Touches You

Am I Missing Something?

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

One of a slew of Edgar Allen Poe adaptations released in the late 1980s/early 1990s by cheapo producer Harry Alan Towers, which also included THE HOUSE OF USHER and THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM. To be kind, we could have done without these films but they did offer something in the way of atmosphere and also included ageing movie stars overacting as madmen (Oliver Reed, Donald Pleasence, Robert Vaughn to name but three). This one was filmed in South Africa (due to budget costs perhaps?) and is not based on any one Poe story, instead using devices such as bricking up alive and burying alive (really?) from some of the author's stories. BURIED ALIVE is actually not that bad, and it passes the time amiably enough, with occasional flashes of inspiration. However the film is lifted by a single factor which I'll discuss later. Firstly, though, the bad points.The film is incredibly clichéd. Most of the deaths are standard slasher fare - trowel in the head (remember NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD folks? It was innovative there, not here.), a girl getting her hair torn out by a blow dryer gone mad. The main actors in BURIED ALIVE are a group of high school girls, and let's just say that these girls are not the best of actors. All have big '80s hair, all are incredibly obnoxious and seem to have been chosen for their ability to stand around in revealing clothes rather than any depth or insight for their roles. I don't know but I'm pretty much sick and tired of seeing obnoxious American teenagers like these who seem to permeate every single horror film of the 1980s and 1990s. The main heroine too is a peroxide blonde who is annoyingly bubble headed and screams a lot. I find this kind of portrayal sexist and hey, I'm not even a girl! However bad the acting on show here, it's countered by enlivened performances from three stars whose names should mean something even to those who are not horror fans: these are John Carradine, Donald Pleasence and Robert Vaughn. Carradine has only a tiny role as a wheelchair bound, long haired psycho but he's pretty effective in a lunatic, giggling madly kind of way. Interestingly this was Carradine's last performance in a film before he died of natural causes, the film is dedicated to his memory accordingly. Also on hand we have Donald Pleasence, another actor nearing the end of his career. While his performance isn't as over the top as in THE HOUSE OF USHER, he's pretty cool as a weirdo doctor bloke who wears a spooky toupee and eats from a bag of sweets all the time. In fact his role is a lot of fun and he is his usual creepy self. However Carradine and Pleasence have relatively minor roles whereas the brunt of the overacting lies on Robert Vaughn, the Man from UNCLE himself! Although Vaughn starts off as a dignified scientist, by the end he is an axe wielding maniac! Yes, this is the only film which has the dubious distinction of Robert Vaughn running amok with an axe. And it certainly is a sight to see.Apart from Vaughn's frenzied performance, there is a palpable air of Gothic menace hinted at in a few scenes (although not nearly enough), especially in the dungeons below the school. The nightmare scenes with the bulging wall are also good, the special effects here are tremendous. Ants feature prominently in the horrific areas, and they do pretty much make your spine tingle, I hate insects and their use here is an effective one, creating real feelings of repulsion. There is an excellent scene where two dead characters are buried with only their heads showing, and Janet finds the rotted heads crawling with ants! Another classroom scene is not for the squeamish and involves sheep's eyeballs and yep, you guessed it, more ants. Altogether this film is quite average and nothing special, yet it's not as bad as it could have been and it is elevated by Robert Vaughn's hysterical performance.

Janet (Karen Witter) is the new biology teacher at Ravenscroft, a school for troubled young girls (including former porn star Ginger Lynn Allen and debuting Nia Long) run by Gary (Robert Vaughn). This odd, isolated place seems to bring out the worst in Janet as she keeps having hallucinations about hordes of ants, a pulsating brick wall, and a arm that keeps grabbing her. Staff quack Dr. Schaeffer (Donald Pleasence) tells her she just might be seeing different layers of reality (!?!). To make matters worse, the student population keeps dwindling as girls are offed by some guy in a mask. You know you are in for some true class when the opening credits misspell Poe's name (as "Edgar Allen Poe"). Another of Towers' South African lensed Poe "adaptations," this has about as much to do with his short story "Buried Alive" as Fred Olen Ray's THE HAUNTING FEAR does. I'd probably rate this one above USHER just because director Gerard Kikoine (EDGE OF SANITY) manages to pull off some interesting camera moves. He isn't concerned with such trickery in terms of plot though as the villain is exactly who you think it is. Oddly enough, the T&A factor is limited to one scene and former X-rated queen Ginger Lynn does not get nude. Arnold Vosloo and Bill Butler have small supporting roles. John Carradine has 30 seconds of screen time and this was to be his last film. The end credits dedicate it to his memory. Poor John.

Buried Alive (1990)* (out of 4) This was one of three Edgar Allan Poe movies to be filmed in South Africa and while none of the three are very highly remembered today this one here at least can say it features the last screen appearance by John Carradine who would die of mysterious circumstances shortly after finishing work on this. While Carradine had a few others films to be released after this one, all of them were just footage shot by Fred Olen Ray in the early 80s.A teacher (Karen Witter) goes to a school for troubled women where she finds that things aren't all they seem to be. Not only does she have to put up with constant fights between the girls but she soon realizes that they are terrified and one by one they start to runaway. Being a horror film you know that they haven't actually ran away but instead someone in a mask is taking them into the basement and burying them alive. The principle (Robert Vaughn) and doctor (Donald Pleasence) at the school might know a few things as well. BURIED ALIVE is a pretty poor movie that doesn't work on many levels and today is only of interest for it being Carradine's swan song and there's some mild interest in the fact that Harry Alan Towers produced this with Menahem Golan who was just out at Cannon. This film is pretty much like the typical junk you'd find at rental stores back in the day as we get a confusing story, horrible acting and of course a little gore thrown in so that horror fans would have something to talk about. The film borrows from Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado", "The Black Cat" and "The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether" to name just a few. I'm really not sure what the filmmakers intended but the story is all over the place as it's never quite clear if they're wanting some women-in-peril slasher flick or if they want it to be some sort of psychological terror. The psychological stuff is poorly done and the ultra-cheap acting doesn't help matters much. The supporting group who play the "teenage" girls are just downright awful and their cussing and fighting at one another is downright hilarious and it's these unintentional laughs that help keep the film moving. The special effects are all rather bland but you have to give them credit because one scene has a girl trying to curl her hair with a blender, which ends up scalping her to death. Vaughn is clearly just picking up a paycheck but you can't blame him too much. Pleasence at least adds some nice comic timing and manages to get a few laughs. Witter isn't too bad but then again this isn't Hamlet. The great Carradine has very little to do here and only appears in a few sequences terrorizing the teacher. BURIED ALIVE was coming in just as the horror-on-VHS cycle was starting to cool off and you could point your finger at films like this for the reason why it began to die off. The film is a complete mess from start to finish and there's very little to recommend.

They've got a lot of nerve to call that "Edgar Allan Poe's buried alive".It does not look like the writer's works to the slightest extent -unless the presence of a black cat counts-Located in a luxury reform school for girls (?) ,this piece of garbage casts Robert Vaughn as the director and D.PLeasance as a doctor(?)A young female teacher arrives:she is to teach here-but we never see her working or so little.In the basements ,a man with a Ronald Reagan mask(??) is burying alive the girls who try to escape.This is a completely failed horror film,borrowing now from"shining",now from Dario Argento's "suspiria" and "phenomena".This is a cock-and -bull story with the obligatory final trick:it's not over when you think it is,now roll on "Buried alive 2" :but the movie,proving that sometimes there's justice in the universe ,was a flop,preserving the spectators from it.It's the movie scenarists that should be buried alive.