burial ground

The modern zombie film may have been invented in America, but its real evolution took place in Italy. While the undead were still shambling around shopping malls in the states, Italian zombies were wielding machine guns (Nightmare City), battling sharks (Zombie) and laying siege to castles with battering rams in copycat quickies like Andrea Bianchi's Burial Ground (1980), a pasty-faced piece of exploitation filmmaking made all the more notorious by a tasteless bit of oedipal violence that still has the power to trigger your gag reflex!

Vacationing at a family estate, a wealthy host and his guests are trapped inside after an archeological dig resurrects the angry remnants of the local peasant population. But locked doors and barred windows won't keep out this horde of vengeful corpses! Despite their rotting frames, these zombies use a wide array of tools, weaponry and good 'ol undead ingenuity to break in and extract their pound of raw flesh.

Using Lucio Fulci's Zombie as a template, Burial Ground doesn't even bother with the pretense of character development beyond the mother-son duo of Evelyn (Mariangela Giordano) and Michael (Peter Bark, a 26-year-old actor playing a 13-year-old boy), whose incestuous sexual tension becomes a running gag throughout the film, culminating in the aforementioned shocker of a finale where Michael, now a zombie, bites off his mother's breast! It's a disgustingly brilliant moment of Italian excess, somewhat reflective of little Karen consuming her parents in the original Night of the Living Dead, but oh-so much more sexually grotesque.

Director Andrea Bianchi was no stranger to mixing sex and death; in fact, it was his cinematic signature in previous over-the-top outings like Strip Nude for Your Killer and Malabimba: The Malicious Whore, all coattail riding genre pictures that pushed things to the extreme. Burial Ground (aka The Nights of Terror) dutifully arranges the naked flesh for display, and then promptly devours it! The zombies themselves are rather slipshod in construction, ranging from light make-up work and Halloween masks (keep your eye out for Karloff's likeness) to full-blown applications that look like they were melted in a microwave. But there's something ridiculously charming about them all the same, especially when Bianchi films them shuffling around the castle grounds in an endless eerie loop.

The gore is your typical "guts in a box," nothing that even comes close to Savini's work on Romero's trilogy...or even the ingenious eyeball puncture in Fulci's film. Burial Ground leans towards Ossorio's Blind Dead series, relying on the strength in numbers and twisting the rules as needed; there's even a gathering of Knight Templars tossed in just for kicks! The film's reputation rests mostly on little Michael's big mouth and a couple of humorous typos in the end credits. So why all the fuss? Italian horror doesn't make sense, and neither does the appeal for the uninitiated. There are plenty of zombie flicks out there; feel free to enjoy their convincing special effects and professional acting...this one is ours!

And Severin Films is a perfect fit for Burial Ground's hi-def debut. The self-described "Criterion of Smut" has put together an incredible special edition that starts with a stellar new 2K restoration of the film itself, looking consistently amazing all the way through. Extras include a fascinating tour of the shooting location (which has been a hot spot since the early days of Italian Gothics), festival Q & A with actor Peter Bark, sit-down interview with actors Simone Mattioli and Mariangela Giordano and producer Gabriele Crisanti, plus deleted / extended scenes and a theatrical trailer.