Burial Ground

* (add stars to this if you like your movies dubbed atrociously with dialogue that could only have been distorted from the original script, and logic lapses quite severe)

“You’re getting a raise, but it has nothing to do with money.”

When I watch these movies, I have to figure something gets lost in translation when Italian horror films are dubbed for American audiences. One character calls his wife a nice looking whore when dresses in lingerie for him! There’s an inexplicable scene where lights bulbs go on and off and start to explode! Why??? What does that have to do with the undead arriving at a professor’s castle to embark on a feeding frenzy? I think those assembling the script and set pieces just said, “Fuck it.” I honestly do. Case in point: the film goes out of its way to establish where the dead come from, as the professor follows research to a crypt, pulls out the hammer to open it, and the dead just surround him and attack. So we get a clear, cut reason of where they come from. Then the film decides to just let a zombie just emerge from under the earth and crawl up to a couple making out (photographer and his lover model), looking to do some “necking” itself. Get this: a zombie with no eyes (!!!) is able to toss a knife and stab a maid in a balcony from several feet away as if a circus act performer! Oh, and as she just stands there with the knife in her hand, another zombie (very, very, very slowly) cuts her head off with a scythe! Not to let this set piece end there, director Bianci lets his camera sit on her neck wound (absent head) gushing blood. Not to be denied, the director has shot gun blasts exploding zombie heads, zombies forming the horde around bodies and tearing away at torsos for [very] bloody organs to munch on, zombies picking up weapons (ax, pickaxe, rake, and scythe) so they can take down locked doors (or using them on victims if given the chance), and zombies set on fire. You get a lot of close-ups by Bianci on the rotted faces of zombies (Bianci just can’t get enough of that) and their boney hands reaching (they all walk like Glenn Strange’s Frankenstein’s Monster) out for humans to detain. It goes the typical siege route with the humans who gathered at the professor’s château holing up and hoping to wait the zombies out (like that’s going to happen, eh?), but these ghouls are a determined lot…they want their bloody meat. All the while, Bianci has this unnerving synth score with all these weird sounds and bizarre melodies. And Peter Bark, the boy-man with the most marvelously cheesy voice-over next to that blonde kid in the Fulci 80s movies. Hell, you even have a zombie climbing up the château wall to get at a window!
 
What has ultimately brought this film infamy is the obvious son-mommy love that just kind of happens. It is one of those surreal moments in an Italian film that begs to question: what brought this on to begin with? Seriously, someone coming up with the script decided that it would be a good idea to include mommy and her boy leaving the scene of a human survival of a zombie onslaught by getting nice and close, embracing with groping and kissing! Gah! Eventually mommy tells her son to quit touching her inappropriately and he scurries away disappointed!

Then, in one of my inexplicable moments, a victim of the zombies (she’s not bitten; her head is pulled into a broken window by a zombie) just rises up as a zombie herself. It goes right along with the zombie who was buried in the courtyard and another that had a crypt near the château’s flower garden…the script just wants these scenes to exist and makes them so.