DEAD ALIVE (1992)

"I kick ass for the Lord!"

1957: 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. 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.

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.

SAN QUENTIN (1937)

Good cast, but the story is as weak as a one-legged kitten with feline polio. The prisoners at San Quentin have been getting kinda rowdy lately so the state calls in a military man (Pat O'Brien) to take over the prison and whip the men into shape. As movie fate would have it, the night before he starts the job, O'Brien meets nightclub singer, Ann Sheridan, and instantly falls in love with her. As he's putting the moves on her, her younger brother (played by Humphrey Bogart who was 11 years older than Sheridan in real life) shows up with the coppers hot on his tail. He's arrested for robbery. And I'm sure you can guess what prison he's going to...that's right wise guy: San Quentin.

On his first day in the joint, Bogart gets into a fight, but tough loving O'Brien makes it a point to reform Bogart with a kind but firm hand. Pulling Bogart in the opposite direction, is a fellow prisoner who wants Bogart to take part in an escape.

With a runtime of only 70 minutes (!!!), you never get a chance to get bored, but the characters are two-dimensional as fuck and the story completely uninspired. In most of his movies Bogart commands your attention, but here he was completely miscast.  People constantly talked about him like he was a child, but in real life he was 38 years old and looked it! At one point somebody mentioned his character was 25!

Very little action, a completely miscast Humphrey Bogart, unoriginal story, Ann Sheridan's hair was too short. Skip it. If you need me I'll be in my room watching I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG.

Shadow of cameraman.