Dead & Buried (1981)

Directed by Gary Sherman. Starring James Farentino, Jack Albertson, Melody Anderson, Dennis Redfield, Nancy Locke, Bill Quinn, Robert Englund, Nancy Locke, Michael Currie, Christopher Allport. [R]

Just what the heck is going on in the small town of Potters Bluff? Sheriff Farentino is puzzled by a string of grisly murders, but sometimes it’s best to suspect the most obvious culprit. In this case, that would be the eccentric coroner who’s performing weird reanimation experiments on corpses. More subtle and intelligent than the average zombified shocker; the opening scene (when the viewer doesn’t know what’s happening) and the last twenty minutes (when the viewer knows all too well what’s happening) are the most effective segments. A few of the performances are wooden, and the emphasis on visceral horror over suspense results in too many dead patches in the first two acts, but it’s a pretty decent twist on the reanimated corpse sub-genre with a juicy final feature film appearance from Albertson as the demented doc. Stylish dummy/prop special effects by Stan Winston. Script credited to Ronald Shusett and Dan O’Bannon of Alien fame, although O’Bannon later disowned the film, claiming that none of his ideas/contributions ended up in the finished film.

66/100