Buried Alive

Robert Kurtzman is a seasoned horror vet, no one can deny that. However he made a truly terrible film in this case. The new Dimension Extreme label has gotten off to a hot start with the excellent Black Sheep and Broken. In addition you have a good director and the always at the top of his game Tobin Bell in the cast. Who by the way the way does have a decent amount of screen time, as some have said it's just a cameo. Now if you look at my past reviews you can tell I'm a generous critic who makes an effort to highlight the strengths' of a film, but thats really a difficult task here. For one the film is quite boring. The cast is annoying with the exception of Tobin. They didn't make me laugh and they certainly didn't make me care about there fates'. Most of all Buried Alive goes a good thirty or forty minutes before anything scary or gory happens, and then you have another long wait to the end. Your just stuck with the lame interaction of the characters lounging about, really not doing much. Tobin Bell is the only bright spot here. Now a couple things barely save this from a one rating, and thats a few much welcome moments of nudity, and maybe two kills done much better in Wrong Turn 2. Still it's so awfully boring for so long that I was actually just looking at the back of the DVD case for the running time, to see how long my misery would last. As an easy to please critic I give Buried Alive a "very" generous 3 rating. Kurtzman's other new film The Rage actually looks quite good, so I'll forgive this effort.

Zane (Terence Jay) and Renee (Leah Rachel) play incestuous cousins who get Renee's boyfriend Danny (Steve Sandvoss) nerd Phil and two fraternity pledges to a big old deserted house in the middle of the desert. It belongs to Zane and Renee's family and Zane thinks there's a treasure buried there. Also on hand is crazy old Lester (Tobin Bell of the "Saw" franchise). They're all attacked by an evil old spirit.

The story is old and characters familiar but that's not what sinks the film. It's basically boring! I kept dozing off cause there was nothing interesting on the screen! To make it worse the gratuitous female nudity here is REALLY gratuitous and annoying. On the up side there's some REALLY gruesome gore, the whole cast is attractive (especially hunky Sandvoss), the acting isn't half bad and it does manage to eke out some suspense at the end. Also Jay (or more likely a stand in) shows a nice butt. So it's not terrible but dull and awfully familiar.

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]

'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!