Dead and Buried (1981)
It will take your breath away... all of it.
When you’ve had skin in the game for decades and live in a burnt out garage watching VHS tapes for eternity, nothing will ever be as special as finding something you’ve never seen that becomes an instant classic/favorite in your collection. Imagine shuffling across a vast desert, eating handfuls of sand, desperate for a new drink of water while hoping maybe this next gulp will be something else. Most of the time, you end up watching years of garbage, and you understand why you haven’t seen it. And you keep eating the sand.
The first time I finally saw Dead and Buried I knew I had found something special, something that proved there are still diamonds in the rough, buried in the sand, that can offer us a cool drink of water. Suddenly, you’re revived, renewed, ready to march into the sun.
There’s something that I inherently love about the battle-tested troupe in horror of “The Small Town Is In On It.” The added layer of paranoid fear of finding yourself in some odd place that seems just a little too quaint, like everybody in town has some inside joke they’re keeping from you. And you, the outsider, are looked at in a slightly threatening, observational way. Maybe it was born out of growing up in a small, strange town; maybe it came from traveling the west coast as a kid, staying in motels in the mountains or on the coast, who knows? But it’s one of my favorite narratives and Dead and Buried hits all the right marks of that feeling for me.
From the opening beach scene with Lisa Blount, 80’s scream queen, you understand that something is amiss in Potter’s Bluff. If that beach scene doesn’t punch your ticket for the ride, I don’t know what will because it’s got everything that excites me in a horror opening — and it ends in one of my favorite kick-off kills of the 80’s.
From that starting bang, director Gary Sherman (exploitation extraordinaire) takes us into the world of Potter’s Bluff. A local sheriff, with his school teacher beau (who spends her time teaching children about very bizarre rituals of the past), investigates a string of tourist murders in their sleepy coastal town. As bodies pile up with no clear suspect or motive, he enlists the help of the town’s eccentric mortician Dobbs (the asshole grandpa from Willy Wonka we all hate).
James Farrentino as the big city sheriff trying to acclimate to this small, odd town with a strange string of murders on his plate really carries the flick, supported by the campy performance from Willy Wonka Grandpa. James is really going for it, reminiscent of some schlockier Cassavetes performances (I’m looking at you, The Incubus) and Grandpa is having the time of his life (shortly before he died) hamming it up as the kooky mortician. The entire cast is really great though — you even get a young Robert Englund as one of the townsfolk.
Stan Winston is behind the effects, which is a major draw for anyone who loves the genre. His work on some of the more unique murders helps make this one stand out, and the nurse attack in the hospital is a marvel of puppetry, animatronics and practical craftsmanship. This one offers a fun collection of different methods when it comes to knocking off its victims, steeped in some classic foggy atmosphere that really gets you in the mood.
I’ll always give extra credit to a flick that really goes for it; a movie that takes it’s shot and really tries to pull the rug out from under you. The first time I saw Dead and Buried, it did that. It doesn’t play its hand tight to the chest. It lets you know early on that the people of Potter’s Bluff are up to something sinister. Normally, that would be the big the climatic reveal, instead we ride along with maybe the only person in town that isn’t in on the joke and then Dead and Buried hits us with an even bigger reveal, a deeply personal reveal that rocks the fabric of a man’s existence… And then it does it again and hits you with a surprise hook that gives the whole finale such operatic gravitas (perfectly acted by Farrentino) that solidifies this one as an underrated gem. TKO.
7.5/10, watch it every fall on a cold night.
