can slit someone's throat the psycho is alive, and of course he starts killing the students one by bloody one, also because it is Halloween a group of kids (i mean kids) also visit the same cemetery where they are terrorized by the same psycho. plus the living dead who have risen from their graves. This Mexican Zombies on the loose/Psycho killer flick is cool, there's lots of gore, graphic murders, atractive cast, large body count, is well acted and fast paced. I recommend it highly. Other Mexican Horror flicks that you shouldn't miss are "Ladrones de Tumbas" (grave robbers) and "Trampa Infernal" (infernal trap).

Hugo Stiglitz, probably best known to horror fans as the hero of Italian zombie flick Nightmare City, battles the undead once again in Cemetery of Terror, a low-budget Mexican mish-mash that borrows heavily from several successful US horror hits.

The film opens in Halloween mode, with lumbering serial killer Devlon gunned down by the police after a bloodthirsty rampage. The Evil Dead is the obvious inspiration for the introduction of a Satanic book that is discovered by a group of partying youths, whose idea of fun is to steal a body from the local morgue (no prizes for guessing whose corpse they make off with), and then perform a life-giving ritual during a rainstorm in a creepy cemetery.

With Devlon resurrected (I said there were no prizes!), the film enters Friday the 13th territory, with the dumb kids bumped off one by one by the undead killer. Last but not least, the film becomes a Night of the Living Dead-style fight for survival in a creepy run-down mansion, as a group of young trick or treaters are terrorised by zombies, brought back to life by Devlon's supernatural Satanic powers. Stiglitz plays the occult expert who holds the key to permanently putting Devlon to rest.

Cemetery of Terror is extremely dumb and utterly chaotic nonsense from start to finish, with not a lick of logic and unremarkable performances all round, but energetic direction from Rubén Galindo Jr. (who was also responsible for US-style slasher Don't Panic), lots of bargain basement zombies, and quite a fair bit of crude gore (a torn out throat, guts pulled out, an axe in the head) mean that there's still some fun to be derived from this random slice of South American schlock.

Fans of cheesy '80s horror will also enjoy the frequent appearances of the boom mic or its shadow, some nasty fashion (including a shiny, multi-coloured jacket with a skier printed on the back), an impressively staged zombie resurrection scene 'enhanced' by an excess of smoke and coloured lights, and one of those 'WTF?' final shots that were so prevalent among cheap horror films of the era.

This fairly unknown Mexican zombie movie may not be the most original horror film ever to be released, and clearly takes a lot of influence from many successful American movies in the same vein; but in it's own right, this is an extremely fun little romp that I'm sure wont be a disappointment to most people with an inclination to track it down. The plot is halfway between a zombie movie and a psycho slasher flick and focuses on a killer who a professor believes may have come back from the grave. Enter a bunch of kids who decide that it would be a good idea to read from a strange old book and resurrect the dead (to impress some girls, naturally). It's not long before the killer has come back as a zombie - bringing the rest of the cemetery with him and the dead have eating the kids' flesh on their minds. If you've seen more than a handful of zombie flicks, you'll have seen everything included in this film many times before. But that's not to say that Cemetery of Terror is not worth a look. Director Rubén Galindo Jr does an excellent job of creating a thoroughly fetid atmosphere to surround the cemetery at the centre of the film and there's a fair bit of gore included too, most of which is well done. Naturally the acting is nothing to write home about, but everyone approaches their roles with gusto and the film remains entertaining for the duration. Overall, this is not brilliant; but it's a more than worthy Mexican horror entry and I would say that it's worth seeing.