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Customer Review
- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 7 May 2013Despite its rather basic premise and minimal plotting Andrea Binachi's 1981 Burial Ground is one of the strangest and at times outrageous entries in the Italian walking dead genre.This could be thought of as a real achievement when you consider this short lived cycle of films includes such titles as Lucio Fulci's Zombie Flesh Eaters and the surreal The Beyond not to mention Umberto Lenzi's Nightmare City or the cheap and cheerful zombie/cannibal crossbread Zombie Holocaust. In the brief prologue a bearded professor accidently awakens the Etruscan dead whilst excavating in a tomb close to his swish country retreat. After he pleads with them not to kill him by proclaiming that he is their friend(??!!)the bulbous headed skull faced zombies chow down on the unlucky fellow anyway. Cut to the arrival of a group of swinging socialites who arrive at the professors decadent villa set deep in the lush Italian countryside to meet up with their academic friend and enjoy a weekend break. Little do they know of his activities and soon the professors's handiwork in the nearby tomb becomes aparent as the surrounding gardens and the house itself are soon besieged by an ever growing zombie hord and in an obvious nod to Romero's Night Of The Living Dead the stranded weekenders and a small house staff of two have no choice but to fight back with whatever weapons are at their disposel. Gorey and at times sleezy, Burial Ground despenses with plot, logic and back story in favour of entrail pulling and gut munching with a fair bit of T&A thrown in for good measure. The characters are all pretty generic which consist of a house maid, waiter and three adult couples of which one brings along their strange teenage son. Now this is were the movie starts to get weird as a twenty five year old man(Peter Barke) was cast as the twelve year old boy complete with a thick black mop of a toupee, whiney voice and an unhealthy and incestuous fascination with his mother. He also grabs the best and most well remembered line from the film ( "Mother this cloth smells of death") as well as the show stopping gore scene which is far to explicit to mention here. Throw into the mix a soundtrack that mixes laid back lounge jazz and what appears to be library cues taken from a late 50s sci-fi flick and walking dead that echo Ossorio's Blind Templers and you have an Italian zombie film quite unlike any other. Ignoring the cheapness of the production Burial Ground builds up a nice midnight movie atmosphere in its later stages and the filming locations which were the Frascati region of Rome and the villa itself all add to the experience. Of course this wouldnt be an Italian horror film with a bad English dub and cringe inducing script and Burial Ground is amonst the worst the genre has to offer. The special effects despite being grim are not the best I have seen from an Italian Morti Viventi filck either. The zombie make-up is at times questionable with actors faces clearly visable under the application and the gore looks like scraps from a butchers bin. The zombies appear in varying states of decay but I do like the fact that when killed they dont bleed blood but what looks like brown sludge which would be far more correct than the bright red ooze that erupts in other zombie films as these guys have supposedly been dead for many years.
To conclude there is no doubting Burial Ground's awefulness and for newcomers to the genre there are better made and much more accessable Italian horror movies to sample before you dip your toe in this bizzare little movie. For seasoned fans though this is ultimatly very entertaining and despite some obvious problems remains a firm favourite of mine that I never grow tired of viewing.
Burial Ground was released on VHS in the 80s through budget label Apex and it was this release that first introduced me to this sick little puppy and was inadvertantly my first foray into Italian horror though at the time was completely unintentional as I rented what I thought was Romero style film in the same league as Dawn or Day Of The Dead. What I got was something entirly different as this rendering of Bianchi's movie titled The Nights Of Terror should in all fairness put me off the genre for life. You see when this was scrambled onto VHS tape in the mid 80s complete with a BBFC 18 certificate the distributor already scared of the then very easily offended BBFC after the video nasty debate had alraedy cut an astonishing ten minutes from the running time. To add insult to injury the BBFC then scissored another three minutes of salacious and obviousy to them, harmful material. The end result was an unwatchable mess that ran barely over an hour with huge continuity problems, haphazard dubbing and featured nothing that the hungry fan of horror would want. I would go on to forgot all about this film until a good fourteen years later when I found a Vipco release of a unknown title called The Zombie Dead. On viewing this memories came flooding back. The small midget playing a child and the finale in the workshop. This was the film I had rented back in the 80s only this time there was one notable difference. The gore! Indeed the DVD from Vipco which was sadly of bad quality was indeed the full uncut version with the full thirteen or so minutes back into the running time. Over the years Burial Ground has remianed a guilty pleasure of mine and I have now owned two DVD releases. The said Vipco disc and the American import from Shriek Show which added extras and an anamorphic transfer. Now with Shriek Show releasing some of their back catalogue to Blu ray I was a little excited to see my that old friend Burial Ground, my first Italian zombie flick was getting the 1080p treatment. I did hold off ordering this due to less than welcome reviews. After updating Zombie Holocaust to Blu ray and being pleased enough with its high def treatment courtesy of Shriek Show I decided it was time to replace my now old SD DVD. Like other Blu rays in Shriek Show's cannon this AVC encoded 1080p transfer has its fair share of problems and some that im sure with better quality control could have been easily avoided. The image itself is rather on the soft side. Across the board detail isnt great but is an obvious improvement over the rather bland looking DVDs. Close ups show the best textures from the zombie make up complete with decomposing flesh and maggoty eyes through to the thick sack attire worn by the cadavers. Long shots also can look reasonable all things considered from the bright outdoor scenes of the gardens and countryside through to the sumptuous interors of the villa complete with period furnature and wall art but alot of this depends on lighting as the black levels and shadow detal on the whole are not great with some obvious black crush in the dark and nightime segments. What really ruins this transfer is a problem that seems to persist with many Italian films presented in HD and that is the grain structure which often appears as noise and not natural film grain. This is prevalent throughout the running time with some scenes appearing alot worse than others and in dark scenes especially it is a big problem resulting in an image that looks rough and dirty. Colours are stronger than I have seen before especially the Vipco disc that had an odd greenish tint. Skin tones can look fairly natural despite some obvious heavy make-up on the actresses but reds in particlar look too boosted. There doesent appear to be any noticable print damage issues and as Shriek Show havent done alot to the transfer it does appear to be presented as it is with no digital tweaking. Unlike other versions this is presented in a far more open 1.66:1 ratio complete with window boxing to the sides which I would presume to be closer to the original aspect ratio as most European films were shot this way. The extra headroom does alot for the compositions whilst loosing nothing from the frame edges. The major downside to this Blu ray release and one that could be a deal breaker for some comes in the form of its running time which is minutes less than the DVD alternative. Now the film hasent been cut for any censorship issues so why the difference in times because we are not talking seconds here but MINUTES. On closer inspection it has been noted that frames have been chopped out. Now some of these contain nothing you would notice whereas one does contain a slight snippet of gore. It has never been made apparent why this was done and indeed Beyond The Darkness befell the same fate on another Shriek Show Blu ray although this was only around twenty five seconds of footage.Maybe it was to remove damage at reel changes as this is an alternate version to the one released on DVD with different shots inserted at different times or maybe it was just laziness on Shriek Shows part. Whatever it is this doesent show off alot of confidence in Shriek Show's product and just highlights their lax quality control. Newcomers to t
