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 Richard Boone plays a cemetery director who, when he puts pins on the map of
empty graves, the graves' owners die. This drives Boone crazy and "real
estate prices sky-high." Is there something else at work here though? It
turns out that "digging for answers uncovers a most horrifying climax." They
call Boone a "rugged Hollywood leading man" and note that co-star Theodore
Bikel was a folk singer. Leonard Maltin is quoted yet again. Is he the only
guy
to ever see any of these MGM Midnite Movies? 1957, 80 minutes, DVD
It's always the old Scottish caretaker. I've made it through more tight
scrapes than I can count by just reminding myself over and over to keep an eye
on the geezer with the thick accent. So often in life we ignore the losers who
have somehow managed to keep their pud jobs for years and years. These are the
type that pretty much exist solely for their job. Frequently they live at
their job site (you know - those handymen that have a room right there at the
factory, the warehouse, or the school) and have forsaken the normal aspects of
life like family, girls, and cars so that they can continue to keep the lawns
well manicured. This preoccupation with their occupation can cause some
problems when someone is dumb enough to try and put these old goats out to
pasture. Often times, it will result in something snapping inside of them and
an obsessed employee rapidly turns into a disgruntled employee. Though this
movie does a good job of disguising this aspect of its story, the movie is
basically just a tale about this old dude who gets "retired" by Richard Boone
of Have Gun Will Travel fame and goes a wee bit overboard in objecting to that decision. Boone plays
Robert Kraft, a businessman that has been elected to be the chairman of the
local cemetery by a bunch of other local businessmen. Kraft doesn't much like
the idea of having to hang out one afternoon a month at the local graveyard
because he has too much other work to do, but he is convinced by his uncle that
it is the decent thing to do and would get him some brownie points with the
community at large. Besides no one has ever turned down the chairmanship
before - it just isn't done. Reluctantly and with some degree of poor attitude
, Kraft agrees to be the chairman and heads out to the cemetery to fire the old
caretaker. His name is Andy and he's been the caretaker for some forty years.
He really likes his job (we know this because he's always singing these
atrocious Scottish folk songs when he's engraving tombstones and also because
he starts killing people) and he agrees to find his replacement (yeah, I'll bet
he'll really be busting his ass to do that). Why Kraft didn't just put an ad
in the paper or go down to the homeless shelter and get someone is beyond
me.  The movie is pretty smart about this "old Andy gets the axe" story line, because
they present it in such a fashion that it doesn't get a lot of play or drama at
the beginning. Kraft is nice about it and tells Andy they'll be paying him a
full pension for life which will be same as the pay he was making before, but
that he wont have to work anymore. Shoot, I don't know what Andy's problem is.
Getting paid to sit home in your trailer for doing nothing but watching The View and trying out those new Oreos I seen advertised (something about two flavors
in the center instead of just the white flavor) sounds righteous to me. If
Andy had a beef with getting put out to pasture, he should have said something
to Kraft, even if it was something along the lines of "aye, you blighter! If'n
ye fire me, I'll be tha bane o'your existence, ya gomer!" or something like
that. I will say that at this point, I began to believe that the highly
overrated Groundskeeper Willie from The Simpsons was probably based on this guy and it made me wonder why there wasn't a
Richard Boone-inspired character, but I suppose I'll have to content myself
with the fact that sportswriter John Feinstein resembles a puffier version of
Boone. I kept waiting for Kraft to weigh in with his take on the Allen
Iverson/Larry Brown feud. With Groundskeeper Andy pink slipped, we meet a
couple of Kraft's buddies, the newly married (and soon to be dead) Drexels.
They're cruising by the cemetery to get their burial plots (how's that for
optimism) and when they leave, Kraft begins farting around with the map of the
cemetery. Andy explains to Kraft that all the black pins represent customers
that are already in the ground, while the white pins are customers that have
bought their plots ahead of time. Guess who decides that as long as I've got
this boring old cemetery job, I'll start messing about with people's pins?
Kraft puts two black pins in the Drexel's plots instead of white ones and
before you know it, the Drexels have themselves a nasty car wreck and become
the first customers on Kraft's watch.  Kraft is a little bit uneasy by this bit of coincidence and does what any of us
would do in that situation - he sticks another black pin into someone's plot
that isn't full up with their rotting corpse yet. Adios, Mr. Isham! This guy,
who appeared to be in the doll repair business (probably okay that he bought it
early, those doll repair guys have a nasty habit of being a bit psycho
themselves - see Attack Of The Puppet People for instance) suddenly drops over dead. When Kraft gets the bad news (What?
You mean my Grumpy Bear Carebear won't be fixed for another month?) he really
starts thinking that maybe he has some sort of supernatural power through the
cemetery map, where he's able to do a little voodoo on someone's plot and cause
their death. He probably also thought this because of the brief narration at
the beginning about how some men may have powers beyond those that science can
explain. He talks to his buddy at the newspaper, who doesn't think there's any
big deal and Kraft also bothers a homicide detective, but everyone writes Kraft
off as having sniffed too much embalming fluid. Kraft also has a girlfriend of
some sort and she's only in few scenes. I didn't really understand what her
point was and she played little part in the story, except that it gave someone
for Kraft to snap at so that we could see that this whole map situation was
getting to him. He talks to his uncle and his uncle gets him to put a pin in
someone else's space to prove that it is all a bunch of bunk and that guy of
course drops over dead. Kraft is really starting to spaz out now and the
committee decides that they need a little more proof before they can officially
decide if they have a haunted map or if Kraft has some kind of God-like power
over life and death. They hold a little vote and decide that Kraft should put
black pins in all of their plots on the map. Kraft is a bit reluctant, but the
committee has voted and what can he do, right? Uh, well, you could quit that
stupid job and also quit monkeying around with your devil map, but that
wouldn't make a lot of sense would it? These idiots get their black pins
tacked into the map (I believe that this was what Darwin had in mind when he
used the term "natural selection.") and Kraft hangs out at the cemetery waiting
for everyone to drop dead. 
It ain't too long, before Andy has more business chipping away the names of the
newly departed (at least they already had their plots bought) but Kraft's uncle
hasn't bought it yet. He was one of the committee members that Kraft marked
for death on the map and the uncle comes to see Kraft and they have a little
confrontation about something or other and then he leaves. Kraft calls the
fuzz and tells them to keep an eye on the old man so that he won't keel over.
About two hours later he talks to the cops and they don't know what happened to
him. Kraft goes outside and finds out that dear old Uncle never made it out of
the cemetery! Now, Kraft is besides himself as he realizes that seven or eight
deaths is a little bit much for coincidence and there are some cool scenes with
him at the map and the map seems to get larger and larger until it fills the
whole room and dwarfs Kraft. Kraft figures out that maybe since when he
changes white
pins to black, it causes to people to die, then perhaps if he changes black
pins to white
it will cause them to live again. In a very effectively photographed and
scored (the music is very good throughout actually) scene he switches the pins
of those people that he's just killed and puts the white ones in their place.
Then I guess he prepares himself for the resulting zombie attack, because he
closes up the cemetery office and starts a fire in the center of it to keep
himself warm throughout the night. In the morning he wakes up and practically
chokes to death on all the smoke that has built up inside. I guess starting a
fire in the middle of a closed off room and just letting it burn for eight
hours is some kind of health hazard. He stumbles outside and begins to look at
the graves of the people that he marked with white pins and sees as he rushes
through cemetery from grave to grave that they've all been dug up and are
empty. Sometime during all this pin pushing excitement the cops have shown up
and tricked Kraft into putting a pin into a guy's plot who is staying in Paris,
France. The police say this is an effort to prove that Kraft is just a stupid
dope and that nothing can happen to some smelly dork in France.
Kraft is peeved that he's been forced to kill another person and is really
distraught when he gets a call from the guy's wife saying that he is dead. Andy finds out that this dude is dead and gets in Kraft's face yelling at him
that his puny power hasn't caused nobody's death and that it was Andy that did
it all, scaring people to death somehow and that he was the one that dug up the
bodies and moved them from their graves. He did it all because he was getting
fired and he really liked the job. The police show up and somehow Andy
himself has died from fright. There is some question still in Kraft's
mind about whether Andy really acted on his own or because Kraft and the map
had some kind of power (I mean, what was the point of Andy digging all those
people up? If he didn't, Kraft would just think he had the power to kill.) I
also wondered what the whole point of Andy's plan was. Just because those
people were dead and/or Kraft quit his job, did he think that their successors
were going to let a crazy old coot stay on as the groundskeeper? This was a
decent
little movie that played at first like an episode of The Twilight Zone, but without the really cool ending. It seemed quite unbelievable that Andy
had been able to kill everyone, especially since the police had figured out the
cause of death on all these people was always something different. How could
Andy fake a car wreck, heart attack, and brainfart in all these different
people? Oh and it turns out that the whole thing with the guy in Paris was a
work by the cops to get the real killer come out of the shadows. Matlock
couldn't have done it better. Boone is solid in his role as the guy befuddled
by his apparent curse and does a good job unravelling, though if this was
really happening, he could simply stop pushing pins into the map to make
everything stop. The movie is moodily photographed with a few nice effects
(the big map, the couple of pull-back shots they use to close out some scenes)
and it was especially nice to see a real cemetery used in one of these movies
instead of those bogus sets with all the dry ice, styrofoam tombs and fake
bushes. The ending is obviously a let down, pretty much dispatching with any
supernatural explanation and substituting an equally implausible, but far less
scary "real world" reason. Still, seeing Paladin in action is always a good
thing and this movie isn't a bad way to waste about an hour half late at
night. This is about as scary and atmospheric a movie about a guy staring at a
map full of pins as you're likely to find anywhere.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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