DEAD ALIVE (1992)

"I kick ass for the Lord!"

For the two or three people out there who've never seen DEAD ALIVE, here's the story: adult Lionel still lives with his over domineering mother in a large house on the hill. He goes on a date with a local girl, Paquita, to the zoo. While spying on her son, the mother is bitten by a rat monkey and the next day turns into a flesh eating zombie! Lionel can't stand the thought of killing his zombie mother, so he keeps her under sedation in the basement. Keeping a live zombie in the basement is hard work, so before long everything has spiraled out of control until there's an entire horde of zombies running around the house...and all of them want to kill Lionel.

That's a brilliant story, but what pushes DEAD ALIVE into the one of the greatest zombie movies of all time territory is the absolute genius of director Peter Jackson. I remember when this movie came out (I was in high school) my girlfriend and I sat on her mom's sofa in absolute horror movie Heaven. I was so glued to the screen I completely forgot about the sweet fuckmaking I was about to throw down. Outside of EVIL DEAD 2, I'd never seen anything like it. Right from the beginning, the film blasts off in a frantic pace and it never lets up. It's just one hilarious gore-drenched scene after another all wrapped up in a clever script that somehow makes it all believable and even has a little romance thrown in for good measure.

There really hasn't been many over the top splatter films of this quality made since this movie. It's kinda sad. It's also sad that Peter Jackson has completely forgotten about the horror genre.  Maybe one day he'll return to it.

[Update 5/17/2018: I watched DEAD ALIVE again last night and then today I watched it yet again, but this time with the volume turned down a little and played some music by Anna von Hausswolff. I have no idea why, but it actually turned out kinda cool.]

BURIAL GROUND: THE NIGHTS OF TERROR (1981)

Zombies attack a group of people vacationing at a secluded country estate. The End.

I like this movie. It’s not impressively made and there’s nothing fancy going on. Just a straight-forward story about zombies chasing people around a large country estate. One of the things that I enjoyed the most is all of the humans, when they see a zombie, literally stop and stand there screaming until the zombies slowly shuffle over and kill them. It's like the zombies have some kind of telepathic freeze ray or something. Any normal, halfway athletic person with an aluminum baseball bat could kill every zombie in this movie.

In the grand scheme of things, BURIAL GROUND is not great movie, but I like it and it would make a great double feature with 1974's LET SLEEPING CORPSES LIE. Steady pace, mild female nudity, plenty of funky-looking slow-moving zombies, really stupid humans, son/mother incest, leg caught in trap while fleeing zombies, zombies using tools and weapons, nice amount of blood and gore, no CGI.

If you like the older Italian zombie movies, then I say check it out.