Video Nasty #33 : Dead & Buried

Synopsis: After a series of grisly accidents, Sheriff Gillis suspects foul play. As the accidents continue the dead and buried are inexplicably sighted around town. Welcome to Potter's Bluff : A new way of life!

Dead & Buried is by far the biggest budget movie on the list, and accordingly it's team is also of the highest calibre. Co-writer Dan O'Bannon worked on Alien and went on to write one my favourite zombie movies, Return of the Living Dead. O'Bannon was joined by the his co-writer on Alien as a producer, as celebrated/exploited on the poster. Horror legend Stan Winston (Aliens, Predator, The Terminator) also provides special effects for many of the film's 'accidents'.

What they and director Gary Sherman created is a tonally-unbalanced yet surprising, gory and darkly funny original movie that deserves to be better known than it is. This isn't helped by the lousy DVD transfer; many scenes are too dark and most of the audio is time shifted as if all the actors are performing an elaborate ventriloquist routine. Spoilers ahead.

The plot itself owes somewhat to Invasion of the Body Snatchers (feel free to pick any version), although in this case the alien plants are replaced by a nutty mortician who can use makeup, embalming fluids and a bit of voodoo to quite literally bring corpses back to life. Unlike Invasion, there isn't any  subtext (lack of freedom, communism, blah blah blah), instead the plot is milked for all its paranoid and gloriously gory potential.

And god bless Stan Winston is this gory. Much like the film's tone the effects vary, ranging from vicious realism to intentional silliness. The most memorable scenes are head-meets-acid (not very well done, but A+ for effort), a needle being jammed into a completely incapacitated burn victim's eye (ewwww!) and the utterly insane prehumous embalming. Things get a little silly when Sheriff Gillis' collision with an undead results in a dismembered hand getting stuck in his car's grill, the hand still wriggling like Ash's bird-flicking paw in Evil Dead 2.

And this alludes to probably the only major issue with the film. In parts the film is deadly serious yet as the admittedly daft plot gathers momentum it feels like there's some resistance to embrace the potential for humour (unlike the similarly gory and funny Strange Behaviour).

Regardless, Dead & Buried is worth a watch if only for the third act's plot twists that are so good they'd make Shyamalan jealous. It's films like this that make my idiotic year long movie-night worth it.