Dead & Buried (1981) – Review

When you think of 80s horror, chances are you’ll conjure in your mind one of the nearly endless string of slashers that dominated the start of the decade. On the other hand, if I were to ask you to picture a zombie movie, your response would probably be to think of vast, shuffling hordes of the rotting undead that’s limbed their way right out of a George A. Romero picture.
It’s to the credit of Gary Sherman’s Dead & Buried, then, that it technically falls within both of the categories I just mentioned and yet doesn’t resemble either one of them. Thanks to a script by weirdo mavericks Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett – who between them also managed to cook up the likes of Alien and Return Of The Living Dead – this slow burning creeper proves to be something of an underrated gem that takes it’s setting of a mist enshrouded coastal horror and ⁷ delivers the sort of macabre twists usually reserved for a more ghoulish episode of the Twilight Zone.
Welcome to Potters Bluff.

As we follow an amateur photographer on vacation in the small, New England town of Potters Bluff, we see him navigate the picturesque coast as he snaps pics of various flotsam. However, it looks like his luck is about to change when a mysterious and sultry woman starts questioning him about his hobby and then requests if she could be his muse. Obviously thinking that he’s onto a winner here, our increasingly horny shutterbug snaps frame after frame of increasingly sexy photos until he realises way too late that he’s the victim of a particularly brutal honey trap. After being surrounded by glassy eyed locals all armed with cameras, the man is soundly beaten, wrapped up with netting and promptly set ablaze while his attackers watch with all the intrest of  someone blankly doom scrolling at 3am.
In the wake of this shocking scene, local Sheriff Dan Gillis now has to try and figure out what actually went down without the slightest clue that a small subsection of Potters Bluff have taken to murdering any visitors to their picturesque, yet suspiciously misty town and the only help he seems to have is from eccentric local mortician/coroner, William Dobbs.
Trying to juggle his wife’s recent personality change and the very real possibility that a murderous conspiracy has gained a foothold in the population and is growing like a cancer, Dan soon finds out that he’s completely out of his league. But after hitting one of these “cult” members with his car one night, the discovery of a severed arm lodged in the grill of his police vehicle that’s still twitching like a beached salmon finally clues him in that something supernatural is afoot.
But what does it all mean? Surely there can’t be a subsection of the population of Potters Bluff that’s suddenly become a gang of undead maniacs, can there? Prepare to witness the death – and resurrection – of small town hospitality.

Dead & Buried is one of those films that tend to go unlauded when people tend to rave about 80s horror which is a shame considering it contains numerous scenes that relentlessly scarred my childhood psyche when I once viewed it far too young. For a start, that opening scene that I spelt out on such detail in the synopsis, is an absolute belter of an opening scene that is chilling and horrific in equal measures. You literally have no idea why it’s occurring and there’s something of a sinking feeling that in the right environment, you’d probably fall for the same, lethal, scam too if you were out snapping pics of the scenery and an attractive local came onto you. But while a lot of the rest of Dead & Buried is something of a chatty slow burn, both Sherman’s direction and and O’Bannon and Shusett’s script keep things moving, alternating yet more shocking moments (most of them containing the continuing misadventures of that guy in the opening scene who really cannot catch a break) with punchy dialogue and some small town quirkiness.
In fact, there’s a lot of Dead & Buried that invokes the like of John Carpenter’s The Fog (mobs of zombie killers operating in a misty seaside town) and the unfairly maligned, Halloween III: Season Of The Witch (unfeasibly cruel, small-town conspiracy) and if you’re willing to go down the rabbit hole without reading up on what the movie is actually about, it comes loaded with some pretty devastating twists too. Sherman, who also directed cult British horror flick Death Line (aka. Raw Meat), goes all in when invoking the the hazy menace that comes with close-knit communities that exist away from the big cities and even the indoor set day sequences seem to come complete with a strange dusting of fog to really complete the fact that Potters Bluff is so overloaded with horrifying secrets, it seems the air itself has grown thick.

The cast all perform their roles wonderfully. James Farentino’s Sheriff barely seems able to cling onto his sanity throughout the entirety of this movie as each devestating twist brings him closer to bellowing hysteria; Melody Anderson brings those all-American, girl next door looks from Flash Gordon to bare as the local school teacher who has no compunction about teaching voodoo to her young students and on top of all that, we even have an early, pre-Freddy role for Robert Englund as a sneering local. However, possibly the most fun casting is that of Jack Albertson as the jazz loving mortician who performed the role while tragically succumbing to cancer. While it’s quite a genuine wonder image to see the man most famous for playing Grandpa Bucket in Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory, essentially play a lunatic whose greatest joy is to rebuild a mauled human face, the fact that he was actually dying at the time gives his villainous rants some truly impressive gravitas, even if his dastardly plan is nuttier than squirrel shit.
O’Bannon would later go on and write and direct the equally twisted Return Of The Living Dead and the amount of ghoulish obsession Dead & Buried has with the mechanics of being dead feel very much like a vital precursor to that zombie comedy classic, but the most memorable parts of the film (aside from that devestating final twist) prove to be when the script allows effects master Stan Winston to get extra spiteful.
While vicious gore gags aren’t quite what you think of from the genuine that created the Terminator, the Predator and the full sized T-Rex from Jurassic Park, it turns out that the late, great, Stan the man was just as capable of dishing out unsettling murders as the likes of Tom Savini. But apart from someone have acid pumped up their nose here and having a crushed skull reconstructed there, the true showstopper is a ghastly moment where that luckless and charred dude from the opening is visited later in hospital by the woman that ensnared him in the first place and has a syringe plunged into his eyeball while he whimpers for his life. Surely this guy must be the most fucked over character of the entire decade – especially when he get resurrected to pump gas for a living.

While maybe too slow for some, if you go in not knowing how it ends, Dead & Buried packs quite the wallop for a film that doesn’t really get the flowers it deserves. Loaded with jarring imagery and a real, small town eccentricity that you’d usually find in an early Stephen King novel, as long as more people keep digging this flick up, the less chance it’ll stay dead.
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