When I saw a movie listed on the Amazon streaming service as Dead And Buried, I wondered if this was the very same Dead And Buried which scared the daylights out of me back when I first saw it as a VHS rental in the early eighties. The image that Amazon had was just a text title of the film’s name. So I cranked up the great Amazonian streaming machine and, lo and behold, there it truly was: Dead And Buried, freshly come back to life for me much like the characters in the film do.
Taking place in a quiet coastal town, Sheriff Gillis (James Farentino--who I’ll always fondly remember as Cmdr Richard Owens from The Final Countdown) deals with a series of grisly murders where the victims are either burned up or chopped up in vicious ways. On top of all of this is the fact that Gillis is also dealing with the strange behavior of his wife, Janet (Melody Anderson--best known as Dale Arden from the 1980 Flash Gordon), who may be having an affair behind his back.
There is one really shocking moment in this film that really got under my skin back when I first viewed this movie on VHS. It’s the scene when Gillis is examining the murder scene of the first victim, a photographer who had been burned alive and placed inside a crashed car to make it look like he perished in an accident. Dobbs, the coroner, played by Jack Albertson, shows up and gently presses the side of the burnt corpse’s face--only to have the corpse scream in horrible agony. The “corpse” was still alive. This literally made me jump back in my seat the first time I saw it, and I remember bracing myself for a really scary horror movie.
But, that was it.
That one shocking moment was the ONLY shocking moment in all of Dead And Buried, which soon devolves into a dull, listless “mystery” that just lays there. The great reveal of what is actually happening is telegraphed well in advance, leaving befuddled Sheriff Gillis as the only one who doesn’t know what’s going on (which makes him look like an idiot). Dead And Buried suffered from the ‘too many cooks in the kitchen’ syndrome, where it was taken from the hands of director Gary Sherman (who had intended to make a dark comedy) and extensively reworked.
The result of this is the odd sequence where another of the victims, a hitchhiker played by Lisa Marie, shows up as part of the undead gang of killers terrorizing a family before we see the hitchhiker’s death scene, which comes later (and shows how she became “recruited” into the undead in the first place). It leads up to a boring climax where Gillis is running around, reacting in shock to revelations that either we’ve been shown before, or had already figured out.
The saving grace of watching Dead And Buried again some thirty six years later is the nostalgia factor of watching then-young actors who would go on to better things. Lisa Blount, who would later star in An Officer And A Gentleman, and John Carpenter’s Prince Of Darkness (and who left us at a way too young age in 2010), played the girl on the beach in the opening (as well as the icy killer nurse). Harry, the sheriff’s good friend, was played by Robert Englund, who would go on to be Freddy Kruger in A Nightmare on Elm Street. The special effects were done by Stan Winston, who would work on The Terminator, Jurassic Park, and other big-budget popcorn flicks.
Dead And Buried doesn’t hold up at all (unless you like watching a dull, so-called ‘spooky’ mystery that the Scooby Gang could have solved without even trying). But that one shocker of a scare moment was still chilling to watch, even though I knew what was coming this time. If only the rest of Dead And Buried was just as good. --SF
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