By Todd Garbarini
Dead & Buried is one of the those oddball horror films that came out when I was twelve; I recall seeing the television trailers and movie poster artwork in the local theater lobby and didn’t catch up with the film until nearly 20 years later on a lackluster import DVD.
Gary A. Sherman, who also directed the excellent and in-dire-need-of-royal-DVD-treatment Death Line (released as Raw Meat in the United States) in 1972, as well as Vice Squad (1982) and Poltergeist III (1988), shot Dead & Buried in Mendocino, CA. The town may look familiar to fans of Daniel Haller’s The Dunwich Horror (1970), Herb Freed’s Haunts (1977), Barbara Peeters’s Humanoids from the Deep (1980). Joe Dante’s The Howling (1981), and Lewis Teague’s Cujo (1983) as they were all filmed there.
James Farentino (Me, Natalie and The Final Countdown) is a town sheriff whose Potter’s Bluff is plagued by a rash of murders by the townspeople. Hoping to get to the bottom of the reasons behind the murders, he enlists the help of the local mortician, Dobbs (Jack Albertson of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory). The sheriff’s wife (Melody Anderson of Flash Gordon) engages in some suspicious behavior, and what may have seemed original and fresh in 1981 is predictable and formulaic today. However, that much aside, this is a good little horror film, with good performances and great location shooting. The incomparable Blue Underground Blu-ray looks wonderful, blowing previous home video versions out of the water. The ample supplements consist of:
• Commentary with director Gary Sherman and David Gregory (Blue Underground)
• Commentary with co-writer/co-producer Ron Shusett and actress Linda Turley
• Commentary with cinematographer Steve Poster
• Stan Winston's Dead & Buried EFX featurette
• Robert Englund: An Early Work of Horror featurette
• Dan O'Bannon: Crafting Fear featurette
• Two Trailers
The subtitles are easy to read and correspond to the action on the screen. If you haven’t seen the film, you owe it to yourself to pick this one up.
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