Dead & Buried might seem in abstract to have claims to more fame than it actually can boast of. It was the immediate follow-up by screenwriters Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett to their breakthrough hit Alien, with Shusett producing: the trailers and artwork proudly announced that “the creators of Alien…bring a new terror to Earth!” With Chicago-born director Gary A. Sherman, who had raised some eyebrows with his 1972 debut Death Line (aka Raw Meat), taking the reins, the project seemed imbued with class and potential far beyond the average grindhouse fodder. I certainly recall the film’s memorable poster as one of many icons of chilling portent that used to decorate the shelves of video stores when I was very young, as one of the first generation of movies that came to define the age of home-viewing horror. And yet, like too many other horror films of the ’80s, a schizoid battle of impulses behind the scenes between gore-hungry, theatre-packing money-men and the subtler ambitions of the creative team is all too apparent, in an end product that’s an engaging but flagrant mess.
The first eight minutes are galvanising and blackly amusing nastiness, as a photographer from St Louis, George Le Moyne (Christopher Allport), visiting the tiny coastal hamlet of Potter’s Bluff, take shots of the beach and happens upon a gorgeous young woman (Lisa Blount) who, seemingly impressed by his being a shutterbug and with a desire to be a model, begins posing for him. She even bares her tits as a precursor to giving him a come-on, but then he’s abruptly set upon by a mob of the town’s residents, beaten, tied up, and set on fire as they all, including Lisa, enthusiastically take photos and film his terror and agony. With a wild swing from hopeful titillation to malignant terrorisation of the audience, the swinger fantasy of easy sex giving way to misogynist paranoia at falling into a honey trap, the modish satire of the emissary of big city wantonness meeting a sticky reversal of exploitation at the hands of the local yokels, this sequence is like the genre in miniature.
What comes after wobbles a lot in quality, with actors who never quite seem to find their proper rhythm, delivering awkward dialogue, and enacting a plot that only makes the vaguest, most utilitarian sense. The set-up is admirable, however, for carefully arranging a storyline that necessitates repeated killings as gruesome as possible: as part of a programme to create a community of zombies, new candidates must be killed in the most extremely brutal of fashions. The film eventually proves a kind of extended variation on a particularly ghoulish and far gorier episode of The Twilight Zone or the like, with its hoary double-buff premise and black-humour punch-line. Local sheriff Dan Gillis (James Farentino), suspicious when he finds Le Moyne fried to a crisp but still clinging onto life in his car, which has been wrecked to resemble a traffic accident, begins probing, a task that becomes all the more urgent as more people begin to turn up hideously tortured and killed, including a drunkard fisherman (Ed Bakey) and a pretty young hitchhiker (Lisa Marie, a long time pre-Tim Burton).
Dan becomes increasingly unstable emotionally, and has snappy exchanges with his teacher wife, Janet (Melody Anderson), who’s keeping books on witchcraft in her sock drawer – to entertain her students with, she says, with his paranoia stoked when he learns of her connection with Le Moyne. Dan also has a quarrelsome relationship with the local coroner-cum-mortician, William Dobbs (Jack Albertson), a self-congratulatory “magician” at restoring the dead to showroom-worthy condition. It’s hardly a surprise finally that he proves to be the puppet master of the undead. O’Bannon and Shusett’s original plans were apparently more comedic than the final result, and there’s more than a hint of inspiration drawn from The Wicker Man, with the remote locale and hidden cabalistic conspiracy assailing an impotent policeman, a similarity particularly acute in Janet’s comedic recitation of morbid details to her class. If the comedy had been left more discernable, however, the basic MacGuffin would be more readily recognisable as uncomfortably similar to Death Becomes Her.
Perhaps however it’s a good thing in this film’s case that the producers wanted to punch up the proceedings, because it’s the relative rawness of the violence that lends the film urgency, mixed with Sherman
Sub-textual force is however drained off by the happenstance structure, and O’Bannon and Shusett just never wielded the same canniness as O’Bannon’s former collaborator John Carpenter in describing political and social metaphors, putting far more emphasis on rendering their stories as hyper-vivid shock machines, which is perhaps why they finally found such a fitting director in Paul Verhoeven for Total Recall. The final horror of the revelations involving Dan and Linda’s marriage is virtually ineffectual, partly because a supposed passion relationship hasn’t been very well described – and also because if you don’t guess the twists from a half-hour in, you ought to have your genre fan membership revoked. Technical raggedness is often apparent in poor post-dubbing, which doesn’t help the brittle acting. In his last feature role, Albertson’s portrait of evil – even if his motives and methods remain too hazy – is however entertaining, with his low-key, avuncular, proudly showman-like relish of his achievements all too keenly offsetting Farentino’s hammy approximation of hysteria.
What compulsive tension Dead & Buried does retain – and it does retain quite a lot – is thanks to Sherman
