And the Theme for October's Marco Movie Night is....
Marco Movie Night of the Living Dead
Friday October 29th at Chez Noyola
7:00 - 7:30 -- 30 minutes of trailers, interviews, film clips, parodies, etc. inspired by tonight's film selections.
7:30 - 9:30 -- Dead and Buried (1981) / Dir: Gary Sherman
9:30 - 10:00 -- DVD behind the scenes footage
Dead and Buried failed to make much of an impression upon its initial release but this under-appreciated chiller about reanimated corpses got a second life, as it were, on home video. Over the years Dead and Buried has built up a small following (as has director Sherman's debut film Death Line AKA Raw Meat). Like a good mortician, the cult film afficionados at Blue Underground have cleaned up the corpse, dressed it up with some tasteful special features and made it presentable for viewing. They even invited many of the original cast and crew to show up and say a few kind words of remembrance.
With Halloween around the corner it's only fitting that this month's film selection is a horror film. Dead and Buried takes place in Potter's Bluff, a sleepy New England town with a scenic coastline, a quaint downtown and friendly locals who could have stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting. Of course, if you've ever read anything by H.P. Lovecraft or Stephen King you know to stay the hell away from such towns which invariably play host to all kinds of horrors. Potter's Bluff might be a nice place to live but it's a terrible place to die as many visitors find out. It's up to the local sheriff to figure out what's going on but when recently buried victims are seen walking around town it's almost more than he can bear.
Click to viewAlthough Dead and Buried was originally conceived as a black comedy director Gary Sherman was ordered to tone down the humor and forced to insert additional scenes of gore. While Sherman's original vision was compromised the end result is still entertaining and strikes a good balance between gothic atmosphere, visceral scares and gallows humor. Sherman is greatly aided by script doctoring courtesy of producer Ronald Shussett (Alien) and Dan O'Bannon (Alien, Return of the Living Dead), moody cinematography by Steven Poster (Donnie Darko) and some top notch make-up effects by the legendary Stan Winston (Terminator, Aliens, Predator, Jurassic Park, etc.).
Despite its tonal shifts Dead and Buried still delivers the horror goods but never takes itself too seriously. Released at a time when most horror films had fallen into the grueling "masked-killer-stalks-teens" slasher formula Dead and Buried stood apart by featuring adults in the leads rather than the usual cast of expendable, scantily clad coeds. Instead, Sherman and company have crafted a fun supernatural detective story that would have been at home in the pages of Weird Tales or EC Comics and features a twist ending that would have made Rod Serling proud.