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Director: Gerard Kikoine
Screenplay: Jake Chesi and Stuart
Lee
Cast: Robert Vaughn (as Gary
Julian); Donald Pleasence (as Dr. Schaeffer); Karen Witter (as Janet); John
Carradine (as Jacob); Ginger Lynn Allen (as Debbie)
A Night of A Thousand Horror (Movies) #47
In another context Buried Alive, not to be confused with
the Frank Darabont TV movie of the
same year, would be prime trashy and psychotronic material for another blogger
to relish. A late production by producer Harry
Alan Towers, who I like many will know for his genre films such as those
produced with Jesus Franco as
director, another blog would have become intoxicated over a plot where teacher Janet
(Karen Witter) joins an all female institute
for mentally disturbed young women only for the girls to be picked off when
they try to leave and, in the sole reference to Edgar Allen Poe in its full title, are usually bricked up alive
behind a wall like in the Black Cat
short story. There's bad end-of-eighties hair and fashion, bitchy female
characters, a girl naked in a group shower wearing sunglasses, a girl being
scalped when the electronic whisk she is using to curl her hair in the kitchen
backfires, and Donald Pleasance as a
pudding bowl haired man who is constantly eating.
All the above sounds in computer
text brilliant to see but the execution is different almost always from what
you can imagine. Unfortunately barring wonderful exceptions, I find that I
can't appreciate trashy movies like this if they cannot generate any sense of
mood, or any cohesive glue of atmosphere, not necessarily fog machines or menacing
amounts of shadows on the wall, to make it all seem to have some connecting
together and stand out further. It neither helps that it's such a tedious film
to sit through for the most of it. One is foisted with a bland, dragged out
narrative where the only interesting detail about the heroine in the centre of
it is her numerous freakish hallucinations of breathing brick walls and
thousands of ants crawling out of a toilet, aspects which suggest, when she
gets there, she's more in danger of psychological breakdown than any of the
girls there and should logically lead to some great things; the scenes I've
mentioned themselves are memorable but in-between her concern about what's
happening at the institute and its founder Gary Julian (Robert Vaughn) trying to get cosy with her, you're eventually
numbed by the lack of dynamic or fun to most of the running length.
Without any sense of mood, that
even the schlockiest Italian films of the later eighties could still drip in
rivers of, this merely becomes a grab-bag of odd details, snippets that are fun
by themselves but without a memorable film around them to allow them to stand
out. If one is to take pleasure from the trashy, it only truly works if the
entire film is one impactful effect on you, not merely something you can make a
minute YouTube clip of its funniest moments of. Inherently a killer in a worn,
browned Ronald Reagan mask bricking
people up behind walls in a fun and surreal idea I can appreciate as a villain
for example, dying for a film as strange as the image itself, but it becomes increasingly
obvious once I got into odd films and watched them incessantly that without a
metaphorical adhesive to connect these shots into once clear form, even if its
utter madness of the z-grade variety of weird editing and narcoleptic acting
performances, a standard directed and blandly in-cohesive film like this one
fails. Instead even the fun moments start to lose their energy and the entire
film drags one's mood down miserably.
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Neither does it help I hate something
controversially that most people like - that I've never held enjoyment for
female characters, from mainly eighties slasher films, who only speak in bitchy
comments and snark which makes up a large part of Buried Alive when it's not Janet onscreen. Not even the fact the
main offending character Debbie is played by porn star Ginger Lynn can get me over the fact that I find such caricatures
on American genre films of this period utterly irritating to see. Especially here,
it's obvious how unlike real women these characters are, worst when the cast in
mainly women, and that, without the graced penmanship of a film like Heathers (1988), a fine art to catchy
and profane insults for any gendered character, the snotty comments and threats
thrown by characters here is simple time killing dialogue without humour to it.
Neither does it help the fashion
in display is dreadful to the point of being an aesthetic displeasure that
effects this particularly film badly rather than a quaint time capsule - it
would take a woman (or a transgender man to not limit ourselves by gender binaries)
of such charisma to pull off the bird's nests stuck on some of these actresses'
heads and look good in them alone. Ultimately it's down to Donald Pleasance (thank god) as the pro he is to add something
watchable in his scenes - literally pudding haired with a thinning grey
haircut, foreign accent for an unknown country and constantly with a bag of
crisps (chips) or food of some sort in his hands as an Igor-like figure to Vaughn's head of the institute. That and
spotting Arnold Vosloo in a tiny role
as a policeman before he'd end up playing Liam
Neeson in the Darkman
straight-to-video sequels.
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Abstract Spectrum: Psychotronic; Weird
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None
Plenty of moments, if to use the
full title, stand out in Edgar Allen
Poe's Buried Alive (sic) as being strange. Close-ups of a black cat that
have no connection to the plot whatsoever but merely try to justify using Poe in the title. The constant
references to ants, one on a plane of glass to many in a toilet bowl. The girl,
already mentioned, who is killed by hexed machinery, presumably done through
fiddling with the electronics but looking in the scene like the film has
supernatural traits, when she though using an electronic whisk with a hairdryer
in the institute kitchen in the middle of the night was a good way to style her
hair. The fact the basement, full of sinister corridors, also has a giant room
with black-and-white tiles and statues. John
Carradine in his last role before his death in a wheelchair bond cameo
and plenty of other strange sights. However because the film is merely
perfunctory in style and lacking a good narrative strand, even if it was a frail
thread, to make the scenes connect together fully, they are merely disconnected
pieces unable to cohere together and have the impact they deserve for such odd
moments.
Personal Opinion:
A film of conflicting aspects. Times
utterly memorable for its weird content, but in the end an utter mess without
the charisma to get away with it. Not a good film at all in the end.
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