Nerds That Geek Movie Review: ‘Burial Ground’

Written by John Edward Betancourt

I would like to think that when it comes to zombie movies, I have seen it all. I don't know if I have achieved this epic goal as of yet, but I can tell you this, I've watched a ton of movies about reanimated corpses and there have been amazing ones and there have been terrible ones. It's the yin and the yang of every genre. But there is one particular zombie movie that came up in a discussion the other day that I wish I had managed to forget about; Burial Ground.

This one is a foreign living dead film, which left me curious the first time I saw the VHS cassette hanging out in the video store. After all, The Blind Dead were an excellent addition to the zombieverse and Lucio Fulci's Zombie was impressive on so many levels, so naturally I thought it would be worth my time, and holy crap, I regret being this wrong. The plot, if you can call it that, revolves around a bunch of friends meeting in a lovely home out in the boonies, as many a group in horror films are wont to do and somewhere along the way they discover zombies and well, it's a mess past that point.  

Because, the main characters are vapid beings, devoid of personality. So, when the dead begin to attack, and pick them off one by one, you could care less. Yeah, there is splatter, yeah, it's cool but, I never thought I would say this about guts and gore in a zombie flick, but all of it is boring and repetitive. Those two words really summarize the film nicely, as since the characters basically run around to avoid the living dead, only to find them in another location.  

But what truly makes this film terrible, and no I'm not making this up and please be sitting down as you read this; is the subplot involving incest. Yeah, this movie goes there. Long story short, one of the characters is a single mother and her ‘teenage’ son has an Oedipus complex, and we are even treated to a scene where he spies on his mom undressing, complete with his creepy delight. To make matters worse, the filmmakers clearly cast a little person well into his forties to play the ‘kid.’ To I guess…. make this really gross and inappropriate sub plot work? Well either way, it doesn’t and it’s creepy and uncomfortable to watch.
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​If anything, this is a weird little movie without any solid identity, and it really is just plain awful. My advice is to steer clear of this one, but if by chance you are curious about how bad this is and decide you want to see it, I beg of you, don't. Go take a walk outside, put together a puzzle, or simply stare at the wall. All of those things would be more worth your while than watching what I have to consider to be the worst zombie movie that I have ever seen.  

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