Over the years, I have had so many opportunities to view Dead & Buried. Sadly, something I thought would view even better took precedence and, typically, wasn’t even that good. But now, after viewing it, I feel like a jerk because Dead & Buried is good. Really good.
In the coastal village of Potters Bluff, the seafaring community has a weird way of welcoming visitors: by burning them alive. While that would hurt most places — how did the tourism bureau cover this shit up? — more and more visitors visit and more and more are horribly manhandled, mangled and murdered by the fisherman and their lone blonde seductress.
It’s a crime that has local sheriff (James Farentino, The Final Countdown) increasingly puzzled, as his attractive wife (Melody Anderson, Flash Gordon) goes about her business, teaching witchcraft to her interested middle-schoolers. It seems almost no one cares about this death and destruction — and those who do, like the area’s kindly mortician (Jack Albertson, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory), find themselves either strictly murdered or fraudulently useless.
Even weirder still, the bodies of the deceased are soon brought back to life and join the murderous rampage. What is going on here, guys?
Written by Alien’s Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett (although O’Bannon later disowned it completely) and directed by Poltergeist III’s Gary A. Sherman, Dead & Buried is one of those blissful horror films from the early ’80s that manages to continually toy with the audience, switching between subtle mystery and graphic horror to — as the corpses are stripped to the bone and re-animated — ghoulish cinema.
With its shocker ending offering no rhyme or reason — just a black screen followed by credits — if I had seen this as a kid, I would still be gushing about it today. Instead, I’m gushing about it now. —Louis Fowler