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 1991, James Cummins made his directorial debut with The Boneyard, which is commonly referred to as a horror/comedy. It is decidedly not that. There is humor, but it is mostly character-based rather than jokes that are played for laughs, and yes, the final creature designs are absurdly over-the-top, but again, they’re not jokes – despite being mutated versions of Phyllis Diller and her poodle. From the opening scenes to the final credits, The Boneyard treats all of its characters with respect and depth – something none of the films so far this year have even tried.
Cummins made his name as an effects artist, working with the legendary Stan Winston and designing effects for The Thing, Dead & Buried, House, Enemy Mine, and other films. As a writer/director he made three films, with The Boneyard being his first. He left the industry around the turn of the century, after open heart surgery early in 2002, but went on to write and illustrate a picture book for all ages called Good Things to Share, donated a portion of the proceeds to the American Heart Association. He passed in 2010 from hardening of the arteries.
I mention all of this, because there needs to be a re-evaluation of his work. The very first thing I noted when starting The Boneyard, was that this was written, shot, and edited like a real professional movie – another first for this year’s Easter Zombie Movie Marathon. Veteran actor Ed Nelson (TV’s The Fugitive and Peyton Place with guest spots in just about every television series ever produced), plays police detective Jersey Callum as serious and measured with just the right touch of irreverence, and Deborah Rose’s extremely troubled psychic Alley Oates is a revelation, making it doubly disappointing that this was a rare dramatic role and her final film.
TV’s Mr. Roper from Three’s Company, Norman Fell, also appears as an ex-hippy city mortician and legendary comedy icon Phyllis Diller plays the ridiculously named Mrs. Poopinplatz, the lead morgue attendant. Despite what their castings imply, they are not just comedy relief, although they do provide lighter-hearted moments before everything goes sideways with the arrival of three mummified corpses that turn out to be ancient Chinese demons known as jiangshi.
The Boneyard takes place in a single night after the arrest of a Chinese mortician named Chen (Robert Yun Ju Ahn) after he was discovered mutilating corpses in his funeral home in order to feed the three mummies. His family has been cursed for centuries to protect and maintain the creatures, but now Chen is the last of his line and wants to be rid of them. All of this is eventually verified by Alley’s psychic vision.
The rest of the movie is a siege film with our heroes trapped in the basement of the fortress-like city overflow morgue while three hideous mummified children swarm around, bloodily feasting on the stacks of corpses waiting for removal and burial. We also have side plots about a suicidal young woman finding a reason to live, and a young cop finding his inner hero. I’ve read some reviewers say the film doesn’t take itself too seriously, but it takes itself serious enough to take some big character development swings, and I’m here for it.
Rose’s Alley is the heart of the film as the reluctant psychic who overcomes her own crippling depression and nightmarish visions of dead children to help save the day. She’s not your typical horror movie heroine, being an overweight thirty-something, and it’s damn refreshing to have characters that seem like real people in one of these movies. She’s not an action hero, but she steps up and does the job anyway. I loved it.
Writer/director Cummins was also in charge of designing the creature and make-up effects for the film, and the mummified children are very impressively grotesque. They maintain an element of realism that helps to establish just how threatening they are. It’s the design and implementation of animatronics and puppetry for the mutated Phyllis Diller and her poodle that cause most critics to lean more into the comedy aspect of their takes.
Diller’s mutated Mrs. Poopenplatz is an oversized and monstrous puppet, with what feels like inspiration from both Evil Dead’s Possessed Henrietta and Pee Wee’s Big Adventure’s Large Marge. It’s a fantastic practical effect that would feel at home in Peter Jackson’s 1992 splatter classic Dead Alive, and despite the absurdity, it is a work of art.
The mutated poodle, not as much. But when it comes to making a gigantic, demonic, anthropomorphic poodle, they had their work cut out for them. And it’s a shortcoming that I’m more than willing to overlook when the rest of the film is as well done and ambitious as The Boneyard.