BURIAL GROUND (1981) (AKA: The Nights of Terror, Zombi 3) A professor doing research on Etruscan black magic releases a horde of zombies that descend on a nearby country estate. In a scene very reminiscent of Fulci’s Zombie, one of the maggot-infested corpses reaches out of the ground and attacks a couple having sex in a graveyard . More people in the midst of sexual escapades are interrupted by the zombies—until one of the cast tries destroying them with a gun but ends up getting eviscerated. The remaining survivors lock themselves in the house but underestimate the intelligence of the living dead, which use axes and scythes to smash their way in. The professor eventually turns up as a zombie and makes lunch out of one of the humans by ripping the guy’s guts out and eating them. The last of the breathing characters seek help at a neighboring monastery only to find the place crawling with the hungry undead—Karin Well has her nipple bitten off in the film’s most memorable scene. Burial Ground is an incredibly idiotic but nicely atmospheric entry in the Italian zombie sweepstakes that makes no pretenses for being anything other than a full-throttle splatter epic. B (Currently streaming on Tubi.)
DAWN OF THE MUMMY (1981) The last ten minutes of this movie are fast-paced and exciting. It’s too bad the rest of the film is a waste of time. In Ancient Egypt, a high priestess places a curse on the tomb of a powerful pharaoh. In modern times, a group of fashion photographers and models on a magazine shoot run into a tomb raider (George Peck) whose discovery of the cursed burial chamber has brought the pharaoh and his servants back from the dead as bloodthirsty zombies. These bandaged stiffs are pretty lively for 5,000-year-olds, and they go about tearing people to pieces and gorging on the leftovers. There’s a sequence where the mummies crawl out of their sandy graves in the sun-bleached desert that gives the film some much-needed visual imagery. Why it takes over an hour for the majority of the gory action to materialize is a question the writers of this Dawn of the Dead cash-in never answer. I’m assuming it’s to pad out the endless 92 minutes of this clinker. C– (Currently streaming on Tubi.)
THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD (1985) A weaponized toxic gas created by the military—and secreted away in canisters in the basement of a medical supply warehouse—is accidentally released by a couple of meatheads. The gas reanimates the place’s medical cadavers and eventually seeps into the nearby cemetery, turning the corpses into an army of hungry zombies. The characters in this movie discuss how to kill a zombie, directly referencing George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and the idea of destroying its brain. But unlike your typical walking dead, the zombies here can’t be put down by demolishing the brain—or by any other means. This proves bad news for a group of punk rock teens partying at an abandoned graveyard just as its rotting residents decide to do a little partying of their own. Abandoning the rules created by Romero (and subsequently used in every zombie movie), Return of the Living Dead‘s fresh take on the subgenre not only makes for an exciting film but creates an idea that eventually seeps into the zombie pop culture lexicon: the brain-eating ghoul. Smart, funny, and scary, Return of the Living Dead is in many ways the definitive zombie movie of the eighties. Sorry, George. Followed by sequels. A– (Currently streaming on Pluto TV and Tubi.)
ZOMBIE LAKE (1981) A woman skinny dipping in a French country lake is attacked by a green-faced zombie that emerges from below the water. This scene is supposed to evoke the fear we felt at the beginning of Jaws when a helpless swimmer is terrorized by the shark. Judging from the amount of close-ups of the woman swimming nude from below, the only thing you’ll feel is that director Jean Rollin mistook this production for a softcore porno. Another green zombie arises from the lake and kills a passerby. All of this is happening because, ten years earlier, German soldiers were massacred during WWII by the locals, and their bodies dumped in the lake. This places the majority of the present-day action in 1955, yet the fashions and cars are straight out of the seventies. We’re offered even more gratuitous T&A in the form of a women’s basketball team stripping nude and going for a swim before being submerged by zombies. The townsfolk have enough and band together to lure the walking dead into a burning mill. Technical goofs include a zombie chomping a woman’s neck but producing no wound, the image of a crew member in a mirror, a soldier’s jackboots are removed before being drowned but he returns later with a new set of shoes, and another solider is shot in the head but the action is out of sync with the sound of gunfire. The underwater sequences were obviously filmed in a pool dressed in seaweed. Julian de Laserna stepped in to direct additional scenes, resulting in the credit “A.J. Lazer.” Zombie Lake is often called the worst zombie movie of all time. You can’t argue with reason. D (Currently unavailable.)