This is a review that almost didn't happen. While on a bus trip to perform ancient burial rites while wearing clothing made of human skin and inhale the ground bones of my dearly departed ancestors (you know, in celebration of the Day of the Lepus), I made the misfortune of grabbing the wrong bag from the guts of the Greyhound upon my arrival on the pavement of my heritage. By the time I'd realized my mistake (the moment I noticed the bag in my possession was filled with panties, hair cleaning products and condoms) I was about 40 miles from the bus station and said bus station had been closed for three hours. However, the mystic forces of the International House of Pancakes and Supernatural Prophesizing Objects directed me to an alternate reality in which the scanty-panty purchasing, "looks are everything" cock crazed co-ed was not aboard the same bus as I and I was able to acquire my proper baggage without being an utter bonehead and not taking the two seconds to differentiate between the two duffle bags. Of course, I had to kill this alternate universe form of myself, absorbing not only his baggage but also his powers of levitation, super strength, x-ray vision, combustible flatulence and hockey hair... looks like them hair care products may come in handy after all...
Back to this reality, my 1/4 responsibility for the first "Tomb of Anubis Double Double Feature" is Burial Ground.
I remember reviewing this greasy little spaghetti ghoul cheese-o-rama in the infancy of the Tomb. Yes, back in the days when I was still a goofy-looking, mullet wearing, high school kid full of hope and two bright eyes looking to the possibilities of what my future might hold. Well, now I'm a goofy-looking, thinning haired, old man brimming with dread whose eyes consist of one blurry diabetic ocular orb and one hole through which the cold breeze whistles (due to a freak juice squeezer accident), dreading and cringing at the possibilities of what others pains the remainder of his future may hold for him... all while nursing a gallon of homemade scotch out of an old milk jug and popping various stimulants and depressants in an effort to find that one perfect mix that will make the demons in his head go away, if only for a short time... or at least put me into a mood to watch Burial Ground... not to be confused with whatever recipe it was that convinced me paying $25 for it in the first place was the best thing I could do with the last few remnants of my paycheck.
On the plus side, the disc's reflective surface comes in handy when I need to pop those ever persistent zits on m
Speaking of ass zits that sounds like the perfect segue into today's feature!
George is some big chief money money guy with no discernable source of income who owns an out-of-the-way manor house in the wilds of Italy, no doubt built on designs by the great architect Frigg N. Huge. With no phone, a small staff of two (a butler and a maid) and acres upon acres of secluded property, it's the perfect locale for a weekend getaway with friends or an all night murder spree topped with a rousing game of "Hide the Bodies". Well, whatever their reason for going, George decides to take a little vacay there with his wife Helen & his creepy Oedipal stepson Mike (played by an imp the producer released from a cursed bowling trophy into cinematic servitude), the horny photographer Mark & his "looks like she's fresh outta rehab" girlfriend Janet, and the pedophile mustache sporting writer James & his trollip poon Leslie who likes to wear ill fitting lingerie she finds in dead peoples' wardrobes. While he's been busy with his life as a travel agent/vacuum cleaner salesman/porno producer, George had given full use of the house and it's facilities (i.e. the maid and the butler) to Professor Ayers; an archeological historian whose credentials include a big crazy beard, a pick hammer thingy and an ability to read ancient Etruscan... which comes in real handy when...
The Prof found a burial vault used by the Etruscan folks on George's property. Refusing to let his scientific curiosity leave well enough alone, the crazy old man goes about trying to unlock the supposed secrets the 'Scans had in the ways of giving themselves eternal life, cuz when you're an old guy with a beard as mighty as his, you know you'll try anything to keep that baby a treasure for the ages. It's the Holy Grail of facial hair and I am in awe.
When the Professor (sans Mary Anne) figures he's found the secret room he's been searching for, he grabs his pick hammer of science and starts makin' some noise. Too bad for King Beard-O though, cuz the residents of the tomb don't dig with smart ass geezers shitting in their cabbage patch and making a ruckus while doing so. Obviously not fans of the "If I had a hammer, I'd hammer in the morning" defense, the dead begin to rise and put voice to their need for peace and quiet... by introducing the old coot to his numerous delicious innards. Hey, can't blame 'em, it's the only way I could ever get my neighbors to turn down their fuckin' hip-hop shit... not that cops ever believed me when I told them an Italian horror movie made me do it.
From here the undead pretty much do what any other undead do: shuffle around like drunks, decked out in tattered old clothes likely taken from the corpses of some hobo mass grave, biting people and occasionally getting their skulls collapsed by garden tools, shotgun shells or whatever solid objects are handy at the time. Very basic, very by-the-books and very well done... in movies other than this one. These ghouls don't even get a proper origin! No radioactive fallout, no secret mad scientist experiments, no body possessing demons, no voodoo rituals, not even Satanic heavy metal music. Nope, some guy with a beard woke them from their nap with all his hammering and now they're just kinda killing every living thing they can find till they're not pissed anymore, I guess. Since our bad guys are so uninteresting and our story heavy with the stink of lazy writers, we're left with our heroes/victims then, right?
The Mark-Janet and James-Leslie couplings are meaningless, as they do nothing but cavort, screw and throw innuendos at each other like teenagers (yes, 40 year old teenagers) while occasionally stumbling and falling down for no good reason. They're there because they're willing to show their creepy bodies on film for little or no money because their pride is either cheap or nil. Aside from their methods of demise there's nothing worth talking about regarding this quartet, so I'll gloss over them for the remainder of the review. As for the other three, there's a whole creepy dynamic going on with them and that's the only thing that makes this movie stand out in any way, even if only by infamous means. But as the cliché goes, "there's no such thing as bad publicity"... no, seriously, this is definitely the exception to that rule.
Though it's not covered, I'm pretty sure that Michael's from one of Helen's past liaisons, either from a previous marriage, one-time stand or what have you. She hooks up with George, they tie the (hangman's) knot and it creates the always uncomfortable "step family" dynamic in which George is always trying to gain Michael's acceptance and Mikey's constantly shooting daggers from his eyes in George's direction, not too happy that this pretender trying to be his new father figure. To further complicate things, we have Freud's theory of a child’s opposite sex parent being their first love object, which Mike seems to be going through… but without all the moral hindrances that most parents try to bestow in their children to prevent this kind of creepy shit from happening. In other words, nobody told Little Mikey McFreak-a-nut that trying to finger-bang mamacita or stuff your tongue down her throat is one of the most wrong things in the fucking world... unless this is just one of those Italian things I choose not to acknowledge. Either way, it's completely unsettling, more so when you've seen the movie once, then go back and watch it again, knowing what's coming and realizing just how nauseating all the little foreshadowing moments are. My feelings of discomfort are heightened exponentially by the fact that I'm typing this review while visiting my parents and staying in their house...
Albeit an abominable grotesquery (I'm sorry kids, I'll try to stop using do many vocabulary words), there's something tragically sweet about the final scene between Helen and Mike after sonny boy's been killed and now returns as one of the not-quite-dead. Mentally unstable with the death of her husband and now her son's transformation into a flesh eating ghoul, Helen, in spite of the fact her son wants to eat her organs as well as the organs of her friends, ambitiously hugs and coddles then kid before whipping out her tit for Lil' Mikey in an effort to re-open that otherwise sweet and innocent, nature-imbued bonding a mother and child experience during the nursing days. Originally I thought she was just trying to appease the confused little zombie boy sexually, as if she felt bad for slapping him and rejecting his earlier advances, but when you take a step back and re-examine it she really is just trying to revert to as nurturing a mother figure as she can be. If she were just trying to appeal to his hormones she would've gone spread-eagle for him or slobbed up his mini-knob. Don't think this doesn't make the whole thing still creepy though, cuz it definitely is, as supported by the "I think I'm gonna puke" looks on the faces of Mark and Janet as they watch the whole awkward exchange like its some kinda taboo auto accident. A metaphor made all the more prevalent when Helen ends the scene with most of her left tit in Zombie Michael's mouth and screaming in bloody horror. All together now boys and girls! "Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww"!
As for the aforementioned deaths I promised earlier, here we go:
George is disemboweled while trying to prevent the zombies from getting to Helen and Michael... though they all could have easily walked around them, but I guess George was just looking for an easy out from the creepy family situation he'd married himself into.
The maid is pinned to a window shutter with a spike (as thrown with carnival sideshow type accuracy by one of the "can barely summon the strength to shuffle about, let alone throw a spike with the speed, power and accuracy to do such a thing" Etruscan ghouls), then gets her head guillotined off with a scythe... which she makes no attempt to prevent with her free hand...
Leslie gets broken glass scraped across her face and scalp. Not sure how this actually kills her, but she dies anyway.
Michael gets chewed to death by Zombie Leslie in the crapper, after which Helen promptly bashes in the back of Zombie Leslie's skull on the bathtub.
The butler gets his throat torn out and his guts molested by Zombie Professor Ayers.
James gets the same treatment from a group of undead druids after he, Helen, Mark and Janet manage to escape to a nearby monastery... filled with those aforementioned zombie druids.
Like I said before, Helen gets her tit ripped off by her son's hungry jaws.
Though we don't actually get to see it, we can presume Mark and Janet don't make it out alive either, as they end the movie cornered in a building, Mark about to make face with a spinning buzzsaw like it was his prom date and Janet squirming under the unwanted advanced of a dozen rubber zombie hands.
All in all Burial Ground is nothing special, though not something especially painful. Sure, it sucked and it's a relief to see it end, but I've experienced much worse in every definition of the word. It’s just another grain of sand in my ass from the littered beachfront that is Italian zombie cinema: irritating and uncomfortable, but easily remedied with a quick dip in the drink.
Just to jump into particulars though (beyond the completely uninspired story and lack of interesting personalities), allow me to complain further. The audio is nauseating. I give the movie a minor pass in that it's incredibly cheap and I didn't expect anything professional from the voice actors involved, so I won't ream the crew with a rabid beaver about the lame dub... except for one burr in my vas deferens: everything was obviously recorded in a small sound studio and that's excusable for the most part, but when the characters are outside in the open air and you can plainly hear that "enclosed area echo", my teeth grind. It's a petty little peeve, but it's mine and that's how it fucking is!
Other points of contention: some of the Etruscans are buried in stone coffins in the nearby tomb, while others are buried on George's property in naked top soil, at least one of which was underneath little more than an inch of dirt so as to do his cheap imitation of the now famous (to geeks) "Maggots Eye's Resurrection" sequence from Fulci's Zombie... complete with the maggots and awful make-up job. Speaking of which, I feel another gripe coming on. The not-so-special make-up effects are terrible to say the fucking least and it looks like the people responsible simply smeared feces from various species of animal on the extras' faces and allowed these shit masks to dry and cake in the sun before going on set.
The next segment isn't so much a gripe, but a few little known facts about the Etruscans' physical traits that Burial Ground has taught me and I would like to pass on to you in the name of edumacation. Fact #1: being dead for hundreds of years will not decay an Etruscan to a state of simple bones and dust. Most muscle, eyes, hair and clothing will actually stay in tact even though maggots seem to infest their dead bodies. Fact #2: whereas everyone else's teeth and bones decay, Etruscan teeth and facial bone continues to grow long after death into large tumorous facial lumps and other unnatural facial contours that barely resemble anything human after an extended period of time. Fact #3: beneath their initial layer of skin, the Etruscan have a sub-dermal layer of rubbery black under-flesh. This can be seen plainly when the outer flesh has rotted enough that their secondary eyelids, lips and even noses become visible. Fact #4 much like bats, Etruscans possess an uncanny "radar sense" that allows them to "see" the world around them without the use of their eyes, which is fortunate considering that most of the ghouls don't have eyes to speak of, but manage to know exactly what it is they're doing. Fact #5 Though most other races of humans have blood that congeals and rots once the body dies, Etruscan blood will become sludge after several centuries, but continue circulating through the body on it's own! This is presented when the risen Etruscans are shot, stabbed of receive other injury and small geysers of green ooze is seen spurting from their wounds. I can only hope my circulatory system is as stubborn after my own demise.
And thus ends my quick class on the Etruscan anatomy. I hope everyone learned as much as I did. Go ahead, write a paper on it for your history professor or something. I dare ya!
As for me, this is the end of my poop parade. Many would say it's better to be pissed off than pissed on, but in this case I wind up getting both and it's not pretty. Go in peace my brothers and sisters, while I hit the head. I've got this one puss-well just beaming it's big ugly white head at me in mockery and I think it's about time me, Burial Ground and a ceremonial dagger did something about that. The little bastard's had it too good for too long...
P.S. – Michael’s not really played by a kid, but a deformed little man with growth problems and a bad wig named Peter Bark, whose other film credits include “Whistling Guy” and “Boy Scout on train” for two Italian movies whose titles I’m not going to bother spelling out here. He kinda reminds me of Michael J. Anderson in a way, but not... Sure, the Italians may allow graphic sex and animal cruelty in their movies, but child molestation (because seriously, how is consensual sexual contact considered “endangerment”?!) doesn’t cut it with those gondola pushing pasta monkeys. Good for you Italy!
