ZomBlog Review: "Dead and Buried"

“Dead and Buried”
1981
U.S.
Stars: James Farentino, Melody Anderson, and Jack Albertson
Writer: Screenplay by Ronald Shusett and Dan O’Bannon
Dir: Gary A. Sherman
94 minutes

Nothing pleases me more than to stumble onto something others had discovered and hailed as a classic before it wound up in my hands. While I must say at the outset that I knew this was not exactly zombie fodder, its reputation demanded I take a look.

And I am glad I did.

“Dead and Buried” is what I would call a great episode of “The Twilight Zone.” It plays out very much like that. The film opens with a photographer on a secluded beach (passing by a sign welcoming him to “Potter’s Bluff — A New Way of Living”), and finding a more than willing and attractive subject in a young blonde. Within a few moments, he is beset upon by a horde of old men and women, even the blonde herself. He’s strung up, tied to a pole, and burned alive. Later, a tow truck driver (Freddy fricken’ Krueger himself Robert Englund, prior to his “V” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street” days) and Sheriff Dan Gillis (Farentino) examine a car wreck, where, they find none other than the torched photographer — very much alive and screaming.

The sheriff suspects that things are not what they seem and begins investigating the accident involving the out-of-towner, inquiring with the local coroner, Dobbs (a splendid performance by Albertson, who won an Oscar in 1968 for “The Subject Was Roses” but was probably better known as Grandpa Joe in “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” or "The Man" in "Chico and The Man" TV series; his last big screen performance was this film). Albertson’s performance is low-key but incredibly charismatic and stands out above the others (even though all are very solid).

As the film moves forward, the audience starts noticing that some people appeared to have died — but are now walking around and working in the town as other people in different occupations.

As the sheriff delves deeper into a few other mysterious out-of-towner deaths, the secret of Potter’s Bluff is revealed and the film ends with a nice twist — not one that you don’t see coming, but a very satisfying one all the same.

Romero Rules Followed: None at all

Gore factor: Moderate, despite some real attempts

Zombies or Wannabees? Wannabees

Classic, fine, or waste of time: Classic, but not in the zombie sense

Additional comments: While the film featured a lot of great performances (and included some early effects work by Stan Winston) and is a satisfying horror film, it does not belong in the zombie canon. It is closely married to “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” And, it holds its own in that vein. I mean, come on, it was made by the same team that unleashed “Alien” onto the world, and later “The Return of the Living Dead.” It’s worth a look. Just don’t look for flesh-eating zombies.

— ROB

Zombie or Wannabe: Pod People

Don Siegel’s 1956 B-movie masterpiece Invasion of the Body Snatchers is almost the perfect Rorschach blot of a film. You can make equally compelling cases that the film is either a parable of the feared Communist infiltration of the United States that strangled the country at the time or the mindless conformity being demanded of Red Baiters like Joe McCarthy and his assistant Robert Kennedy who saw political hay to be made from the national unease.
But I propose you could also read the film’s central conceit, that aliens are wiping out emotion and individuality, as a proto-zombie text. Sleep next to a pod and you wake up a pod person. But are you a zombie?

The case for: Twenty years before Romero sent zombies mindlessly shambling through the mall to send up consumerism, Siegel’s pod people were featureless imitations of humanity simply going through the motions of living without all the emotional messiness actually being a person entails. Like zombies, the pod person invasion spreads almost virally. One person will be converted and feel compelled to infect their friends and neighbors as the infection spreads exponentially through a small California town. Dr. Miles Bennell’s patients, who complained to him just days earlier that family members were impostors, suddenly laugh off their prior fears as they join the ranks of the pod people. As Miles, love thang Becky Driscoll, and their neighbors slowly piece together what is happening to their town, the zombie elements of the film come to the fore. The survivors get trapped in a web of paranoia, fearing any friend or family member could turn on them at any time, much like they would if they were the walking dead. Becky and Miles even spend a night holed up in his medical office waiting out the invasion, much like the cast of Night of the Living Dead boarding themselves in the farm house. Beating Shaun of the Dead by half a century, Miles and Becky even feign being emotionless pod people at one point to escape a dragnet of infected townsfolk.

The case against: Making the case for viewing Invasion of the Body Snatchers is hampered by the fact that the film is never clear on what exactly is happening with the pod people. Our plucky band of heroes find gigantic pea pods containing featureless, anthropomorphic slugs hidden in their basements and greenhouses, which slowly taking the characteristics of their psychic hosts as they sleep. At first, the film implies the pod people, having absorbed the human’s memories, will replace their doppelgangers. Which would seem to imply there would be a whole rack of murdered bodies stinking up the town. (Miles does suggest perhaps the humans’ bodies simply dissolve once they’ve been drained). However, violating its own rules, Becky later becomes a pod person without an actual pod in the vicinity, making it hard to determine whether she’s been zombified or murdered and replaced. More importantly, can you really make the case the pod people qualify as the living dead?

The verdict: While a pretty compelling case can be made that Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ cinematic DNA eventually trickled down through the zombie canon, all of the elements just aren’t there yet. The fact remains the pod people are not the reanimated dead in the conventional sense whether they’re mind stealing doppelgangers or murdering impostors. However, this is another transitional fossil, much like Frankenstein's monster, in the proud lineage we’ve come to love.