Dead & Buried

REVIEW
The rosy hue of nostalgia might often indicate otherwise, but truthfully, the early-80’s were not always the best time to be a fan of American horror films. Unless you were wildly enamored with post-Halloween, post-Friday the 13th slasher movies in which hordes of partying teens were inevitably picked off by an asthmatic masked psychopath, you were often out of luck. Dead and Buried, however, emerged as one of the most stylish and inventive genre films of the era, an eerie and imaginative shocker that generates suspense and terror largely through mood and atmosphere—but yet never shies away from delivering the gruesome gore effects and shocks so popular in genre productions of the 80’s. While ostensibly a “zombie” film, writers Donald Shusett and Dan O’Bannon (the scripters of Alien) and director Gary Sherman (responsible for the equally remarkable British horror cult fave Raw Meat) treat the material with a sensibility unlike any other horror film of the period, balancing a surreal, nightmarish quality with a note of jet-black humor. A small town sheriff (James Farentino) is alarmed to find a series of grisly murders occurring in his sleepy Potter’s Bluff—and is understandably even more alarmed when it seems that some of these victims have been spotted around town, back among the living. As he investigates, he begins to suspect everyone from his schoolteacher wife, to the town’s sinister funeral home director (Jack Albertson in his final role). Ultimately, he discovers that he is closer to the unnatural secret of Potter’s Bluff than he could have ever imagined… Sherman brings a uniquely old-fashioned quality to the depiction of this sleepy seaside community (the film occasionally resembles the previous year’s John Carpenter film The Fog in its mood), which contrasts effectively with the mayhem on display (courtesy of some excellent early Stan Winston effects). One of the most underrated and memorable American horror films of the period, Dead and Buried is presented here by Blue Underground in a deluxe special edition with a wealth of retrospective featurettes and no less than three commentary tracks (!).