morrison-dylan-fan Nearing the end of the October Challenge on IMDb's Horror board,I decided that it was time to watch an easy-going flick by Lamberto Bava. Looking round for info on his titles,I stumbled on a Bava Horror that has recently been put online,which led to me deciding to disturb the graveyard.The plot:Stealing sweets from a shop,a gang jump in their van and drive off. Traveling to the outskirts of town,the gang find a tavern.Entering the tavern, the group meet the inn keeper and notice a pot of priceless valuables. Interested in getting their hands on the loot,the gang accept a bet where they have to spend a night in the catacomb and graveyard under the tavern.Expecting a quiet night,the gang start to notice disturbances in the yard. View on the film:Screened on TV during the final wave of Italian Horror,co- writer/(along with Dardano Sacchetti) director Lamberto Bava (who has a pretty funny cameo) & cinematographer Gianlorenzo Battaglia use the low budget to their advantage,as waves from Simon Boswell's Shoegaze score brew a dreamy atmosphere of fog drenched blue surrounding the group. Signally the direction he would soon go in,Bava pulls the Horror outline away for a "Family" Fantasy flick,featuring no serious threat,and all the ghostly creeps they faced being de-fanged.Despite reuniting with cute actress Lea Martino,the screenplay by Bava and Sacchetti leaves the gang running in inane circles,with the writers giving up on making the characters anything but flat,or giving them any real challenges,as the graveyard is left undisturbed.

Scarecrow-88 I think Lamberto Bava's Graveyard Disturbance is the very definition of a mixed bag. The plot, characters, and dialogue are a clumsy, jumbled mess. But, what I think Bava excels at in spades is the look and atmosphere of the catacombs where a great deal of the movie is set as a group of irritating, moronic twentysomethings, after robbing a supermarket (the proprietor of the establishment is the director!), drive into what appears to be a wooded area where the van carrying them gets caught in a river, forcing them to hike it to the skeletal remains of a castle, located next to a strange pub with customers who favor ghouls and have glowing eyes (wtf?). Challenged by a creep with a mangled face who had been following them (wearing a slicker), serving as their waiter in the pub, to stay the night in the underground catacombs beneath the establishment, these bratty young adults experience all sorts of bizarre events and encounter a number of undead monsters (rotted vampires, mummies, and zombies), hoping to win a treasure if they successfully make it to dawn. A foggy labyrinth of ancient rooms covered in thickets, cob webs, rats, and skeletal remains, with pits of goopy water, ladders, cells, and gateways that lead to a neverending cycle of similar passageways, the catacombs is an ideal Gothic setting for any horror film featuring young criminals who rob a store for the hell of it (or more like the thrill of it), suffering for their wrong doing by entering a world alien to their own. It doesn't surprise me that this is a television movie as Bava plays it safe with no nudity, sexual themes, or ultraviolence, but he sure put the make-up department to work as there are plenty of rotted faces on display here, not to mention one of the most crazy dinner table scenes you are likely to see (this family is a bunch of icky monsters, such as a mother with multiple eyes, others with gloppy faces, the menu entails such delicacies as "spider pie"). It seems Bava is having a grand ole time as the movie just keeps placing the characters in one weird scenario after another (one of the men falls into a deep, watery hole where a one-eyed creature is floating around looking for him; every time it seems the group is about to hit paydirt and escape from their crisis, climbing up a ladder, they wind up in another room almost identical to the one they just left). It does get a bit repetitive and to be honest, the screenplay is scattershot and schizophrenic, but I had some fun with Graveyard Disturbance. I enjoyed the setting even if I found most everything else poor. The make-up for the monsters really gives them a wonderfully ghastly look. The twist regarding the creep in the slicker is a bit obvious, especially after Bava shows law enforcement coming across the van, but the reveal of the face underneath a skin mask is rather an unpleasant sight certain to earn praise from zombie fans. How the characters are able to deal with him and their eventual fates left me with mixed feelings. I think escaping one perilous situation only to face the consequences of their actions at the beginning of the film (and willing to accept this considering the alternative) is amusing, at the same time, I think the creep in the slicker is dealt with a bit too easily. I think the way the characters behave while facing extremely unsettling and nightmarish experiences, sometimes taking them in stride, other times barely holding themselves together, hurts the film, and the unfocused screenplay is a detriment to the visual merits and technical achievements.

capkronos After pulling off a supermarket job (stealing... candy bars???) and busting through a police barricade, five teens - hunky Robin (Gregory Lech Thaddeus), pretty Mikki (Beatrice Ring), her brother David (Karl Zinny), brainy Tina (Lea Martino) and their getaway driver Johnny (Gianmarco Tognazzi) end up passing through a thick blanket of fog and from then on out find themselves lost in the middle of nowhere. After getting their van stuck trying to drive over a creek, they grab their camping gear and decide to hike to the nearest town by foot. As night falls, they stumble upon a huge crumbling church where they decide to spend the night and also discover a spooky tavern located on the other side, go in and find it populated by a bunch of strange, ghoulish people with red glowing eyes. The deformed tavern keeper (Lino Salemme) promises them a treasure if they're able to survive the night in an underground catacomb of crypts located beneath the church, and like all moronic horror movie teenagers, the five take up the challenge. Yeah, like allowing yourselves to be locked up in a dark, spooky place by creepy and, from all indications, inhuman strangers is ever going to have a good outcome...So after cracking a lame "American Werewolf in London," joke, down below they go, finding themselves even more lost than they were before in an Escher-style maze of staircases, ladders and various tombs and crypts. Other than encountering the expected cobwebs, gravestones, coffins, spiders and rats, there are also zombies, an animated eyeball, some kind of large wolf creature and a skull-faced Grim Reaper complete with a scythe he never uses. Unfortunately, the zombies never come off in a threatening way and are used mostly for pathetically unfunny and completely out-of-place comic scenes (such as when a male zombie grabs a female zombies boob and she slaps him) and the werewolf itself is never once shown. Boo! In fact, this entire movie, which I believe was made for Italian TV, is virtually gore free.On the plus side, the art direction and sets are (surprisingly) quite good, and mix that with the cinematography, score and liberal use of a fog machine, and the film manages to be fairly atmospheric at times. I found myself really enjoying the first half, but soon after the teens enter the crypt, the film becomes annoying, repetitive and even more illogical than it already was. After encountering various creatures, I seriously doubt you'd be giggling, cracking jokes or even lying down to take a nap if you only have to survive until dawn. The characters are extremely annoying and do consistently stupid things, the dialogue and English-dubbing are both terrible and the tone uneasily fluctuates between being jokey to wanting to be taken seriously. A senseless twist ending drives the final nail in the coffin, relegating this potentially good film to failed opportunity status.

HumanoidOfFlesh Lamberto Bava's "Graveyard Disturbance" is pretty lame.It starts off with five teens doing their daily shoplifting in a grocery store.Evading the police they drive off in their van to eventually come to the creepy inn.They are welcomed by a strange man with glowing red eye,and soon take on the bet which they simply can't refuse.The script by Lamberto Bava and Dardano Sacchetti is mediocre,the acting is pretty bad and the gore is non-existent.There are some atmospheric moments and the zombies look very creepy.The scene,where someone falls into a pit of rotting corpses is clearly borrowed from Dario Argento's "Phenomena".Give it a look,if you have enough time to waste-just don't expect anything special.