If I haven’t made it readily apparent, I watched a ton of movies as a child. And by ton I mean billions, quite possibly literally. Growing up in Wisconsin I tended to have a lot of free time. Now, unlike the kids of today I spent most of that free time outside.
I created countless games and would spend hours playing them. One of my personal favorites was a version of baseball involving my basketball hoop and a tennis ball. You see I was always the pitcher and the object was to throw the ball into the square of the backboard for a strike, and if the ball hit the rim that was the equivalent of the batter hitting the ball. Trust me, it totally made sense to me and was a blast to play.
But when I would get tired of playing my own personal version of BASEketball I would bike to my local video store and rent a movie. Now it didn’t take long for me to work my way through the giants of the day and I soon began to search out far riskier fare. As an interesting side note, I know have the odd ability of identifying a good two decades worth of movies solely by their cover art, often times coming up with my own idea of what the movie was about based on these images.
As I started finding far more risqué fare and discovered a burgeoning love for Ralph Bakshi, their also was quite a large amount of films that I consciously avoided. Many of them were of the horror variety, with a large number of them being Video Nasties. A Video Nasty, for those who don’t know, is horror film made during the 1980′s that was condemned for its reliance on gore and violence. The public uproar against Video Nasties was so great in the UK that these films were eventually banned. These were the 80′s equivalent of torture porn, but with whomever the British equivalent of Tipper Gore leading the censorship charge. Now I have spent many years analyzing why I never dared to watch these movies while I was growing up at have come to several conclusions.
Now I didn’t hit my teens until 1987, so for much of the 80′s I was fairly young and naive. I don’t think it was an altogether bad idea that I didn’t subject myself to such psyche scarring horrors as Cannibal Holocaust inevitably would have caused. While I liked horror films, I simply preferred to stick to genre mash-ups and ridiculous science fiction films rather then scare me silly. But I have also discovered that evidently, for much of the 80′s I was a pussy.
You see most video nasties are actually pretty tame outside of their lurid cover art. These were ridiculously low budget productions that didn’t even have the budget for special effects, let alone decent acting talent or coherent scripts. So while some of these films like the aforementioned Cannibal Holocaust or Last House on the Left is best viewed by people old enough to vote, plenty of others like The Driller Killer are laughably bad and of no threat to anyone.
But along with the Video Nasties that worked on both ends of the spectrum, their were numerous films that fell under this umbrella that were operating with goals far greater then simply showing plenty of naked flesh and sloshing buckets of blood onto every frame. Dead & Buried just happened to be one of Video Nasties that had more going on then the naysayers ever took the time to discover.
Dead & Buried is about a small town sheriff caught up investigating a recent rash of bizarre murders in the New England town of Potter’s Bluff. But in an interesting twist, each one of the victims begins to resurface in town, seemingly inoculated into small town life. And while the killer’s are revealed quite early on, it is a mystery as to who is masterminding this nefarious plot.
Dead & Buried doesn’t take long to delve in the type of behavior that would invoke the title Video Nasty with an opening scene that features an impromptu photo shoot that quickly devolves into a lurid affair that culminates in the local townsfolk beating up the photographer and ultimately burning him alive. And while the scene is most definitely violent, it isn’t gory in the slightest as the camera routinely cuts away before anything to graphic can be revealed.
Dead & Buried maintains this relatively demure sensibility throughout much of the film, focusing more on creating mood rather then shocks. In one outstanding scene, as a family searches an abandoned house for someone to aid them, several antagonists can be viewed through the windows as the casually stalk the unaware family. The viewer is perfectly aware that the family is in danger and the sense of dread builds throughout the scene, with several moments that seem perfect for a scare, before the menace finally breaks through its levee to terrorize the family. For a film that had such a notorious reputation for glorifying gratuitous gore, the scene is remarkably restrained and focused.
But this isn’t to say that Dead & Buried completely ignores the gore or cheap shocks. There are a few instances of cheap jump scares, and a fun facial reconstruction sequence that has aged quite well. There is also a fantastic death scene that involves a man having acid injected into his sinuses. But as far as the typical horror film goes, Dead & Buried is relatively tame, as it is content to stick with its mystery fueled plot then try and overreach to satisfy the gore hounds in attendance.
One of the more enjoyable aspects of the film is the rather impressive casting. Barry Corbin and Robert Englund both have important minor roles. James Farantino, who I only know from Blue Thunder, stars as the over-acting lead, while Melody Anderson, of the ingenious Manimal, is his beautiful and eccentric witchcraft loving wife. But the biggest coup is casting Jack Albertson as the mortician Dobbs. Albertson is probably best known for his role as Grandpa Joe in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and Dobbs is a brilliant bit of casting against type. Dobbs is quite the odd duck, with his passion for reconstructing bodies and his quirky personality trait of sleeping in coffins.
It isn’t difficult to figure out why Dead & Buried hasn’t become a more well known film to the movie going public, as mysteries with a smattering of explicit gore isn’t exactly a popular genre of films. Dead & Buried is a bit too risqué for the standard mystery fan, while far too tame for horror and gore fans, making Dead & Buried a bit of the odd man out. While Dead & Buried isn’t the greatest of films, if you enter into it without any preconceived notions of what a Video Nasty should be, it will certainly entertain you.
