Burial Ground (aka The Nights Of Terror) (1981) **
Burial Ground (aka The Nights Of Terror) (1981) is one of those spectacularly bad films that is a lot of fun to watch with an audience who can enjoy laughing at it, but is by no means a horror film of any true merit.
This isn't just your run-of-the-mill Romero Italian rip-off—no, it has incest (with the creepiest 25-year-old playing a child ever), perplexingly intelligent though painfully slow zombies (one is a crack shot, another is an excellent climber, and they even organize a weaponized mob!), and a hilarious, ridiculously elaborate gag involving a scythe.
Unfortunately, it also has about as much suspense as a toe nail cutting session, more Fulci rip-offs than you count (if you've ever thought that that director lingered too long on shots, Andrea Bianchi takes the cake), and slipshod production design and editing. Additionally, few films have this much disregard for their characters.
On the plus side, the synthesized score is pretty cool, but the f/x by Gino De Rossi are piss poor. De Rossi did commendable work with Fulci in Zombie (1979) (review) and especially in City Of The Living Dead (1980) (review), but here he was clearly working with a smaller budget and (likely at the behest of the producer and/or director) recycles his gore gags from Zombie with none of the same panache.
Burial Ground is best enjoyed if you don't take it seriously, but it's not a film I'd be terribly eager to revisit.
This isn't just your run-of-the-mill Romero Italian rip-off—no, it has incest (with the creepiest 25-year-old playing a child ever), perplexingly intelligent though painfully slow zombies (one is a crack shot, another is an excellent climber, and they even organize a weaponized mob!), and a hilarious, ridiculously elaborate gag involving a scythe.
Unfortunately, it also has about as much suspense as a toe nail cutting session, more Fulci rip-offs than you count (if you've ever thought that that director lingered too long on shots, Andrea Bianchi takes the cake), and slipshod production design and editing. Additionally, few films have this much disregard for their characters.
On the plus side, the synthesized score is pretty cool, but the f/x by Gino De Rossi are piss poor. De Rossi did commendable work with Fulci in Zombie (1979) (review) and especially in City Of The Living Dead (1980) (review), but here he was clearly working with a smaller budget and (likely at the behest of the producer and/or director) recycles his gore gags from Zombie with none of the same panache.
Burial Ground is best enjoyed if you don't take it seriously, but it's not a film I'd be terribly eager to revisit.
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