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Well, since this is a German release, it must all be in German. The letters
are the same, but they're all mixed up into ugly combinations. I did recognize
the phrases "special edition" and "trailer." There's a picture on the back
that shows the sign welcoming everyone to the town in the movie: "Welcome to
Potters Bluff: A New Way Of Life." There's also a picture of a guy getting a
needle stabbed in his eye so you probably know everything you need to from that. 1981, 89 minutes, Widescreen, DVD
This pretty effective and gory horror film combines two different things that
most of us always suspected of not exactly being on the up and up: small towns
and funeral parlors. While there have been a number of movies that showed us
living in a small town was the same as moving into a haunted house (for example Village Of The Damned and Children Of The Corn) and some films that dealt with the fact that most funeral parlors are really
operated by guys doing unspeakable things with dead folks (see the Phantasm series), Dead And Buried takes that logical next step and poses the question
that is really almost embarrassingly obvious: What if there was this small town
where the guy in charge of the funeral home was using voodoo to resurrect dead
people and keep them alive? Of course, there's a little more to it than that,
and I have managed to spoil the movie already for you in my usual fashion, but
wouldn't you have been more irritated if I had ruined it for you when a cheap
American version was available on DVD instead of just the overpriced German
version? It does come with a pretty slick collector's booklet and contains a
text interview with director Gary Sherman, but the booklet is all in German so
unless you've been hankering for some small photos from the movie of star James
Farentino grimacing, you're not really getting anything worth the extra Euros.
Interestingly enough, despite the booklet and the menus being in German, the
text essay and filmographies are in English. This allows you to get the inside
dope on what it was like for Sherman to work with that dead girl on Poltergeist
III (he liked her) and to learn that Dead And Buried isn't his favorite project
(Really?). The packaging of the DVD is fairly slick though, with an outside
sleeve made of stiff heavy cardstock that slides off of the container holding
the disc. The container opens up like a book with the disc on the right side
and the booklet on the left. The inside container features the striking cover
art devoid of any ad copy on the front. Dragon Entertainment put together a
nice looking package with this release.  The movie is a nice package itself, photographed in a consistently moody and
hazy
style that gives everything an unreal, dreamlike feeling. George is a
photographer from St. Louis who has gotten tired of shooting the Arch and the
strip clubs across the river and has headed out to Potters Bluff for a little
R&R. Potters Bluff is a seaside village on the east coast where somebody like
a
rube from the midwest can wander along the sea shore and see stuff like old
fishing nets, barrels and boats all laid out nice and seductive like so that
he can photograph them for their layout in Ye Olde Shipping Cliches Photography Monthly (anyone have the April '97 issue - I lent mine to Kevin Spacey and he never
gave it back). I thought I was watching an Old Spice commercial or something.
Then, just when it seemed that this movie was going to be about a photographer
finding himself on the shores of a really scenic town, this woman in tight
jeans shows up. These jeans were really obscenely tight, because even though
she was a really skinny chick, her flesh was still hanging over the edges of
them during some scenes. She was also wearing a blouse that was knotted in
such a fashion that you would have thought she was fifteen year old gal from
the Ozarks or something. I believe the knot was what we in the boating
community call a square knot, thus allowing sailors to quickly undo it in an
emergency. She decides she's going to call him Freddie and he says she looks
like a Lisa. Dispensing with real names brings to mind all those online
flirtations where people use assumed names, except in this case there is
actually a female involved. Next thing you know, her top comes off (see I told
that was an easy knot!) and this guy has suddenly become Elmer Batters. Just
when you thought that this vacation of George's was going to turn into one of
those letters to Penthouse, he gets conked on the head. The whole town shows
up and clubs him and slashes him and gets him all tied up in the fishing net to
a stake. Then they dump gasoline on him and light him up. The whole time Lisa
is watching and everyone is taking pictures of the event (probably for the
town's newsletter) and some dude is even shooting home movies of it, I think!  The only guy in town interested in investigating things is the local cop
(that's a lucky break). His name is Dan and we learn through some clumsy
exposition by other characters that he is a college educated man with a masters
degree that came back to his home town to help them out by breaking up their
secret voodoo ring. Dan is played by James Farentino and he shows some good
fire in the character, getting us to believe that he's trying to figure out the
crazy things going on and that it is all weighing heavily upon him. There's an
Oscar winner in the cast, but it isn't Farentino (it's the girl on the
beach, who won
the 2001 Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film, The Accountant!)
. You know though, that
Farentino is able to really feel all these emotions that he's putting up on
screen. The worry, jealously, rage, and self-loathing come off as authentic
since he demonstrated
most of those during the time when he was stalking Tina Sinatra. He also got
busted for cocaine possession in Canada, but we're here to critique his work in
this movie, not air all his dirty laundry. The burned up guy has somehow been
put into his VW bus to make things look like an accident. The funeral parlor
dude takes his own sweet time getting to the scene and when he finally gets
there, they discover that this deep fried photog is still alive! Perhaps
he'll be able to tell who did all this to him. Luckily for the townspeople
that did all this, Potters Bluff has an excellent hospital that they keep this
guy in, instead of shipping him to some special burn ward in a big city and
this enables Lisa (who happens to be a nurse Potter General) to show up in his
room and stab a syringe into his good eye, causing this guy with a
Rasputin-like stubborn streak to finally die. Meanwhile the village drunk
stumbles around at night down by the docks and gets himself and sliced and
diced by the townspeople. This makes two murders in the little town of Potters
Bluff and instead of calling in the state police or whomever, Dan continues to
slog through his half-baked investigation. He does stuff like talk to the
motel owner where George/Freddie was staying, getting gossip about his wife
and also finding out that his wife has hidden a book on witchcraft along with a
ceremonial dagger in her underwear drawer (Hey that's better than what you
could have found, bud!).  Dan's wife tells him that she's hiding the book there because she's teaching a
unit on voodoo and stuff to her second grade class. She explains that kids
like creepy stuff and otherwise they'll get bored in her class and won't like
her so much. Dan's problems are only beginning though. His wife not being a
strong Christian is the least of them. Some dumb family comes through town at
night and gets lost. They get directions from the people in the diner and then
someone runs in front of the car causing them to hit a telephone pole. They
end up being pursued by the townspeople and seemingly escape, speeding off into
the night. Later their car is fished out of the bay, but no bodies are
recovered. Dan's wife does have a new boy in class though... Dan, himself has
an encounter when he sees the speeding car go by and puts his breaks on just in
time run over a guy. This guy gets up, grabs his severed arm that's embedded
in Dan's grill and runs off into the night. While all this crazy crap is going
on and Dan is busy investigating two murders, his wife, Jan asks him to drop
some film off at the Photohut and then gets pissed when he forgets to do it.
Just because you have a double homicide doesn't mean that everyone else's life
doesn't go on, Mister! The strangeness continues as he finds out that the
tissue he scraped off his grill has been dead several months and then
the motel owner shows up claiming to have seen the photographer working at
the
filling station. He rolls over there, gets some pictures and sends them off to
St. Louis and eventually gets a positive identification that Freddie who worked
at the service station is really the dead photographer. After a pit stop to
his wife's school to get some clues (he listens in on her lecture about voodoo
and how the dead are controlled by the master when he cuts their hearts out and
hides it) he decides that it's about time to dig up that grave where the
photographer is buried (they don't wait very long to find out who these people
are - they die, they get buried in Potters Bluff, and then they dig them up to
I.D. them). The casket is empty except for something small wrapped up in
a bunch of rags. You can feel the tension mount as Dan unwraps one rag after
another and even though you're pretty sure about what he'll find, it still is a
bit of a start to actually see it. Somewhere during all this, Dan remembers to pick up the film (boy is he whipped)
and decides to check it out. He sits there in shock as it unspools and he sees
his wife pumping another man (Oh no!) then he notices that she stabs this guy
over and over in the back (Say it isn't so!) and finally he sees that the whole
town was watching and taking pictures of everything (I'll never be able to show
my face at church again!). The funeral director is the next stop. Dan has
learned that the director (Willy Wonka's Jack Albertson) has a bit of a shady
past and when he confronts him, he learns the truth about everything. This
includes the truth about his wife and it turns out that she's been dead all
along
and that she was the funeral guy's first project. Dan shoots the funeral
director and leaves. He goes to the graveyard where his wife has finally
figured out that she is in fact just a smelly dead corpse and now wants to be
buried. The whole town shows up to photograph the event and Dan finally ends
up with one final confrontation with the doctor and one final, obvious shock
ending. This one is pretty creepy in its set up and only starts to lose steam
as its lackluster secrets are revealed. Many things about the story remain as
hazy as the mist that seems to perpetually hang over every scene (Lucio, is
that you?). Is the whole town afflicted with this? Just part of it? How do
the townspeople react to all these people dying mysteriously and then showing
up again? We know that it freaked out the motel owner. That can't be the
first time that's ever happened. How is it that some people who are dead are
in on it and others aren't? Am I really to believe that a funeral director has
figured out how to raise the dead through voodoo because no one can ever
appreciate his artwork in reconstructing bodies since they all end up buried?
And what's with everyone taking pictures all the time? If you could raise the
dead like this, would you really just be content to be a kindly old funeral
director in a podunk town? If you want everyone to see your work, shouldn't
you tell them these people are dead or at least do it in some town where almost
everyone isn't dead? I guess complaining about the problems with plot in
movies like this is tantamount to complaining that your talking dog never says
anything you want to hear. I don't really know what that means, but it would
be neat to have a talking dog, wouldn't it? Anyway, this movie delivers a fair
number of jolts (chiefly due to loud music) and good seaside atmosphere.
Farentino is a solid lead, though everyone else in the movie has little depth
(the funeral director is reduced to making whiney speeches about how no one
appreciates his skills). There is also a good dose of gore here for those of
you that care about stuff like that. These effects are pretty good and used
well throughout the film. This is a good movie that entertains you and keeps
you wondering what is the source of the craziness that goes on. The let down of
an ending and the holes in the story ignored for drama's and suspense's sake
keep it from being any better than just a good shocker.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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