Film Review: Burial Ground: The Nights of Terror.

Burial Ground: The Nights of Terror (1981)
Starring: Karin Well; Gianluigi Chirizzi; Simone Mattioli; Antonella Antinori; Roberto Caporali; Peter Bark.
Directed by: Andrea Bianchi.
Colour/85 Minutes/NR

Note (June 4, 2009): Every since I started this blog I've been wanting to do a post for the Final Girl Film Club, which is part of one of my favourite blogs about horror films: Final Girl. Her recent movie pick (which, of course, is this film) left me pondering if I should rewrite this review. In the end I decided that I'd probably end up trying to add in funny observations and more plot details that would only manage to bog down the entire thing, railroading any value it originally had. So yeah, it's still as it was.

Also known as Zombie 3 and just Nights of Terror. This is one of the worst and most disturbing gore films from the Italian horror boom of the '60s and '70s. It's about a group of wealthy idiots getting together at an old house that happens to sit over an old burial ground. They are interested in drinking and getting busy with each other, and are unaware that the professor who invited them managed to awake the rotted corpses that were lying in the underground crypts. The corpses start to pick them off of course. However, I kept wishing they'd do a quicker job of it.

None of the characters are likeable AT ALL. They all deserved to die and die some more, and then maybe get killed one more time just for kicks. The acting is non-existant. Just really bad stuff here, and the writing is so bad that watching these stupid characters say and do the stupid things the script demands of them, brings a double wammy of pain for the viewer. The awful dubbing doesn't help either. The characters just say some weird and awkward shit. The gore is okay, but the make-up and costumes for the zombies rank as some of the worst ever. They were going for something that was akin to the near-skeleton zombies from The Blind Dead series of zombie films, but they just didn't have the budget. So what we get are really bad masks that have no organic movement to them at all. The zombie actors faces were painted black around the mouth and nose areas to give the illusion that you're looking at skulls with the flesh rotted mostly away...it's just too bad that you can still obviously see the actors lips and noses. They should have just painted the actors faces green and added some rotting flesh bits here and there. This would have made them passable.

Up until this point, if this was all I had to say that was bad, I could tell you it was so bad that it was good. For the above mentioned faults, it's worth checking out. But then we get to something in this film I wouldn't wish on anyone. The worst, and I mean the WORST thing about this film is the relationship between two of the main characters -- a mother and son duo. INCEST, DUDE! Freakin' creepy, tit and naughty-bit groping incest. The child character had a serious case of momma's boy going on and the mother was apparently cool with that. He's only supposed to be maybe 12 however! So obviously they couldn't have a real 12 year old trying to get into mommy's pants, so what do they do? They hire a twenty or thirty-something actor to wear a really bad hairpiece and play the child character! Because the actor is just slightly above being a midget physically, the makers of this film thought they could get away with it, I guess. But it's so fucking creepy. Especially when you hear the dubbed voice they use for him. Arrrgghhh! I felt so unclean after seeing this film. I guess I've gotta tell you all to see it once. Just once. This film is like a car crash. You just can't look away.