Wonderfully offbeat film!

terrible... so disappointed.

One of my all time favorites.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

In a remote mountainside house, a group of friends arriving for a weekend of fun find the house under attack from some type of strange walking corpses unearthed from a tomb nearby and realize they are trapped in the house with the living dead forcing the ever-dwindling party to escape.This is one of the better Italian zombie films out there. Frankly, one of the best aspects of this one is the really fast pace to this, which also means that you are rarely bored with this film as something is always happening. It gets started off almost immediately with the opening resurrection in the catacombs that takes great advantage of the underground catacombs. There are also several great scenes in here that really work, with the resurrection of the zombie underneath a patch of grass being really spine- tingling as it's a slow, drawn-out sequence that leads into the fantastic battling throughout the courtyard as well as the fun scenes in the garage. Once inside the house, we are treated to some more highlights in the assault to break into the house, the first attacks on the people inside, and the attack in the bedroom are tense scenes that drive up the scare factor of the film due to the fast pace here. Generating some creepiness to the attacks every now and then, as well as the series of assaults they undertake here throughout the house that really delivers some terrifying moments due to the relentlessness of the zombie attacks. As well, the film has some of the best-looking zombies ever seen in the genre, going beyond looking rotten as there are several that have their faces reduced to near skeletons with small amounts of flesh on the skull. Some have barely any skin on there, and with their grotesque faces, they strike quite an imaginative and scary look upon first viewing with their tattered clothes, shuffling walk, and the very creative makeup used on their faces to create a nearly-perfect zombie. Even better, the film utterly wallows in a decidedly sleazy atmosphere that comes off quite fun here with the sexual shenanigans as well as the overtly sexualized behavior here including one of the most legendary sequences in the genre. Alongside the relentless gore on both sides with great, brutal deaths against human and zombies, these here are more than enough to hold it up over the few minor flaws. The main issue is the sheer and utter stupidity displayed by the characters who continually display bad decision-making to keep themselves in danger or failing to recognize ways out of the situation that would keep them alive. This happens frequently and it does become somewhat of a sore spot with this one with several scenes easily able to be rectified by characters not being so dim- witted. Also, this movie destroys some zombie laws in a couple areas by having them grab utensils such as pitchforks and saws and actually using them in certain scenes which is something that may upset true zombie fans. While there are a couple scenes that are clearly homages to other movies of the time, and they are spotted pretty easily, they don't distract too much overall.Rated UR/NC-17: Extreme Graphic Violence, Full Nudity, incestuous scenes and several brief sex scenes.

If you thought that ZOMBIE FLESH EATERS was a low budget, poorly-made film, then wait until you see this rip-off! Andrea Bianchi disposed of a story entirely and instead hired Gino de Rossi (son of Giannetto) to create as many gut-wrenchingly gruesome moments as he possibly could on the film's poor budget. The plot consists of a group of people hiding out in a variety of locations - a mansion, a monastery, a model storeroom (!) and being picked off one by one by a pack of unruly zombies which have risen from the local caves after an interfering professor accidentally re-awoke their corpses! Just about everything in this movie is inept and that's what makes it fun. The lighting is almost non-existent; scenes are either bright or dark with nothing in between, no shadows for suggestion or anything. The dubbing is particularly stilted with inappropriate voices for the actors and actresses which don't match their characters at all. The sound varies between a laid-back jazz score and some weird computer noises in the zombie scenes which don't have the desired effect. The zombies themselves look pretty mouldy and scary thanks to some good masks and make-up, although you can see human skin in between the joins once too often for my liking. They are also tool users and grab a wide variety of weapons to help with their conquest. Although they are some of the slowest shamblers ever to grace a horror movie, they seem to have no trouble cornering the humans at every stage, at one point disguising themselves as monks to capture an unwilling victim!The movie is full of weird and wonderful characters. The first person we meet is a professor with a huge beard. Upon encountering the zombies, he cries "Stand back - I'm your friend!" Hilarious. The most memorable character of all is 'Michael' a supposed teenage boy actually played by a dwarf actor (why? Was there a shortage of child actors around or would they not allow a child to partake in some of the more adult scenes?) who sniffs a piece of rag and says "Momma! This cloth smells of death!". He also has Oedipal desires which come to a climax in the infamous scene at the conclusion! Another guy shouts "Whatever it is, it's not human!" on his encounter with a zombie - but isn't that obvious? Many scenes explicitly rip-off ZOMBIE FLESH EATERS, like a guy having his leg grabbed while embracing a girl ("Who are you?!"), a zombie rising from the ground, and a scene where a girl is pulled toward a shard of glass and killed. It's genuinely funny throughout, especially in scenes where people just stand and watch the zombies as they come towards them! Hello - you're about to get eaten - don't you think you better do something? Those crazy Italians! Other amusing moments have the zombies setting a man-trap in the garden for their next victim and working as car park attendants! One of them is particularly handy with knives and must have worked in a circus before he died.The setting of the deserted mansion is actually pretty eerie, although again it has been stolen from NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. There's an atmosphere of unease in the sense that a zombie could be lurking behind any door or corner. Of course such few eerie moments as there are, are countered by ludicrous others like the "shooting gallery" scene where a victim repeatedly shotguns the heads of the zombies causing them to explode all over! This causes the rest of the zombies to run off into the woods and return with better weapons next time. One other extremely weird moment has a zombie being thrown over a wall, and for some reason this is filmed in slow-motion. Whatever the intention, the effect is absolutely hilarious.Oddly, the freeze-frame ending actually works in this film; it closes in a downbeat fashion with one victim being shoved into a circular saw blade, the other being artistically surrounded by zombie hands. There's an amusing poem that comes up on screen that talks about the "nigths of terror" and the "profecy of the black spider" - hilarious stuff. And that's the ending of what may be one of the most poorly-made zombie movies out there, but is also one of, if not the, most hilarious with it, although I'm not sure how it would stand up to repeat viewing! Cheesy stuff from pasta-land, to be sure, so don't go in expecting a proper "film", as this is as far as you can get from a mainstream movie.The cheap gut-munching effects are plentiful but hardly realistic, only seen in close up to disguise the fact that its sheep offal or whatever. Most of the blood and gore is poorly done and lacking in realism - Gino obviously didn't inherit his dad's ace makeup talents. Even the nastiest scene - in which a woman has her breast bitten off and eaten - is really schlocky and the film-makers don't even go to the trouble of hiding the model breast that's used. However, at least the movie has a purpose now as a low budget stomach-churner, a bad film come good and a howl for genre lovers. Behold the "nigths" of terror!

The impact that George A. Romero's seminal "Night of the Living Dead" (1968) had on the future of the so-called "zombie film" was so enormous as to practically constitute a sea change. Up until then, in pictures such as "White Zombie" (1932), "Revolt of the Zombies" (1936), "King of the Zombies" (1941), "I Walked With a Zombie" (1943) and even as late as 1966's "The Plague of the Zombies," these creatures had been presented as essentially harmless beings; hypnotized or drugged, living automatons who carried out the commands of their masters. The Romero film transformed the zombies into ravenous gut munchers; the revivified dead, hungry for human flesh. Since "NOTLD," many films have played on this concept with varying success and degrees of imagination, the best of the bunch (such as Romero's five sequels, Lucio Fulci's 1979 homage "Zombie," 2002's "28 Days Later," 2013's "World War Z") tweaking the formula with interesting new twists. And then there's 1981's "Burial Ground: The Nights of Terror," which is seemingly pleased to jettison everything except bloody zombie carnage in the pursuit of a memorable time for the viewer. And for some, I suppose that might just be enough.The film is too easily synopsized. A professor putters around in an Etruscan graveyard and somehow, in a manner never clearly explained, causes the long-entombed dead to rise. Meanwhile, three couples arrive at a nearby villa (actually, the Palazzo Braschi, in Rome) for a holiday, along with the son of one of the women. The newly awakened corpses waste little time in attacking these seven, who are then forced into a siege situation at the villa, along with the residence's maid and butler. And that's pretty much it; on with the blood and guts and mayhem....Writing about "Burial Ground" in his invaluable "Zombie Movies: The Ultimate Guide," Glenn Kay tells us that it is "among the toughest Italian zombie flicks to sit through," and that "there isn't one iota of suspense or terror, and you won't care about or like any of the characters." And while it's difficult to argue with Kay, I yet have a feeling that I enjoyed the film slightly more than he did. Yes, the picture surely has been made for those who do not esteem such elements of the filmmaking craft as character development, logic, explanations, etc. "NOTLD" had a radioactive satellite as a rationale for its zombie plague; this film offers no rationale whatsoever! The viewer, likewise, never learns why or how the zombies cause the villa's lightbulbs to explode, or, for that matter, why the zombies look like half-decomposed cadavers, instead of the skeletons that Etruscans lying in the ground for 2,000+ years would be expected to resemble. And yet, the film still has some definite assets to offer, I feel. For one thing, it is just remarkable how many different types of zombie masks and makeup jobs the film dishes out; Mauro Gavazzi and Rosario Prestopino have done a wonderful job, respectively, in the makeup and masks departments. While screenwriter Piero Regnoli's script is surely nothing to rave about (especially when compared to the work he handed in for 1956's "I Vampiri"), at least he does keep things lively and moving, while director Andrea Bianchi (who had previously impressed me with his work on that sleaziest of gialli, the 1975 Edwige Fenech vehicle "Strip Nude for Your Killer") manages to provide more than a few clever shocks. The largely electronic musical score by Elsio Mancuso complements the already freaky mood nicely, and the gorehounds in the audience will be happy to learn that the body count in the film--among the living AND the living dead--is extremely high. Among the film's various instances of pleasing grossness are the sight of wriggling maggots in many of the zombies' faces; bloody disembowelments and gut-munching sequences that make the one in Romero's 1968 film seem quite tame; zombie immolation; zombie heads being blown off; zombies being speared and gushing some kind of muddy goop; and on and on. And although Kay has claimed that the film is devoid of suspense, there are at least two sequences that this viewer found somewhat nerve shredding. In the first, one of the women is held immobile in a bear trap while one ugly zombie advances on her. And in the second, the maid has her hand impaled on a windowsill while a scythe-wielding zombie slowly climbs up a wall to slice off her head. (Oddly, the zombies are able to use tools, carry weapons, and even unite to use a battering ram!) And then there's the extremely strange matter of that young kid played by Peter Bark, a 25-year-old actor who, because of his dwarfism, resembled a boy half his age. Italian law prohibited youths from appearing in such violent and sexual fare (I guess I didn't mention that the film has a fair amount of nudity and sexual content); thus, the use of someone like Bark. He makes for a very weird "young" character ("one of the creepiest, oddest-looking kids ever captured on film," says Kay), with a marked Oedipus complex for his mother (Mariangela Giordano, the only "name" in the cast). And, in the film's most notorious sequence, his mom learns an invaluable life lesson the hard way: If your young son ever becomes a zombie, do NOT, out of pity, invite him to suckle at your breast! The bottom line: Although Kay has given "Burial Ground" his lowest rating, this viewer found it to be an acceptable, simpleminded entertainment. The film can be seen today via an excellent print on a Media Blasters' Shriek Show DVD, which comes with many fine extras, including modern-day interviews with the very likable producer, Gabriele Cristani, as well as Mariangela herself, who, remarkably, looks much the same as she did some 25 years ago. As does her Evelyn character in the film, during her interview, Mariangela manages to (you should pardon the expression) get quite a bit off her chest....

If ever there were a "so bad it's good" film, then this is it! The plot is bare bones: An archaeologist discovers a crypt containing zombies which then eat him. Meanwhile, three couples visit a villa in the country for a vacation. The crypt in which the archaeologist was killed turns out to be in the grounds of the villa. The couples set into a regimen of heavy petting in the gardens. The zombies wander out and proceed to attack the lovebirds who quickly retreat into the house. The rest just plays itself out.What makes this film a gem is the character of Michael. Played by Peter Bark, an adult midget, we are supposed to accept him as the young child of one of the women. Seeing the dubbed English version only makes Michael seem even weirder. His voice sounds like a girl's and he's given some pretty odd lines; like this one, clutching a rag found on the floor: "Mama, this cloth smells like death." Someone else here pointed out that he looks like a miniature Dario Argento (a pretty weird-looking bloke himself), and he does! One scene in particular suggests why an adult was used rather than a real child. Why that one scene was deemed so essential that the whole movie should be rendered completely unbelievable, I don't know. But thank goodness they ran with it! This movie is just good old-fashioned crud like only the Italians could make in the 70s and 80s. The zombies themselves look pretty good, surprisingly. Except for a couple who look like guys with heavy eye shadow - put in presumably to make up the numbers. Why give them close-ups then? Who knows! Prior to seeing this, Ralphus from "Bloodsucking Freaks" was my favourite horror movie midget. As far as kids in Italian horrors were concerned, it was a toss up between Bob (Giovanni Frezza) from "House by the Cemetery" and Marco (David Colins Jr) from "Schock". But now Peter Bark as Michael wins both categories.