Bad Movie Monday: Burial Ground (1981)

Not everyone is like me, a movie masochist who willingly seeks out the absolute worst that cinema has to offer. Some of you might enjoy a little bad acting or some ridiculous plot twists, but you don’t want to feel like the movie mugged you in a dark alley and then kicked you in the groin for good measure. The desire for a film to NOT cause your mind to snap is something I can totally empathize with. You want fun, not pain. I understand perfectly. So today’s Bad Movie Monday suggestion is going to be a mostly fun one. And so I present to you Burial Ground.

You can’t really go wrong with any Italian horror movie from the seventies and eighties. Even if you don’t know anything about what you’re about to watch, you can at least rest assured that it’ll be a hell of an experience. It’s not an absolute mark of “Bad Movie” quality, and I’ve been disappointed a few times. However, if you don’t stray too far and stick with the stuff that you can get on Tubi or Shudder you should be fine.

WHAT’S THE STORY?

An archaeology professor accidentally awakens zombies while studying an ancient crypt. They almost immediately kill him of course, and then begin roaming the grounds of his villa looking for more victims. Fortunately for the recently resurrected, the professor had guests coming in that weekend: three couples, along with a sexpot mother and her creepy weird son. You can probably guess the rest. Dumb characters, dumb decisions, dumb dialogue, some nudity, followed by lots of gore.

The film is rather infamous for only one thing. I won’t say what exactly, but I will say that there was a damn good reason why the actor playing the “young” son was actually twenty-five, and that it wasn’t because of the gore or violence. Consider this a content warning. No, really! Personally, I think this is the film’s curse and blessing. It’s a curse because there’s a cool little zombie movie here that viewers often miss because of the shitty softcore porn plot twist, that I feel adds literally nothing to the film besides a few uncomfortable “Ewwwww” moments may I add, overwhelms the whole experience. And it’s a blessing because without the stupid twist I doubt the film would be as well remembered today. It would have gotten lost along with many others. It’s one of those “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t” things.

One massive positive is that it was filmed at Villa Parisi near Frascati, the same location that they filmed Immaculate with Sidney Sweeney. So the film is beautiful to look at if nothing else. Also, the odd spacey soundtrack is kind of great. I love it when movies don’t look or sound like anything else. The acting is fine. The dubbing is wild as usual. The story makes little sense, the zombies are barely explained, and every character is so bad at self-preservation that you’d think they all had a fetish for getting eaten.

And now, onto my favourite part of any review. The list!

TOP TEN THINGS TO EXPECT IN AN ITALIAN HORROR MOVIE

#1 Shitty haircuts on the guys. For all the beauty Italy has brought to the world, it also seems to have invented the bowl cut on men.

#2 Blood that looks like red paint. So you can see it, even in the dark.

#3 Weird looking children. Look, I am not besmirching the appearance of the Italian children. I’m sure most are normal. However, every kid in an Italian movie looks as if they’re secretly the killer.

#4 Scripts that don’t feel written so much as cobbled together at the last second so that the director can hold up a bunch of papers in the producer’s face and go: Vedere? La sceneggiatura esiste!!! (You see? The script exists!!!)

#5 Beautiful locations. Only Italian filmmakers would go to the loveliest places in order to film the sleaziest and most depraved of horrors. Rather fitting to be honest.

#6 Women who are just achingly beautiful and sexy. No joke here. It’s just something that really makes me happy.

#7 English dubbing that sounds like it was recorded in a public bathroom after the sound guy dropped his mic in the toilet.

#8 An almost 100% guarantee that the name of the film on the poster, the Blu-ray or DVD cover, and in the onscreen titles will all be different. Just take Burial Ground, aka La Notti del Terrore, aka Nights of Terror, aka Zombie Horror, aka The Zombie Dead, aka Zombie 3, aka Burial Ground: The Nights of Terror, as an example.

#9 This one’s rather unfortunate: Casual sexism. I won’t quite call it misogyny, because I don’t think there’s any hatred of women in most cases. However, these movies all too often have a running theme of “Wimmen! Amirite???” where female characters are portrayed as dumb bimbos who can’t run in a straight line without tripping. In a VERY mild defence, these movies were made forty or fifty years ago by men who were born a hundred years ago. Burial Ground is actually pretty free of this sort of thing, but only because everyone is a friggin’ idiot. So it’s very egalitarian that way at least.

#10 Gore galore, and all of it will look gruesome while simultaneously none of it will look real.

WAS IT REALLY A BAD MOVIE?

Not at all. It’s dated as hell and has a very icky plot twist, but it’s not a bad movie if you sit down to watch it with the right frame of mind. If I can use an analogy, Burial Ground is like an opera with no music or a comedy with no jokes. Yet you can still hear the singing, and you do laugh. Oh, how you’ll laugh! This is Grand Guignol at its finest. There are no characters in the film, only eventual victims. It’s a hell of a ride, one that I think is worth a go if you’re brave and ballsy enough.

Burial Ground is a 1981 Zombie movie written by Piero Regnoli and directed by Andrea Bianchi. It stars Karin Well as Janet, Gianluigi Chirizzi as Mark, Simone Mattioli as James, Antonella Antinori as Leslie, Roberto Caporali as George, Claudio Zucchet as Nicholas, Pietro Barzocchini as Michael, Anna Valente as Kathryn, Benito Barbieri as Professor Ayers, and Mariangela Giordano as Evelyn