Le cimetière de la terreur

Cemetery of Terror (1985)

* (out of 4)

Incredibly stupid Mexican horror film that tries to capture the spirit of American slashers. A maniac who has killed 17 people gets killed by the police. The next day, Halloween of course, three couples go to a mansion to party. The girls won't put out so the guys have a black mass. This mass brings the killer back to life and he goes on a rampage. Oh yeah, at the end zombies show up. This thing turned deadly boring by the ten minute mark and the action didn't start till around the fifty-minute mark. Everything in this film was truly bad and the plot holes are just incredible. I'm not saying F13 was smart or anything but c'mon! This film rips part of the storyline to Halloween as well. The only saving grace are some wonderful special effects and the zombies look pretty good. This is on DVD with another Mexican film, GRAVE ROBBERS, but at the moment I'm too scared to watch it considering how bad this was.

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.

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.

CEMETERY OF TERROR is a Mexican slasher/zombie/supernatural horror film which seems to take its inspiration from sources as varied as NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968), HALLOWEEN (1978), CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD (1980), EVIL DEAD (1981), ABSURD (1981) and even Michael Jackson's THRILLER (1983). Unfortunately, it is not nearly as good as any of them.

The story concerns a recently deceased psychiatric inmate named Devlon who kinda looks like George Eastman, and whose psychiatrist rushes to try to have cremated because he believes him to be a demon.

Unbeknownst to the good doctor, a group of mischievous teenagers steal the corpse from the morgue and transport him to a local cemetery, where they invoke spells from a black book of magic they just happened to find at a nearby abandoned house, all to scare their girlfriends into submission, apparently. Meanwhile, a group of children decide to visit the cemetery at night as a sort of test of courage.

Predictably, the teenagers manage to reanimate the corpse, and then all hell breaks loose.

If the setup sounds incredibly contrived and stupid then that is because it is. One improbable coincidence follows another, seasoned with unrealistic behavior by almost all of the main characters. Also, the setup takes way too long: we are nearly 40 minutes into the movie before Devlon George finally rises.

Although some of the special effects are decent for the 1980s, many of the actual death scenes range from unconvincing to ludicrous. In one scene, a victim is repeatedly clawed in the face by Devlon George, who stands right in front of him and yet seems to escape notice.

Even though the movie is not good, it still has some of that nostalgic 80s charm which prevents me from giving it a lower rating, but let's face it: unless you know what I am talking about, this film is probably not for you.

Some movies require more of our suspension of disbelief than others, and this is surely one of them. Lines of dialogue that don't quite comport with the scenario; small inclusions that either abruptly introduce an entirely new narrative element, or are maybe just so poorly considered that we have to either presume the same or go mad; characters written with so little intelligence or so much obliviousness as to be contrivances of pure Movie Magic; and so on. In fairness, despite any flourishes to present, at its core this is still a slasher - just one mixed with some supernatural aspects - and in no way is it a film that was intended to be approached with any but the most superficial and unbothered of eyes. It's a big ask to wholly dispense with any critical thought to watch a picture. I suppose if one is able to do so, however, this is passably enjoyable? Look, 'Cemetery of terror' just definitely is no height of horror storytelling or film-making, that's for sure. But it's entertaining enough.

The blood and gore look good. I like the production design and art direction. It's well made from a technical standpoint, and while the story in its broad strokes is nothing special, it's still suitable grisly fun. It's in the details that the feature falls apart. I've seen too many poorly made movies to count, and while I wouldn't say that this is one of them, no comparison readily comes to mind to have so enthusiastically encouraged willful myopia of the viewer such that we can't pick apart every minutiae therein. 'Cemetery of terror' demands that we turn off our brain to engage with it, or else we're confronted with an endless stream of flummoxed, skeptical reactions of "What?! ... okay, sure."

It's a pity that the writing weren't more cohesive, coherent, and complete, because if it were by even just a small measure, the feature would have greatly benefited. There are some swell ideas in here, and between the orchestration generally of some scenes, and the addition of Chucho Zarzosa's excellent score to cement the tension and atmosphere, some moments are especially well done. At its best - or at least in its best potential - this is pretty much just as solid as any like horror flick might be. At its worst, one can only respond with "you're kidding me, right?"

Against all odds I think the last third of the picture is sufficiently well done as to pick up the considerable slack that it had dropped earlier. I think the cast generally perform well with what they're given. More so than not this is pretty okay! I just really wish the narrative and scene writing had been tightened, for that would have made a huge difference. Don't go out of your way to watch this, and by no means is it a must-see, but if you have the chance to check out 'Cemetery of terror' and can abide the most severe inelegance it may boast, this is a moderately worthwhile way to spend ninety minutes.