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

Pall Dancers

Zombie Strippers
2008
Dir. Jay Lee
I don’t have my copy of the Zombie Field Guide at hand at the moment, but I can’t recall a chapter detailing how zombism leads to extraordinary stripping ability in women. But alas and alack, that’s the plot of Zombie Strippers, an execrable waste of 90 minutes that could have worked if the writers didn’t think camp was an excuse for truly horrible writing.
Hell, I can pretty well imagine how the pitch for this barely polished turd went.
Jay Lee: What do fanboys love? Zombies! And Robert Englund. And b(.)(.)bs. And Jenna Jameson. And Jenna Jameson’s b(.)(.)bs.
Cigar chomping fatcat producer: Have a few mil to make a shitty movie.
*snorts line of blow off George Lucas’ ass before releasing Star Wars in theaters again with additional 15 frames of new footage filmed with James Cameron’s Avatar cameras*
The sad part is all of this could have worked. Instead we get this unwatchable coprolite that actually features worse acting than the films that powered Ms. Jameson’s original rise to prominence.
Zombie Strippers is the tale of a zombie outbreak at a sleazy strip club run by a pervy, germaphobic Freddy Kreuger that conveniently shares a common alleyway with a s00per s33kr1t military base where they’re doing research on a “chemovirus” to provide zombie soldiers for George Bush’s endless series of wars. Things, predictably, get out of hand.
Zombology: While the chemovirus turns men into drooling, flesh eating monsters, it turns women into drooling, fleshing eating monsters who can work a stripper pole the way Eddie van Halen works a fretboard. A woman in a white lab coat said it, so it must be true. The undead dancers become all the rage in town until they start munching down on the clientele post-lap dance. (Dammit people, you’ve been warned about the Champagne Room.) It does raise an interesting philosophical point: just how putrid does a zombie woman have to be before some guy will find her un-hittable?

What Robert Englund is doing in this film, I can’t fathom. His turn as a strip club owner makes you long for his more subtle and nuanced performance from the later Nightmare on Elm Street films (aka "funny" Freddy). But what’s most maddening about Zombie Strippers is the wildly inconsistent effects throughout. The zombie makeup and a few the set pieces – including a pair of head ripping scenes – are well done, but then it shovels on truly awful CGI. Like early Sega Genesis seen from the rear view mirror of a PS3 bad. That just compounds all of the other problems: casting, script, direction (or the suspicious absense of all three).
As much as I really wanted to score this piece of shit a 1(.)(.)on the Hell of the Living Dead scale of craptacularity just for giggles, I have to admit that some of the effects shots are smile-inducing and the zombie makeup is fairly decent for the budget. Grading the suck on a curve, Zombie Strippers bumps and grinds its way to an 85 instead.