It’s that time of year again! Time to celebrate the Resurrection with a weeklong plunge into all things zombie! Here’s the history: In 2008, Dr. Girlfriend and I decided to spend a week or so each year marathoning through zombie films that we’d never seen before, and I would blog short reviews. And simple as that, the Easter Zombie Movie Marathon was born.
For the curious, here are links to 2008, 2009 (a bad year), 2010, 2011, 2012 (when we left the blog behind), 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025.
In 1980, Italian sleaze auteur Andrea Bianchi (What the Peeper Saw, Cry of a Prostitute, Strip Nude for Your Killer, My Father’s Wife) dove headfirst into the world of zombie cinema and eschewed most of the things that make a movie a movie. Plot, character development, and internal logic are tossed out the window in order to streamline Burial Ground (a.k.a. Nights of Terror, Zombi Horror, The Zombie Dead, Zombi 3) into a tight 85 minutes of zombie carnage with a heaping helping of sex and nudity.
The plot, what there is of it, is simple. A big, bearded professor is studying an ancient crypt near his mansion when the dead come to life and kill him. Then, three pairs of couples arrive at the mansion along with one of the couple’s dubiously-cast son Michael (Pietro Barzocchini, credited as Peter Bark) – more on that in a moment – and after everybody finds someplace on the grounds to have sex, the undead arrive and away we go. There’s maybe 10-15 minutes of setup before it’s a non-stop zombie siege on the boarded-up mansion. People die, zombies get organized, and one of horror cinema’s most notorious examples of the Oedipus Complex plays out to a creepy, cringe-inducing, bloody conclusion, before everybody dies.
The end.
Normally when I review a foreign movie for the Easter Zombie Movie Marathon, I try to find it in its original language and read the subtitles, but having a notion of what I was getting into, I opted instead to watch Burial Ground dubbed and with commercials on Tubi. And to be honest, it probably made the film a little more absurdly enjoyable, despite the blaring, sometimes atonal synth music that does most of the heavy lifting of building tension.
I know that this is going to be a controversial take on the film, but Dr. Girlfriend and I both LOVED the zombie make-up effects. They were super cheap for the most part, with some performers only having their faces painted, and others wearing repurposed rubber Halloween masks with worms and maggots liberally applied. But the best zombies had oddly shaped heads seemingly made of papier-mâché.
They were awesome! And they broke open dramatically when hit with rocks!
Another interesting piece of zombie world-building is that while these are your classic slow zombies, they are also intelligent enough to use tools and weapons, including a scythe to behead a maid, and a battering ram to break down the mansion doors.
The low point of the film is that dubious casting I noted before. In order to skirt strict film labor laws for children (abbreviated hours, plus restrictions on being exposed to sex and violence), Bianchi cast the 25-year-old Barzocchini to play what is ostensibly a 10-12-year-old child. He was slim and tiny, but with an obviously grown-up face that made his sexual advances on his mother all the more disturbing.
Luckily, this kink isn’t as large a plot-point as some reviewers make it out to be. It’s gross and weird, but it’s over quickly, before eventually wrapping up with zombified Michael biting his mother’s nipple off, killing her. You see, she’d gone kind of crazy by that point after rejecting his sexual advances and then seeing him being eaten by a zombie. So, when he turns up again at the end, she offers him her tit to nurse from, despite knowing that they are eating people.
It’s one of the more nihilistic endings I’ve watched in a while, with the entire cast dead and eaten or zombified by the final freeze-frame shot (before we really get to see them use a table saw on one of the final two survivors). While some critics appreciate the lack of narrative speed bumps like characterization and plot in order to jump straight into the carnage, those missing elements strip Burial Ground of any kind of symbolic meanings or stylistic points. It’s clearly just a last ditch, low-budget cash-in on the Italian zombie wave headed by Lucio Fulci and Umberto Lenzi, which had already begun to run out of steam.
I don’t even know what to make of the closing quote: “The earth shall tremble… graves shall open… they shall come among the living as messengers of death and there shall be the nigths [sic] of terror… – Profecy of the Black Spider.” Nothing about this quote is included in the entire film and only serves as a last resort of providing some sort of deeper meaning to the nonsensical events.
Oddly, Burial Ground is one of the more forgettable zombie films to get covered by the Easter Zombie Movie Marathon over the past eighteen years, while also having one (or two) of the most memorable character developments. Somehow, Michael became the most annoying and disturbing child in a zombie film, replacing the previous child king, Bob, from House by the Cemetery.