As an Italian zombie flick, Burial Ground (1981) spends a lot of time with decaying zombie faces in close-up, crud-strewn make-up with maggots wriggling around. I couldn’t help but wonder… did the make-up artist apply the maggots carefully with a tweezer, or did they just dump a bucket upside down the zombie’s head and see what stuck? Part of the appeal and artistry with Burial Ground is that it’s a cheap knock-off that doesn’t skimp on the blood and guts as well as the sleaze, which makes it a very memorable addition to the genre.
While a professor gets more than he bargained for when he enters a crypt on a large country estate and starts banging away at the stone walls, a group of people arrive at the very same mansion ready to party. Alongside the butler and the maid, there are several couples all eager to disrobe and make love in the evening, including a remarried woman Evelyn (Mariangela Giordano) who has brought her son along, Michael (Pietro Barzocchini). A very unique part of Burial Ground movie is that Michael looks like he’s got Benjamin Button disease, a small frame yet quite adult in his features (Yes, Barzocchini was an adult cast in the role of a child), and he has a strange attachment to his mother, continuously clasping her bosom, and being a third wheel in her coupling with a new beau. Why did the filmmakers add this strange, incestuous, horny aspect to the movie? Well, if you work backwards from where it all ends up, it’s all for disreputable reasons, a sicko twist on a reliable trope from the original Night Of The Living Dead. But I appreciated that director Andrea Bianchi and writer Piero Regnoli made the effort to set all of this up whereas other exploitation Italian zombie flicks would just throw in the gore without this strange family aspect around it.
Shuffling zombies to the ambient Popol Vou sounds of the electronic score by Elsio Mancuso and Burt Rexo, gore and nudity, lush nature and lofty interiors, all add to a fun time at the flicks, particularly if you’re into this type of sicko zombie trash.
Streamed on Tubi (US).
VHS Tracking 