There are bad movies that are just bad — they are just uninteresting or broken (with boom mics dropping into the frame like The Howling VI), and then there are bad movies that are so bad, they are hilarious, like Troll 2, Demon Wind, and The Room. Today, we have just such a movie. An Italian zombie film like you have never seen before, that Severin is releasing in 4K for the first time in an absurd bundle with a disastrously hideous pillow case that makes us kind of want to order two copies for a matching pair for the guest bed. The movie is Burial Ground. Also known as The Nights of Terror, because any real bad Italian horror movie has more than one title.
Burial Ground is about three couples who drive into the country to stay at a baroque Italian villa, violate the moral rules of the horror genre, and end up in a zombie movie. There is not much else to the plot – just lots of screaming and shockingly bad acting and dubbing that must be witnessed. This is the kind of movie that you ambush your friends and loved ones with as a trick on Halloween. Our personal experiences of sharing this film have been followed by the words, “worst movie ever.” If you have been looking for a movie so atrocious that you could relive the experience of Troll 2 afresh, this is the movie you have been waiting for.
Burial Ground is more than just cheaply made. It is tasteless and exploitative drive-in material. It is hyper-sexed, ultra-violent, and aims to gross you out. When they made Burial Ground, they really went for all the angles to weird everyone out and make us hit rewind on the VCR because we could not believe the thing we just heard and saw. Come with us as we take a tour of the most infamous Italian horror movie without cannibals in the Amazon.
So Bad it’s Delicious
Burial Ground is the older zombie sister of Troll 2, predating our visit to Nilbog by nine years. We draw the comparison to Troll 2 not just because of the bad acting and spaghetti-thin writing. Like Troll 2, the monsters are dressed in potato sacks and the makeup looks like modeling clay and papier mâché.
It is cheap beyond the valley of the shadow of shot-on-tape. The acting is bad, both in performance and dubbing. The English dubbing is the way to experience this movie at its fullest potential as a comically shabby monster movie. The dubbing is as stiff and awkward as one of those movies from the back room of that one video store in your home town – you know the one, with dark, narrow aisles, and the best selection of tasteless trash horror, fantasy and sci-fi movies. That was where you would find Burial Ground. You would not see it at any reputable establishment like Blockbuster.
Beneath the ordinary symptoms of extraordinarily bad horror movies, Burial Ground is on a mission to make you squirm. It rises above the competition with unspeakable taboos. Things are going to get real weird. Your friends are never going to forget the night you sprung Burial Ground on them. But truthfully, the worse the reaction, the better. We are cinematic raccoons, and this movie is a rancid jewel of the dumpster of the long-dead video rental industry.
The feature that makes Burial Ground most unique is the child character, Michael. As fellow, more popular, creepy-child horror film Children of the Corn (1984) would later repeat, Burial Ground casts an adult, 25-year-old dwarf, Peter Bark, as Michael. In Children of the Corn, 23-year-old John Franklin plays the leader of the cult, Isaac Chroner.
Michael is wide-eyed and voyeuristic, and has an Oedipus complex that is going to shock your friends out of their seats and maybe out of the room. Bark’s performance, combined with the English dubbing, which we are pretty certain was performed by a man imitating a child’s voice, is the disaster of disasters that will give you new lines to quote to your friends as part of your secret language of horror trauma bonding, like Troll 2’s pre-meme zingers.
It Is Strangely Endearing
Burial Ground is cheap and tasteless, but we love it, and not just because it has us in tears. There is something endearing about Burial Ground, similar to how Demon Wind has a hint of something eerie. Burial Ground was filmed in 1981 and has a kind of oldness to the film coloring that makes us nostalgic for those VHS horror movies. They feel more raw — more atmospheric.
Burial Ground has some surprisingly strong imagery in certain scenes. This is mostly due to the filming location, the Villa Parisi, which is credited on IMDB in 20 films. The location is Gothic and baroque. It is the kind of bougie sets of black-and-white movies from the ‘40s and ‘50s. Burial Ground feels like a zombie movie through the lens of those black-and-white movies, but in color and with all the gore and vulgarity of the drive-in era.
The slow, drawn-out sequences of zombie attacks are amateurish in style, but the film-rules-breaking gives it that raw quality we already mentioned. It is not overcooked – more like they just splashed some hot water on it and served it crawling on the dish.
Yes, Italian Zombies Are a Thing
If you did not know that Italian zombie movies were a thing, you just stumbled on a Pandora’s Box of horror sub-genre, and you cannot put them back in now. You have to watch them all – Demons, Demons 2, Zombi 2, The Beyond, and City of the Living Dead. There are too many to list here. The story begins with Dawn of the Dead. The European cut of the sequel to Night of the Living Dead was retitled as Zombi. A year later, in 1979, Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2 was released, as an exploitation of the popularity of Zombi, and a new, regrettably brief, era of Italian films was born as the sun had set on giallo hand-horror slashers and spaghetti Westerns.
Fulci’s Zombi 2 would heavily influence Italian horror in the first half of the ‘80s. The director would make two more zombie movies, mentioned above, City of the Living Dead in 1980 and The Beyond in ’81. Burial Ground, directed by Anread Bianchi, is the only one that successfully emulates the low-budget charm of Zombi 2. Burial Ground purposefully makes its ghouls resemble the versions of the undead from Zombi 2, including the bad masks with crawling worms in their orifices.
Severin’s Death Smells Bundle
When you order a movie, and the packaging has the name Severin on it, you are in some deep woods in the horror genre. Severin are connoisseurs of both grindhouse and folk horror. In 2021, Severin released the brilliant folk horror collection, All the Haunts Be Ours, featuring the folk horror documentary, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched.
Severin’s latest bundle includes their 4K edition of Burial Ground, featuring audio commentary and must-see deleted scenes, and the movie comes with two pieces of merchandise, a t-shirt and a pillowcase featuring Michael’s face, with eyes bugging out. Look into those eyes. You know you need this. Imagine the moment your partner or house guest pulls back the bed cover and Michael’s eyes are staring at them with burning intensity. This is a piece of memorabilia as bizarre as the movie. Of course, no one is actually going to sleep on these things… right?
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
