Burial Ground: The Nights Of Terror (1981)

In the horror genre, like in just about every other walk of life, trends come and go. In horror, it seems fads go through repetitive cycles. That is, what's popular becomes unpopular, but usually becomes popular again at some point farther down the line, whether in an immediately recognizable form or not.

Take zombies, for instance. Ever since George Romero re-imagined them with his landmark opus NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, we've seen zombies fall in and out of favor at the drop of a hat. At the time I write this (note: this review is dated 8/6/2010), vampires are currently the big draw. We have TWILIGHT and True Blood and shite like that poppin' up left n' right. A few years ago, though, zombies were king of the heap, thanks in large part to movies like 28 DAYS LATER and SHAUN OF THE DEAD, not to mention books like Max Brooks' Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z. Zombies may be playing second fiddle to melodramatic bloodsuckers right now, but zombies will never go away, and I'm sure there'll be a big resurgence in zombie popularity in no time at all.

For my money, trends are meaningless. Accordingly, zombies will always rule the roost in my mind, regardless of whether they're "in" or not. I fell in love with them when I was a little kid, and I'll never stop singin' hymns o' praise for the legions of the living dead. Staying up late, watching Joe Bob Briggs on T.N.T. MonsterVision, I distinctly remember seeing the Tom Savini-directed remake of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, still about a year before I'd even seen the Romero-lensed original, and it was that movie which first turned me into a full-fledged, card-carrying, utterly obsessed horror fan.

I dunno what it is. I just love ghouls! It's similar to the way I prefer Frankenstein over Dracula. The rotted, dirt-speckled, maggot-eaten, grave-stinking, re-animated undead. The slow movement (slow zombies forever! ...fast zombies suck, period!), the mindless gaze, the mournful moaning. It's all just so unnerving. To quote Dennis Hopper's character from LAND OF THE DEAD, "Zombies, man. They creep me out."

One of the things about zombies that really tickles my sick n' twisted morbid side is the way they, in a sense, represent death itself. You look into a zombie's face, and you're literally looking into the face of death. Not just because that zombie is going to kill you, but also because that zombie is exactly what you will become. Rotted, dirt-speckled, maggot-eaten, grave-stinking.

And, yeah, they're slow (at least they better be, goddammit! ...fast zombies suck!!!). They're stupid. They're easy to outmaneuver, and easy to exterminate. But they're just so many of them! No matter how fast you are, no matter how smart you are, no matter how swift or armed to the teeth you may be. Eventually, you'll run out of breath, you'll make a mistake and you'll slip up, or you'll run out of bullets. But you'll never run out of zombies who want to eat you. And those zombies have something you don't have: time. All the time in the world. They're patient, unyielding, and ceaseless in their desire to see you dead. To say they have a single-minded determination makes the mistake of implying that a zombie could ever have any thing but a singular, one-track mind. They have no capacity for anything other than destruction and consumption (actually, in that respect, the living and the dead are quite similar, I suppose... or maybe I'm just being cynical). Zombies don't think about or feel anything but hunger. Hunger for your guts.

There you have it. However slow they might be, they're still going to get you in the end. They'll never stop, and any attempt to survive their attacks is doomed from the beginning, because the final result, your death, is inevitable.

That's what so scary about zombies, to me. That's what makes them scarier than just about any other type of monster in the traditional horror pantheon.

Spooks? Call the Ghosbusters. Demons? Call an exorcist. Aliens? Call the F.B.I. Werewolves? Call a metalurgist. Vampires? Call Peter Cushing.

Zombies?

Call your loved ones. And tell 'em goodbye.

Now, as I said at the beginning of this write-up, zombies fade in and out of favor with audiences again and again. It's the cycle, the spin of the wheel. You spin the wheel and sometimes it comes up "zombies" and sometimes it comes up something else.

One of the most well-known times that the wheel landed on "zombies" was in the years following the release of George Romero's DAWN OF THE DEAD, after which there was something of a flesheater feeding frenzy. The Italians most notably unleashed a tidal wave of gutmunching mania into cineplexes across the world. Always dependent on regurgitating popular trends until they've been run into the ground, the Italian film industry knew where their bread was buttered after Lucio Fulci's ZOMBIE turned out to be a big hit. Before you knew it, you couldn't open your eyes without accidentally watching an Italian zombie movie.

Although the aforementioned DAWN OF THE DEAD typically gets credit for this torrential tidal wave of foreign flesheater flicks (which also included such illustrious international entries as Spain's TOMBS OF THE BLIND DEAD and France's REVENGE OF THE LIVING DEAD GIRLS), I personally give more credit to Fulci's ZOMBIE. Sure, ZOMBIE was just a rip-off of DAWN OF THE DEAD (for those of you who don't already know this piece o' movie buff trivia, check it out: in Italy, DAWN OF THE DEAD was released as "ZOMBI" and the film that we Americans know as ZOMBIE was released in its native Italy as ZOMBI 2, despite the fact that it had no genuine connection to Romero's picture whatsoever), so I guess that qualifies DAWN OF THE DEAD as the "patient zero." But if you watch all those post-ZOMBIE ghoul pictures, you'll see that they have virtually nothing in common with DAWN OF THE DEAD, and are more or less aping Fulci's shtick, as opposed to Romero's.

The film I'm about to describe to you is one of the Italian zombie pictures released during that time, and I'm sure even the casual horror fan will see that there are more similarities between it and Fulci's film than anything Romero has ever done in his entire career (mind you, that's not at all a jab at Romero, who I consider one of the best directors to work in genre cinema... ever).


This film, BURIAL GROUND: THE NIGHTS OF TERROR, directed by Andrea Bianchi (who also made the erotically explicit EXORCIST riff MALABIMBA: THE MALICIOUS WHORE and the crackerjack giallo STRIP NUDE FOR YOUR KILLER), is a grim, nasty li'l bugger. It is, in one fell blood n' boob-blessed swoop, the very definition of Eurotrash. In BURIAL GROUND, as with many of these slightly artsy, shockingly sleazy, European post-ZOMBIE zombie flicks, story takes a backseat to carnage. The plot here is the absolute paragon of simplicity. Zombies kill people. That's it. That's the entire length, depth, and breadth of the plot.

Far from being a hindrance, this virtual plotlessness actually works in BURIAL GROUND's favor. One can easily look at BURIAL GROUND and see an extension of the nightmare-logic nonsense surrealism found in Lucio Fulci's post-ZOMBIE avant-garde gutmuncher classics THE GATES OF HELL and THE BEYOND. By almost completely obliterating plot, and thereby purpose, from the narrative, Bianchi paints a harsh portrait of meaningless existence. It's a thoroughly nihilistic gesture that's analogous of such misanthropic acts as stepping on flowers, taking a dump on the national flag, mutilating fashion models, and teaching swear words to children. With BURIAL GROUND, Bianchi sneers and says "fuck you" to all the beautiful things in life. He laughs at our vain attempts to superimpose our own fabricated meaning over what he sees as an empty, aimless existence.

Then he throws in a couple of sex scenes. Y'know, just to get asses into the seats.

Okay, so here's the deal. In the first few minutes we are introduced to a David Crosby-lookin' archaeologist (props on the badass beard, my man) who has taken up temporary residence in a rather opulent mansion (which he looks completely out-of-place in) while investigating the mysterious and ancient, cavernous network of ruinous underground tombs nearby. After discovering evidence of a terrifying (and typo-cluttered) doomsday prophecy, our hairy historian hero soon meets his messy, moribund end at the decayed hands of the resurrected undead inhabitants o' the very subterranean crypts he's been excavating.

Though we're not privy to any of the contents of the professor's findings until the very end of the movie, what little we do get then gives the movie a deathly air of apocalyptic hopelessness and religious terror, similar to the way Lucio Fulci used voodoo superstitions in ZOMBIE and references to Lovecraftian literature (like the Book Of Enoch and the Book Of Eibon) in GATES OF HELL and THE BEYOND.

It may not be obvious from the opening scene (wherein a zombie actually does scarf down a handful of the dead archaeologist's offal), but, as the movie continues, you may start to notice something that will, little by little, become increasingly apparent to avid deadhead zombie fans. That being that BURIAL GROUND's zombies aren't your usual carnivores. It's clear that they desire is to murder the living, but not necessarily for the purpose of eating them. Sure, they might nibble on a victim's entrails every now and again, but those occurrences are rarer than in a standard zombie flick. It seems these snackings exist more as an energy boost than as a reason to be. These aren't zombies of the chemically/radioactively/virally re-animated sort, with only base, animal impulses and urges driving them to eat, eat, eat. Instead, these zombies are of supernatural origin. They have a crucial reason to exist, that being the extermination of all life on Earth. Their ruthless determination to bring about the end of the world makes them even more frightening than the zombies we're used to, as does their abilities to strategize and use tools.

Honestly, I'm not normally a huge fan of the idea of zombies being smarter than a bag of hammers, but there are instances when I'm willing to accept it, such as in George Romero's movies (he, after all, showed his zombies being able to use tools right from the beginning, ...remember the scene near the beginning of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD where the graveyard ghoul uses a rock to shatter Barbara's car window?) and in this here flick, BURIAL GROUND, wherein the zombies are shown using impromptu battering rams, scaling walls, throwing railroad spikes, and making cruel use of an electric saw. I dunno 'bout you, but I think that sounds pretty effing groovy, man. Shazam!

Anyway, getting back to the (thin) plot, shortly following the demise of our dearly departed facial hair-cultivating archaeologist friend, three wealthy couples arrive at the grandiose manor that said archaeologist was staying at (the lot of 'em looking much more at-home in the mansion's walls than our scruffy, tomb-raidin' pal ever did). We're also introduced to two servants (read: slaughter fodder), one being a dude with a bowtie (booooo!) and the other being a cutie in an enticing maid outfit (yowza!). One of the couples is revealed to be the actual owners of the mansion, though they admit they haven't been to the house in months (it's obvious that the couples are all well-to-do, to say the least, so it's not surprising that one of the duos owns a second home for vacationing). When they arrive, they ask their servants where the professor is, but to no avail. So, okay, they clearly know the deceased crypt-excavator and are friends with him. I guess the couple who own the mansion have been letting him crash there while he does his research or something. I dunno. Maybe it's a timeshare?

Whatever the exact relationship between the bearded brainiac and the yuppie couples, it's clear that the rich folk don't share the dead doctor's archaic occult interests (despite his apparent desire to share his findings with them). They treat their stay as a relaxing getaway, a vacation from the hustle-and-bustle of the outside world. The fact that there are no telephones in the mansion indicates that the place indeed exists as a secluded, luxurious vacation spot (the lack of phones is also a convenient bit of Horror Movie 101 screenwriting). To be perfectly frank, the couples show nary a care in the world toward anything other than chilling out and having a good time. Also, fucking. A lot. A lot of fucking. These people fuck. A lot. Seriously, the obligatory "horny teenagers" of most slasher movies aren't as horny as these folks. If they're not full-on fucking, then they're making out, taking provacative photographs of one another, or modeling lingerie. Not that I'm complaining. Considering the stupendously sexy Mariangela Giordano (who was awesome, and, better yet, nekkid in 1996's KILLER BARBYS) is in the cast, no sir, I ain't complainin' at all. The sight of this gorgeous gal is enough to afflict me with a case of rigor mortis all my own, though it appears to be rather localized, situated solely within my lower extremities.

Granted, Mariangela Giordano is still no Salma Hayek...

...

Moving on.


As I was saying, the couples approach their time at the manor with an eye toward havin' a good time. If you read between the lines a little, I don't think it requires an enormous intuitive leap to come to the conclusion that this li'l "vacation" of theirs is in fact intended to be some sort of swingers' retreat. The idea that the burly, baldin', bearded buddy boy who died at the beginning of the flick might have been intended as an additional participant in any ensuing debaucherous swinger soiree shenanigans makes me shudder, to be blunt. Thankfully, before the couples can get around to switchin' partners, and before the inevitable orgy begins to arise, the horror begins. Phew! For the first portion of the flick, the couples spend pretty much all of their time fucking, talking about fucking, thinking about fucking, or planning future fuck sessions. Then, completely out of the blue, the zombies show up, and the mayhem begins in earnest. Woo-hoo!

The horror on display here is some of the most foul, decrepit, and flat-out deviant filth in the hoary horrid halls of Italian splatter infamy. I tell ya, no one does zombie make-up better than the Italians. The key to their success is minimalism and ingenuity. Many Italian F.X. artists used soil and clay as the basis for their zombies, and crafted faces which were grossly deformed and skeletal in appearance, giving them a moldy, lumpy, crusty, fetid visage that positively reeked of rot. Then they added real, life worms and maggots into the mix. For authenticity. No blue-skinned baseball players or nurses or nuns or whatever here. These zombies are grey and brown and black, and they dress almost solely in rags n' robes. The ghouls of Fulci's ZOMBIE are probably, pound for pound, the best ever, so it's not surprising that Bianchi actually went out of his way to get Gianetto De Rossi, who did the make-up for ZOMBIE, to do make-up for his NIGHTS OF TERROR as well.

Happily, Rossi makes sure there's no shortage of the red stuff for his oatmeal-faced baddies to wade hip-deep in. Yes, BURIAL GROUND is gory. Yes, it's a full-blown gutmuncher chunkblower. Yes, there are more intestines here then you're likely to find in the back of your local butcher shop. Yes, the death scenes are elaborate, inventive, and graphic (the scythe sequence stands out as a personal favorite, and fellow Fulci fanatics will instantly recognize BURIAL GROUND's "pulling face towards a broken shard of glass" kill as a near carbon copy of ZOMBIE'S "pulling face towards a broken shard of wood" gag) But the best part of Bianchi's NIGHTS OF TERROR is not memorable for its blood factor, but for its ick quotient.

At last, ladies and gentlescum, the time has come to discuss the true star of BURIAL GROUND, Peter Bark.


Ya see, in the movie, the couples vacationing within yon mansion o' death are not alone. In spite of the erotic goings-on that the getaway entails, one couple (or, rather, the female half of the couple) has insisted on bringing her child along with them. Maybe they couldn't find a babysitter? Actually, it seems the son (who is portrayed as being around ten or eleven years old) and his mother have a rather unhealthy (to say the last) relationship going on. The arc of this relationship forms one of the major subplots of the picture (it's ironic... despite the fact that an overarching plot is almost completely absent from the movie as a whole, the film does have a few small subplots... no real plot, but subplots... sure, why not?).

Mommy dotes on her beloved son endlessly, evidently unaware that her overly affectionate smothering mothering has unintentionally fostered an Oedipal obsession in the wee lad. Damned skippy, this kid has issues. Blatant overtones of incestuous dementia abound, as the child repeatedly makes carnally charged overtures toward his mama (not that I can blame him... she's a total M.I.L.F.), voicing his desire to not only suckle at her teat as he did as an infant, but also (and more disturbingly) re-enter the womb. Via fingerbang.

As if all that wasn't insanely freakin' creepy, unsettling, repulsive, and gag-inducing enough in its own right, the fact that the "child" in question is played by Peter Bark, an adult "little person" with a withered face that makes him look like a shrunk-down Dario Argento and what appears to be a bad toupee perched atop his head, ups the ick quotient considerably.


There's very little information on Peter Bark out there, but this one single role has made him a notorious cult figure throughout the horror fandom. And because Italians as a whole are a fucked-up group of people, they were less than content to leave the ick quotient to peak simply with a middle-aged dwarf playing a pre-tween who likes to fondle his mother's nether regions. Once upon a time, there was an Italian screenwriter sitting around, going "This incest shit isn't disturbing enough. I need to take it to the next level." And this screenwriter had a mentally unbalanced friend, who is now surely locked away in a loony bin, who turned to the screenwriter and offered his opinion. "Hey," the mentally unbalanced kook said, "how about having the kid turn into a zombie, then suck on his mother's nipple, and then finally rip it off with his teeth?"

And the screenwriter said "Why not?"

Thus, we have BURIAL GROUND.

This scene is far and away BURIAL GROUND's great big claim-to-fame. It's the stuff of legend in horror movie fan circles. It's even been ripped off (oops, I mean "homaged") a few times in more recent walking dead pictures, like 2006's somehow dull kung-fu women-in-prison mad science experiment SHADOW: DEAD RIOT. Fact of the matter is, you just can't top BURIAL GROUND's sloppy, slobbery, incestuous man-child Peter Bark for ickiness. With his atrocious toupee and mouthful o' bloody booby chunks, he's the diminutive King Of Ick. Long live the king!

Yup. There's a lot of schlock rockin' awesomeness to be soaked up in these NIGHTS OF TERROR. Tons of ghastly spaghetti sauce set-pieces for the gorehounds. A practically numberless army of gnarly, death's head-faced shambling rotters. Worms. Maggots. Bowties. Maid uniforms. Little people with iffy hairpieces. Insanity and incest. Rampant stupidity (on part of both the filmmakers and the characters in the film itself). An armageddon prophecy in dire need of spellcheck. A trio of tempting tarts (one's a blonde, one's a brunette, and one's a redhead... natch ...and, hilariously, they all have butt-ugly husbands), almost eternally in various states of undress. And, oh yeah, some seriously sweet-ass dialogue. My favorite line? Says hubby to his wife when she shows up modeling some perfectly fitting "found" lingerie ("found" my ass! ...bitch is just playing coy!): "You look just like a little whore. But I like it." Here, here, my main man. As do I, as do I.

I also got a kick out of the part where the bearded archaeologist pleads for his life by offering to be the zombies' friend. 'Twas a hoot, I say, a regular dadgum hoot!


More coolness: there's even a little dash of Italian cultural heritage sprinkled in the mix, what with the many references to the ancient Etruscans, whose society reached its height somewhere around 500 b.c. (or so says my history book). It isn't really expanded on, and it leads absolutely nowhere, but I give the filmmakers props for putting the references in there anyway, just for a little homeland spice.

All that's well n' good. But, hey, you can't win 'em all. In point of fact, the the soundtrack friggin' blows. Big time. What's the matter, Bianchi? You couldn't get Fabio Frizzi? Bah, what ass-clenching lameness this movie's score represents! Bah!!!

Now, believe it or not, some people out there consider BURIAL GROUND to be a shitty movie. And not just because of the weak-ass musical score. Some people can't understand why anyone would want to watch this movie of their own free will. Some people haaaaate BURIAL GROUND. Those people... apparently just can't appreciate the myriad joys of titty-munchin' midgets, power tool-revvin' zombies, and occult-meddlin' Alan Moore lookalikes. Losers.

True, this picture can't really compare with ZOMBIE or TOMBS OF THE BLIND DEAD, but, really, how many movies can? Foreign flesheater flicks generally tend to be a mixed bag. Some are great, like LET SLEEPING CORPSES LIE and DOCTOR BUTCHER M.D., and some are less-than-great, like HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD or ZOMBIE LAKE (a movie which I actually quite like, though I admit I'm in the minority). For what it is, BURIAL GROUND is pretty great-ish. Andrea Bianchi is no Lucio Fulci, but, hey, Uncle Lucio was a true one-of-a-kind. Until the day Fulci makes like his own infamous ghouls and rises from the grave, Andrea Bianchi and his NIGHTS OF TERROR will do just fine.

For the most part, what some North American viewers construe as narrative flaws I see as stylistic flourishes. Where others see incoherent nonsense, I see cultural differences. I've heard people complain about how the movie is spotty and rife with inconsistencies or gaping holes in logic. Personally, I think "logic" too often limits our imagination, and, in fact, restricts cinema itself, which is, at its heart, a purely visual and visceral medium. Anyone trying to analyze, in-depth, the rationale behind certain events in the movie (like, say, the randomly exploding lightbulbs) is missing the fucking point. The concerns of the cerebellum should always play second fiddle to striking imagery and potent atmosphere, both of which BURIAL GROUND has boatloads of. The film is rich with gloomy, gothic flavor, somewhat reminiscent of the output of Mario Bava or Hammer Studios. Appropriately, the cinematography and set design have a grimy, dirty, and rather unpleasant way about them, and the tone of the entire thing feels decidedly nasty and mean-spirited. It's suffocating, almost overwhelming in its raw wretchedness.

Naturally, I mean that as a compliment.

My advice? Soak up BURIAL GROUND for its mood, for its tone, for its ambience. Also for its graphic nudity and gore, and its demented perversions. But don't think about it too much. Just accept that the story is secondary, and that's alright. Accept that the characters in the movie only exist to die ("only exist to die" ...see how we're getting back to Andrea Bianchi's themes of nihilism and misanthropy once again?), and, yes sir, that's alright.

Though I'd hesitate to call BURIAL GROUND a "lost classic," the term "underappreciated gem" does spring to mind. If you've a taste for ultra-gory Eurotrash you should find this a decidedly delicious dish.

Obviously, this isn't for everyone. Quite the opposite. Calling BURIAL GROUND an "acquired taste" is probably an understatement. This is a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very niche film, with a very specific audience. You have to be of a certain personality to get into something like this, I think, and you must possess a certain kind of mindset. I'm sure it helps if you've been formally introduced to the mind-altering, psychotropic substance known as T.H.C.

As a disclaimer, I neither officially advocate nor advise the use of T.H.C. for the purposes of movie-viewing enhancment, nor for any other purposes. For the record.

As I was saying, BURIAL GROUND is as lurid, grisly, and actively extreme as they come. It's a warped n' wicked Eurosleaze garbage-plate of sex and death, a savage, sadistic, gleefully grim romp into the realm of the unholy and unspeakable. Some call it trash. I call it art-horror. Aaaaand, yeah, I also call it trash. As is true of all the best European genre films, BURIAL GROUND is a little of both. There are nearly as many moments in the film that remind me of Argento here as there are those that remind me of Fulci. Take that however you want to.


What we have here, my kindred creeps, is a sinister, sex-obsessed, doom-drenched stoner gore flick that'll give your skin cause to crawl and your brain cells a reason to die. It's a garish, grotesque exercise in bad taste and bad attitude. If that doesn't sounds like something that you could sink your teeth into, go watch TWILIGHT instead, ya fangbanger pussy! If, on the other hand, it does indeed sound very much like something you'd dig, then don't hesitate to seek this flick out, friend. Slap it in your D.V.D. player, grab a barf bag, and kiss your lunch (and I.Q.) goodbye.

Until next slime...
Stay sick!
Your pickled pal,
William Weird.



Rating: 4 out of 5 splashy scarlet scythe decapitations
Recommendation: buy it
Best moment: midget molars mutilate mommy's milkbags