I BURY THE LIVING (1958)
Richard Boone, Theodore Bikel, Howard Smith, Peggy Maurer, Herbert Anderson, Robert Osterloh, Glen Vernon, Lynette Bernay
Directed by Albert Band
Welcome to the small town of Milford (which although never stated is either in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, or Connecticut). Robert Kraft is a prominent businessman & local council bigwig, and he has just reluctantly taken over as the new Chairman of the Immortal Hills Cemetery for a 1yr term. He is happy as a successful department store manager but out of family obligation, and with encouragement from his loving fiancé, Ann, he'll put his best foot forward (and not necessarily before plans on selling the cemetery). He meets Andy, the longtime Scottish caretaker (who is no Groundskeeper Willie), and is shown to the office which is a cold & rundown cottage. On the wall is a large map of the grounds displaying the graves of those deceased (marked by black pins), and assigned vacant burial plots which have been purchased (marked by white pins). Overlayed on the map is a painted sigil; a magic symbol which in this case looks like a Picasso sketch of abstract breasts, and infers a faint hint of witchcraft by design. Crusty Andy has put in 40yrs and is given retirement with full pension. While learning to manage the daily operations on the fly, Kraft mistakingly tacks 2 black pins on a white plot belonging to a friend and his new wife -- Stu and Beth. When the young couple (who just paid a visit, and bought the reserved site) die in a freak car accident, he is shaken by their deaths and comes to believe he is responsible. By this same replacement method of pins, a William Isham kicks the bucket next. Seeking to massage his guilt, Kraft's uncle George suggests he make another reversal to see if the tragedy was pure coincidence. The result unfortunately sees the demise of a Henry Trowbridge dying days later.
Convinced that the otherworldly is real, and that he can dispense dark power of life & death through a synergy in the map (which almost sentient, glows and ominously gets bigger to reflect dementia), he tells friends, co-workers and a reporter who promptly don't believe him. But obsessed with the results such sinister control can produce, and inspite of himself, he continues to swap pins between the interred and the not-yet expired; stuck in a boundless loop of repeating doomed tests. Demanding to resign, panicked, fearful, and feeling he is cursed, a despondent Kraft goes to the police who at first are dismissive but then perk up after more innocents -- councilmen Honegger and Bates, and Uncle George -- turn up dead from this pin-thing switcheroo. Unable to ignore this bizarre uptick of fatal exits, the cops ask for a demonstration by way of a black pin on the white site of Jake Mittel whom is in France. Kraft agrees and with deepening depression, and troubled of an ability that he feels only The Man Upstairs should possess, he resolves to turnabout this burdensome bad fortune by changing all recent black pins with white, and collapses in exhaustion. When he visits the filled plots that night, he is shocked to find gaping holes of all the graves dug up and the bodies missing. Back at the office and contemplating suicide, he is told on the phone by Mittel's wife of her hubby's death in France. But the most astonishing revelation (and rationale) of the impossible will come from Andy and the police. The 1950's saw a mass production of low budget, quickie B-movies on the exploitation circuit filled with creepy settings, eerie music, sometimes zero sfx, tight scripting, and yes, believe it or not: some good acting. I BURY THE LIVING is steps above being plain ordinary (spartan dialogue aside).
In different hands, such ghoulish power from the main character would be abused, and we would have zombies clawing their way back to wreak intestine-gorging havoc but instead of that macabre angle trading on gore, we have a thought-provoking, pragmatic approach. [The cover art misleadingly implies rising flesheaters which are nowhere to be found in the movie. And reportedly, the ending was written to show Kraft surrounded by walking corpses and turning into one of the undead, which if true (even in dream sequence), would have been a monumental first as this would have taken place a full decade before 1968's landmark NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD(!) Just thinking & trying to contemplate how this (or any) much smaller obscurity could have been the mother of all gamechangers is mind boggling]. The real effectiveness here comes from Boone's tortured facial expressions. He was best recognized on the TV western "Have Gun, Will Travel" but here as Kraft (and looking a slight bit like Vincent Price at times), his sunken features and gaunt appearance convey an intensely agonized man who is caved-in by the thought of bringing about untimely, Grim Reaper-ish death from simple touch and exact cue. He feels his decency has been compromised by callousness, and is contributing to his downbeat & deteriorating state of mind. Struggling with the sense of losing his sanity has caused a hollowness inside Kraft that rather than being a complete empty shell, displays a distressed humanity as ill-intent, and his lingering, bothered conscience increasingly wears him down into a haggard and withdrawn wreck, whom even doting & everready-to-help Ann can't console.
Moody, ignored, and very Twilight Zoney (inpsite of TZ still a year away from its TV debut), there are 2 ways to take I BURY THE LIVING's ending: It's either a) laughingly & disappointingly stupid, and a real letdown with its sloppy explanations that not ony throws a large monkey wrench into what was an established narrative, but keeps the picture in forgotten, low regard. Or b) amusingly bold but falls short, while recognizable for its early, now familiar (and easily predictable) brand of twist we are currently accustomed to. Weighed in the specific context of many of today's horror finales/resolutions that are often due to writers running out of creative steam, how many countless times have we rolled our eyes and scoffed, having sat through served-up offerings that undermined and even ruined a finish thanks to legit complaints of ridiculous reasoning and implausible logic? [And if we're honest, both complaints are far more egregious in their delivery, and flagrantly outrageous with their outcome, when it comes to a present crop of tangled conclusions that instead of satisfiable pay off, U-turn into cop-out crap. We need less ho-hum, and more home run]. However you plant your flag on this pro or anti side of the fence, this is otherwise still a not bad, and fair chiller for its ambitious, Edgar Allan Poe-ish & morbid concept, which to its credit avoids moralizing and wallowing in sentimentality, and doesn't lack experimental imagination (incorporating montages, zooms, ECU's, and superimposing dissolves) among its limitations. At a quick 76min, on youtube, and just the type of film to garner cult appeal, go on and give this a shot.
CEMETERY MAN aka DELLAMORTE DELLAMORE (1994)
Rupert Everett, François Hadji-Lazaro, Anna Falchi, Anton Alexander, Fabiana Formica, Stefano Masciarelli, Mickey Knox
Directed by Michele Soavi
Greetings from Buffalora, a small town in northern Italy (near the Swiss border and the Alps) which is home to Francesco Dellamorte, the cemetery caretaker who looks like a thin Ash Williams. Gnachi is his mute, dim-witted and Igor-like assistant who looks like a cross between Uncle Fester and Fatty Arbuckle. He can only say one word: a grunting "Gna" (reminiscent of Hodor). Daily life consists of Frankie (a bored, lonely, frustrated outcast stuck in a rut) dealing with rumors & ridicule of being a limp dick, reading old telephone books in which he crosses out the names of dead people, and putting together a puzzle of a human skull. Gnaghi likes eating spaghetti messily, TV, sunshine, and gathering up dried leaves. There's a weird ritual going on in Buff-town: 7 days after their burial, the recently deceased rise from the grave (complete with steaming smoke on the ground), primed for attack. Frankie calls these ghouls "Returners" and takes it upon himself to kill them damn good & proper (be they businessmen or bikers) so they don't turn the town into an 'All You Can Eat' buffet. Perplexed at this weekly re-anim(fest)ation and afraid of losing his job, Frankie begs the local Mayor to look into what the hell is going on, but the Mayor is preoccupied with his re-election campaign. So he turns to his buddy, Franco, a municipal clerk, but is held up by paperwork as he's near-illiterate. Screw bureaucracy & red tape, it'll be easier to just use bullets (or a shovel). At a funeral, Frankie gets the hots for a beautiful and mysterious young widow of a sugar daddy. At first she doesn't give him the time of day but stops being a snob when he shows her the ossuary.
Human bones apparently get her horny and she expresses a new-found erotic passion by fucking Frankie on her hubby's grave (complete with dancing sparks of blue flames). The old and jealous bugger returns, and none-too-happy about her method of mourning via nympho trampiness, attacks & bites her. Once dead, the coroner says she bit the dust from a heart attack. Shocked and saddened, Frankie knows the drill with these bodies, and camps out near her corpse. When she rises, he shoots her. In the meantime, Gnachi has gotten the warm fuzzies for the Mayor's impulsive daughter, Valentina. He shows his attraction by puking on her but alas, before their romance can properly bloom, she is decapitated in a motorcycle accident involving a busload of boy scouts. But no worries: Gnachi simply digs up her severed, alive-again head and with a little violin seranading, he places it in his burned out & screenless TV. Voilà, love is in the air. [It's a subplot that as preposterous as it sounds, is funny and touching, and then heartbreaking for its tragic end]. As a confused Frankie has sunk into depression over the thought of offing the widow, he feels everything really sucks at the moment. Man, life is miserable so Big Daddy himself -- Death -- drops by telling him to kill the living instead of the dead, in order to stop this cadaver parade. In other words: cheer up, dude. After pondering some meditative Freudian reasoning, Frankie eyes 2 more babes he wants to get in the sack (both played by busty, pouty-lipped Falci, a model who at the time was being compared to Cindy Crawford). The first is widow-woman, who reappears as the assistant of the new Mayor who is scared of sexual penetration.
Frankie pretends the rumor of his flaccid wiener is true and visits a doctor to have has penis removed(!) [Seriously? Give up your manhood in the pursuit to get laid?] Doc tells him getting rid of his willy is unnecessary, and gives him an injection. Hoping to hook up with Mayor-girl, Frankie hits a snag when she is raped by her boss and then falls in love with her violator(!) So presto, she's cured of her sexual hang-up and no longer interested in Frankie. For him it's a final straw and having now lost his marbles, he heads into town and shoots the young shitheads responsible for the rumors about him, and gets back at everyone else who ever made fun of him. When the widow again reappears, this time as a college student who reveals she is a prostitute, he kills her and 2 other women by using a room heater to set their house on fire. Franco is blamed for the murders as he's just killed his wife & child, and he then tries to commit suicide by drinking a bottle of iodine. Frankie visits him in the hospital to get answers; accusing him of stealing his crimes but is unrecognized. While there, he goes on another spree, killing a nun, nurse, and doctor, and is ignored when he screams his confession of slaying the trio. His crumbling mind has overwhelmed him: Is it he or Franco who is the real killer? Are these ladies (referred to as "She") all a figment of his imagination? Will insecurities, problems & obstacles keep him held back forever? Fed up, he grabs Gnachi, they pack up a car, and both men set out to the mountains. After passing through a tunnel (complete with bright, white light at its end), Frankie slams on the brakes causing Gnachi to injure his head.
They ditch the vehicle and at the edge of a road (or more appropriately, 'end of the road' as the mortal plane now becomes the afterlife), they come to a canyon where Gnachi falls to the ground from a seizure. Frankie concludes the rest of the world is an illusion (returning us full circle to a snow globe he has periodically shaken) which puts forth a question: is this rejection of existence a denial of his destructive inner self? He loads his gun with 2 bullets meant for Gnachi and himself, but Gnachi stabilizes and tosses the gun over a cliff. Speaking clearly, he asks to be taken home to which Frankie replies, "Gna." Based on Tiziano Sclavi's 'Dellamorte Dellamore' novel from 1991 -- itself a spin-off from Sclavi's hugely popular 'Dylan Dog' comic -- this movie was a co-production between Italy, France, and Germany. As Director Soavi was a protégé of Dario Argento (and also worked with Lamberto Bava), those influences spilled over here into a warped, metaphysical mosaic of giallo gore; black comedy; yearning for affairs of the heart; muddled pseudo/semi/quasi philosophy & existentialism; Euro art house (which is always a worrying sign that can translate into often uneven and mostly boring); revenge fantasy; and a mischievous splattering mixture of EVIL DEAD/BRAINDEAD (aka DEAD ALIVE)/DEMONS/MY BOYFRIEND'S BACK (1993). What brings Buffalora's dead back is never explained even though the name 'Resurrecturis' on a large arch should be a tip-off that supernatural capery is soon to unfold. [Soavi said in an interview with Fangoria -- issue 149 -- that the Returners get their energy from mandragola (mandrake) roots in the earth]. And everything cuts to the chase with cheeky schlock, a dollop of pretentious poetic dithering, gratuitous nudity, and torrid sex with its wee whiff of necrophilia.
What looked like a torch being passed to Soavi wound up being a last hurrah of sorts for Italian horror, as creepy Japanese 'WTF/psychological' horror rose to be a dominant alternative to scary Hollywood output in what yet remains a much-maligned decade. Offbeat, surreal, and exaggerated, CEMETERY MAN certainly doesn't make a lot of sense, but it has a distinct look and an odd, anthology/vignette-type stream of consciousness flow. Stylistically, it's quite memorable for its visual and colorful flair. Even with Everett's droll sarcasm & cynicism (which can easily be mistaken as uninspired blandness for the role but don't be fooled, the man is a fine actor), the movie never takes itself seriously, and as he goes off the deep end from his melancholy, there's plenty of wit as evidenced with Falci playing 3 roles (each stranger than the last), a clueless detective, and boy scout zombies. There's also a bit of satirical commentary by metaphor: When Valentina's father (the first Mayor) uses her death as propaganda to stay in power, it's an example of unscrupulous political exploitation; figuratively cannibalizing his own tragedy for reward. She gets even by feasting on him; effectively removing him from office permanently -- along this same literal line of carnivorous language that has materialized into karma. [I know, brainy stuff]. Dreary and morose, yet freewheeling and unique, for many, CEMETERY MAN was a real headscratcher back in the VCR rental days. If you remember hating this, or not picking up on the layering, and haven't seen it since, give it a re-watch and see if the passing of 2 decades is enough to change your mind. If you count yourself among the already initiated and got a kick out of this on your first viewing, give it a re-watch and see if still holds up 20yrs on.
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