Driving the most airbrushed van in the history of paint, five teenagers go camping in an out-of-the-way cemetery. The grounds feature decrepit buildings, Gothic statues and more fog than John Carpenter’s The Fog and its remake combined. It’s also, as the kids discover upon waking in the middle of the night, home to a tavern, complete with sausages inside and a neon sign for Miller High Life out front.
The tavern keeper (Lino Salemme, Demonia), who has a blinking red eye and ends sentences with overly gregarious belly laughs, tells them if they can survive until dawn in the cursed crypt below, they’ll win a booty of riches. (That’s the strangest twist on the Big Texan’s 72 oz. steak dinner challenge I’ve ever heard.) Because Graveyard Disturbance otherwise would be a short subject, the teens accept.
Roaming the catacombs from room to tomb, they run across rats, spiders, hanging vampires, zombies with herpes sores, an oversized eyeball with optic nerve still attached, maggot-strewn screws and diarrhea-streaked walls. These sets are the film’s high point, casting an appropriate spooky vibe.
I just wish director Lamberto Bava (Demons) had treated the story seriously instead of an Italian Scooby-Doo. The attempts at humor fail — and hard — killing real potential. Worse, pieces unintended to elicit laughs do, notably when the quintet’s most level-headed member (Lea Martino, Bava’s You’ll Die at Midnight) complains, “I like fun things: candy, Christmas carols, Woody Allen!” That line hasn’t aged well, nor has Graveyard Disturbance as a whole. —Rod Lott