jadavix Not since "Night of the Living Dead" was there such a sustained jolt of zombie horror as Andrea Bianchi's "Burial Ground". Aside from the brief sequences introducing the characters early in the movie, the action does not let up for a moment, and the feeling of approaching dread is palpable.Indeed, this zombie classic is one of few in that overcrowded sub-genre that feels worthy to sit alongside Romero's original film. It's not a complete ripoff: the zombies are a little smarter this time, employing a battering ram to gain entrance to the castle the heroes are hiding in, and they are perhaps the most gruesome example of the living dead ever captured on camera. The costume designers spared no detail, with dripping maggots and churning worms.A child actor in this movie also happens to be so ugly I wasn't sure who I wanted to look at least: him or the zombies. He looks like a cross between Peter Lorre and the kid from "Deliverance". The fact that he really only seems capable of saying "Mama! Mama!" made him even more repulsive. At first this seemed like a miscalculation: why would the filmmakers choose such a repugnant child if we are to root for him? But that's the thing... we aren't. During an astonishing scene later in the movie when he attempts to breastfeed from his sexy mother, and then, still later, when he is successful at this aim, with violent results, we come to see how another aspect of the horror in the best horror movies is the unreliability of humans, their uncomfortable closeness to the creatures they are fighting."Burial Ground" is a classic zombie movie, a must-see for fans of the genre.

amesmonde Visitors to a mansion are attacked by the disturbed dead and undead monks of the area.Here we have Burial Ground, Le Notti del terrore, also known as Nights of Terror and The Zombie Dead. Take the sleaziness of The Blind Dead series, put in the trappings of Fulci's dubbed Zombi 2 and add the set up of the Night of the Living Dead and you're pretty close to your expectations of Burial Ground.To this shameless perverse horror's credit it has atmosphere and a nihilistic ending. Set in and around the grounds of a European mansion it's surreal day and nights on location shoot gives it some weight as a group of visitors get killed off one by one. Directed by the elusive Andrea Bianchi who has a long list of films to his name and aliases, the gore and makeup are effective for the most part and what you'd expect from an 80's Italian splatter film. The film heats up when the zombie's start tearing, eating flesh, boob biting and ingeniously using a range of weapons including disc cutters and axes as they lay siege on a rural dwellings.Gino De Rossi provides the special effects on a debatable less budget than Lucio Fulci's Zombi, there's a few similar moments to Fulci's classic including a woman face being pulled close to a shards of glass, worms and maggots falling from the rising dead. The zombies are Romero slow but are reminiscent of the wielding weapon dead in Amando de Ossorio's The Blind Dead.The score is a little intrusive at times synonymous with the Italian films, there's gratuitous groping, kissing and overblown crying and hysterics at times. The infamous uncomfortable incest segment between actress Mariangela Giordano and Peter Bark, where the son makes advances to his mother is unnecessarily thrown in for bad taste sake. Possibly simply to out do Romero's classic basement setup where the daughter kills the mother. There's a notable decapitation scene of a maid where her hand is nailed to a window and her head loped off by a scythe. Actress Antonella Antinori is memorable along with Raimondo Barbieri who gets limited screen time as the Professor.As far as zombie films go this takes its self seriously with plenty of eerie bloody moments and while not as good as the aforementioned films of the same genre it's still a video nasty worth checking out.

ferbs54 The impact that George A. Romero's seminal "Night of the Living Dead" (1968) had on the future of the so-called "zombie film" was so enormous as to practically constitute a sea change. Up until then, in pictures such as "White Zombie" (1932), "Revolt of the Zombies" (1936), "King of the Zombies" (1941), "I Walked With a Zombie" (1943) and even as late as 1966's "The Plague of the Zombies," these creatures had been presented as essentially harmless beings; hypnotized or drugged, living automatons who carried out the commands of their masters. The Romero film transformed the zombies into ravenous gut munchers; the revivified dead, hungry for human flesh. Since "NOTLD," many films have played on this concept with varying success and degrees of imagination, the best of the bunch (such as Romero's five sequels, Lucio Fulci's 1979 homage "Zombie," 2002's "28 Days Later," 2013's "World War Z") tweaking the formula with interesting new twists. And then there's 1981's "Burial Ground: The Nights of Terror," which is seemingly pleased to jettison everything except bloody zombie carnage in the pursuit of a memorable time for the viewer. And for some, I suppose that might just be enough.The film is too easily synopsized. A professor putters around in an Etruscan graveyard and somehow, in a manner never clearly explained, causes the long-entombed dead to rise. Meanwhile, three couples arrive at a nearby villa (actually, the Palazzo Braschi, in Rome) for a holiday, along with the son of one of the women. The newly awakened corpses waste little time in attacking these seven, who are then forced into a siege situation at the villa, along with the residence's maid and butler. And that's pretty much it; on with the blood and guts and mayhem....Writing about "Burial Ground" in his invaluable "Zombie Movies: The Ultimate Guide," Glenn Kay tells us that it is "among the toughest Italian zombie flicks to sit through," and that "there isn't one iota of suspense or terror, and you won't care about or like any of the characters." And while it's difficult to argue with Kay, I yet have a feeling that I enjoyed the film slightly more than he did. Yes, the picture surely has been made for those who do not esteem such elements of the filmmaking craft as character development, logic, explanations, etc. "NOTLD" had a radioactive satellite as a rationale for its zombie plague; this film offers no rationale whatsoever! The viewer, likewise, never learns why or how the zombies cause the villa's lightbulbs to explode, or, for that matter, why the zombies look like half-decomposed cadavers, instead of the skeletons that Etruscans lying in the ground for 2,000+ years would be expected to resemble. And yet, the film still has some definite assets to offer, I feel. For one thing, it is just remarkable how many different types of zombie masks and makeup jobs the film dishes out; Mauro Gavazzi and Rosario Prestopino have done a wonderful job, respectively, in the makeup and masks departments. While screenwriter Piero Regnoli's script is surely nothing to rave about (especially when compared to the work he handed in for 1956's "I Vampiri"), at least he does keep things lively and moving, while director Andrea Bianchi (who had previously impressed me with his work on that sleaziest of gialli, the 1975 Edwige Fenech vehicle "Strip Nude for Your Killer") manages to provide more than a few clever shocks. The largely electronic musical score by Elsio Mancuso complements the already freaky mood nicely, and the gorehounds in the audience will be happy to learn that the body count in the film--among the living AND the living dead--is extremely high. Among the film's various instances of pleasing grossness are the sight of wriggling maggots in many of the zombies' faces; bloody disembowelments and gut-munching sequences that make the one in Romero's 1968 film seem quite tame; zombie immolation; zombie heads being blown off; zombies being speared and gushing some kind of muddy goop; and on and on. And although Kay has claimed that the film is devoid of suspense, there are at least two sequences that this viewer found somewhat nerve shredding. In the first, one of the women is held immobile in a bear trap while one ugly zombie advances on her. And in the second, the maid has her hand impaled on a windowsill while a scythe-wielding zombie slowly climbs up a wall to slice off her head. (Oddly, the zombies are able to use tools, carry weapons, and even unite to use a battering ram!) And then there's the extremely strange matter of that young kid played by Peter Bark, a 25-year-old actor who, because of his dwarfism, resembled a boy half his age. Italian law prohibited youths from appearing in such violent and sexual fare (I guess I didn't mention that the film has a fair amount of nudity and sexual content); thus, the use of someone like Bark. He makes for a very weird "young" character ("one of the creepiest, oddest-looking kids ever captured on film," says Kay), with a marked Oedipus complex for his mother (Mariangela Giordano, the only "name" in the cast). And, in the film's most notorious sequence, his mom learns an invaluable life lesson the hard way: If your young son ever becomes a zombie, do NOT, out of pity, invite him to suckle at your breast! The bottom line: Although Kay has given "Burial Ground" his lowest rating, this viewer found it to be an acceptable, simpleminded entertainment. The film can be seen today via an excellent print on a Media Blasters' Shriek Show DVD, which comes with many fine extras, including modern-day interviews with the very likable producer, Gabriele Cristani, as well as Mariangela herself, who, remarkably, looks much the same as she did some 25 years ago. As does her Evelyn character in the film, during her interview, Mariangela manages to (you should pardon the expression) get quite a bit off her chest....

callanvass This is when a slew of Zombie films were coming out, and a lot of them were low budget knockoffs of Dawn of The Dead. Dawn of The Dead itself wasn't that big of a budget, but that movie is the greatest Zombie film ever made, so it doesn't matter. You've really seen it all before when it comes to this one, except the Zombies have aging makeup with maggot infested bodies. This movie can be pretty controversial at times. Director Andrea Binachi gives us an incest subplot between a mother and daughter. Michael (Peter Bark) who plays the son was around 30 years old when this happened. So that makes it even weirder. Bark is a creepy looking kid; Michael has a sexual desire for his Mother, and let's just say; it's rather creepy. Look out for that scene near the end with the breast. I won't spoil it, but it's one of the more shocking things I've seen. The characters themselves are nothing special. They basically get ridden with atrocious dubbing and run and scream a lot. That's the problem with Italian Zombie films, is you really have nobody to root for in most of them. The gore flows like wine as to be expected, and the effects aren't too shabby. I didn't care too much for the Zombie makeup, but it wasn't bad. My main problem with this movie is the ending itself. It is extremely anticlimactic. It tries to be ambiguous, but it ended up pis****** me off more than anything else. I also have gripes with the pacing in the middle. There are too many scenes with zombies staggering around and the actors doing nothing of note. It became very redundant. Final Thoughts: Nothing original here, except for some rather shocking incest, but it does have moments of cheesy entertainment. I would recommend Zombie Holocaust over this one, but this one is good for a few laughs as well. 4/10