A professor opens a crypt and discovers the secret to "surviving death", unfortunately it also wakes the dead and they corner a group of rich, horny people in a beautiful villa in the Italian countryside.

Where to begin? Some movies are so bad they're good, this one is so bad it's great. The opening sequence sets the bizarre tone, when the professor is confronted by a hungry zombie he tries to make friends with it. Unfortunately being privy to the secret of undeath wasn't enough to make him realize that zombies don't make for good friends.

Things get weirder when you see Michael, a little boy who (I guess) is supposed to be about eight years old, the actor playing him is a tiny thirty-year-old man with an oddly shaped cranium. You'd think that watching a man run around saying "mama, mama!" in a kid voice would be creepy enough, it's not. More on that later.

More amusement comes when the light bulbs burn out and a maid nearly shits herself. I've never seen a light bulb burst in the socket, it might be ungodly terrifying, but I just had to wonder how she was going to react to a zombie. Turns out the light bulbs were much scarier.

Pretty much every person in the group is just looking for a chance for some alone time to get some lovin'. There's some nudity, but nothing to write home about.

When the zombies first attack the party a young couple is making out in the garden. The zombie grabs one by the leg, they pull away and jump to their feet. It may seem stupid that they stand there and watch the zombie stand up and approach them, instead of running they just keep making comments about how disgusting the zombie is. At first you may think it was stupid not to run, but in reality they were trying something no zombie-victim ever thought of before: they were defending themselves by trying to hurt the zombies feelings.

I have to tell you about the most bizarre scene in the movie, maybe the most bizarre scene in any movie. If I tell you it may seem like a spoiler, but if I don't tell you, you'll probably never watch the movie. If there's anything this flick can be famous for, it's this:

While little man-child Michael is being comforted by mama, he decides it's time to make his move. Yep, he tries to seduce her on the couch. As he kisses her he exposes and fondles her breast. This doesn't seem to bother her. Apparently they're a very close family. When he pulls up her skirt and goes for the crotch, mama notices and stops him before he gets in her panties. She's shocked, he should know that she never lets him get past second base!

He then storms off because mama won't give him no na-na.

This is why we watch Italian and Asian horror movies. You never know what's going to happen, I won't say this makes sense, but it makes for a cool ending.

The zombies look good. They're the old, long-buried kind (at first) so they're all dried up and partially mummified. A low budget flick, but the zombies look good and some real effort was put into making them distinctive, although every now and then you'll see one that looks kinda stupid. Lots of flesh dried away from the eyeballs and bones partially exposed, and worms, gallons of worms.

The story is the primal zombie plotline. Zombies surround people, gore ensues.

Don't think that because I made fun of the movie, that it was funny. There were some unintentional laughs, but it's a dark film. There's plenty of gore and it's top-notch. Lots of gut-eating and creative use of graphic violence. I enjoyed the flick, if you're a zombie fanatic or gore-hound it will fit the bill.

I'd also like to mention the woman who plays "mama" is interviewed in the DVD extras. I only mention this because she has no memory whatsoever about the movie, she answers about four questions, then asks "that one was about zombies, wasn't it?". More questions go by and she asks, "wasn't Burial Ground about the living dead?" She refers to the other actors as, "the blonde one, I think." They should have interviewed me for the extras, at least I watched the movie. If you don't recognize her you might think she's just a random woman they found walking down the street.

6 out of 10 oedipal man-children with misshapen noggins

Burial Ground is a quirky flick. I enjoyed it for the most part, though it started to drag towards the end.

The zombies were a little too smart for me. One scene involved a zombie expertly throwing a knife that pinned a woman's hand to the wall beside the second story window she was looking out of. Then another zombie took a scythe and reached up and cut her head off.

Also, at no point in time did it seem the zombies were of a finite amount. I enjoy the overbearing ratio of zombies to humans in most zombie flicks, but when I feel that there is an infinite amount, I kinda lose hope for the humans and I start to get bored.

The gore wasn't real great. The zombie makeup was done well, though some of the zombies looked otherworldy. The zombie beatings by the humans were very good, but whenever a zombie would get a hold of a human, it felt like they put stock footage in of some zombies eating some sausage links with cranberry sauce (just like mom used to make). You really couldn't see the dead body when it was happening either. It didn't really do it for me. I noticed that Gino De Rossi did the makeup for this. I was a little disappointed by this, since he is a master. Don't get me wrong, there were some good effects in the movie, I was just left wanting a few times.

This really is an Italian zombie classic though. The mass amounts of zombies, the quirky dialogue, the cheesy glyphs, the brutal violence, the whole incest with the 30 year old kid. All of it worked. I was a little surprised at the relative lack of nudity in this film. At the pace that this movie started out with everybody making out and stuff, I was expecting nudity of Zombie Lake proportions. Props though to the mom who was getting it on when her son walked into the room. Instead of putting the covers over her, she jumped out of the bed completely naked and walked halfway across the room and then put on her nightgown. Good stuff.

Overall, I give this 7 out of 10 scenes where a zombie pulls a girl through a broken window via Fulci, and then unexplicably dies from the excitement, or whatever.