Dead and Buried (1981)

Those dodgy Roku streaming channels I follow are allowing me to finally catch up with those obscure and off-beat films I missed the first time around, (often because they were barely released in the first place), which then seemed simply to vanish.  The latest of these has been Dead and Buried (1981), a horror film whose original release I vaguely remember only because it got mixed up in the whole 'video nasties' moral panic of the early eighties.  It was, for awhile, wrongly put on the DPP's list of proscribed titles, but was eventually removed.  At which point it just seemed to disappear from sight in the UK.  I'm assuming that Dead and Buried only ended up on the list in the first place because of its title and subject matter - reviving the dead - which probably resulted in someone who had never bothered watching it labelling it a 'video nastie' on the basis of its synopsis, thinking it was some kind of zombie movie.  Which, strictly speaking, it is, but not in any conventional sense.  Indeed, the presence of Gary Sherman as director, (who had earlier been responsible for the classic, but unconventional, cannibal movie Death Line (1972), should have given a clue as to the fact that it was going to deliver a far more intriguing and original take on the zombie genre.

Utilising the classic horror staple of the isolated small town as its setting, the film is structured as a mystery, centering on the local Sheriff trying to get to the bottom of a series of violent murders of visitors plaguing the New England coastal community of Potters Bluff.  The audience already know that the perpetrators are a mob who photograph and film their murders but, like the Sheriff, are none the wiser as to exactly who they are or their motivation. As the plot progresses, it becomes clear to the viewer that they are all locals, who live otherwise normal and ordinary lives.  While this puts the audience one step ahead of the film's protagonist, the script teasingly leaves us as in the dark as to motivation as the local cop is, tantalisingly offering up clues in the form of eccentric behaviour on the part of characters, bizarre, apparently, unconnected incidents and enigmatic dialogue.  Distracted by his wife's increasingly odd behaviour and the constant contrariness of the local mortician, who seems alternately helpful and curmudgeonly and obstructive, the sheriff finds his investigations increasingly being forced down a strange path.  

This part of the film, covering the investigation, is undoubtedly the movie's strongest aspect, with the intriguing set up, the plot that keeps spiralling back to the town itself and the contrast between the apparent everyday normality of the community and the sudden outbursts of shockingly brutal, out-of-the-blue violence, carrying the audience along.  Sherman's direction is incredibly atmospheric, creating an authentic sense of menace, not to mention an almost Lovecraftian feeling of oppressive isolation.  Indeed, as the sea mists roll in on the tiny town, it is easy to imagine tat it is Lovecraft's fictional coastal town of Innsmouth, where the inbred natives practice ancient occult rites and secretly worship Gods otherwise forgotten in the mists of time.  The gradual build up of details and incident, which leave both the viewer and the Sheriff wondering who they can trust, winds up the tension to the point that the final reveal inevitably feels slightly anti-climactic: most of the town's population are dead, revived by the local mortician, who gets them to kill more people, so that he can use his mortician's arts to restore their battered bodies before reviving them and giving them new identities as new residents of the town.  After all that build up, the audience is expecting something more, perhaps some eldritch evil behind the town, (in true Lovecraftian manner), or a sinister cult maybe.  Instead, we get a disgraced doctor turned mortician who has discovered a technique for raising the dead, but uses it as a means of satisfying his artistic urges - using his reconstructive skills to try and create perfection in the form of a town full of 'people' who never grow any older and never get sick or infirm.

Not only does it feel slightly underwhelming, but the denouement also feels more than a little rushed.  With more than two thirds of the film's ninety three minutes having been taken up setting the scene via the Sheriff's investigation, there is  too little time left, it seems, to give anything more than perfunctory explanations for everything that has occurred.  There does seem to be some evidence of truncated sub-plots - the revival and disappearance of the girl hitchhiker not only appears to imply, in the way that it is shot, that someone other than the mortician is also involved in the process, (also, the fact that the mortician himself is later revived after being shot implies the existence of another party), but it is also never followed up on, her disappearance simply left hanging.   The very nature of the mortician's way of reviving the dead is never specified - is it scientific or supernatural?  Certainly, the fact that he controls his living dead creations by keeping their hearts implies the latter, but other details hint at the former.  

Then again, many horror films ultimately fail because they tell us too much, leaving nothing to the imagination.  So, perhaps wisely, Dead and Buried, leaves various threads hanging, hinting at a larger picture that lies outside of the events we have witnessed.  There is a definite implication in the closing scenes, for instance, that this scenario of the Sheriff investigating a series of murders and eventually confronting the mortician, has played out, with variations, many times before, with the mortician always 'resetting' the Sheriff's memory back to 'zero'.  Several times throughout the film, dialogue between the two also hints that the mortician sees it all as a game that plays out in an endless cycle.  Likewise, much of the Sheriff's wife's behaviour and dialogue imply that at least some of the living dead do, at some subconscious level, know that they are dead and are trying to reveal this fact.  In the end, despite the hurried ending, Dead and Buried reveals just enough to satisfy the audience, but not too much that it leaves no mystery at all for viewers to work out for themselves.

As mentioned earlier, Sherman's direction is excellent, conjuring up exactly the sort of atmosphere needed for such a scenario, while the script, credited to Ronald Shusett and Dan O'Bannon, although O'Bannon later claimed that his contributions didn't appear in the shooting script, while far from perfect, is very literate and features some excellent dialogue.  The performances from the cast are also good, with Melody Anderson memorable as the Sheriff;s wife, James Farentino suitably dogged as the Sheriff while Jack Albertson makes the mortician an intriguing villain: an avuncular and often crotchety old man who puruses his bizarre obsession with a combination of apparent kindness and ruthlessness.   All-in-all,  Dead and Buried is well worth looking at - with its unique take on the zombie genre - eschewing the usual gore and murderous rampages in favour of low-key small town intrigue - it is probably one of the most underrated and off-beat US horror movies of the eighties.