Dead and Buried
Dead and Buried is what would happen if Jeffery Dahmer was given absolute control of Mayberry in an episode of the Twilight Zone. It has perhaps the darkest twist of any horror movie made in the 1980s, as well as one of the most disturbing. A sadly underappreciated horror movie, Dead and Buried deserves to be revisited in all its goofy gore and wild abandon. During the opening credits a Volkswagen van arrives at a beach. I know from other 1980s movies that Volkswagen vans were the preferred attack-vehicles of Libyan terrorists, and I suppose they have driven on set to collect their due. A man is on the beach taking pictures of rusted buckets and birds (he must have a comprehensive assignment) and notices an attractive woman. The man looks at her face through his camera long enough for her to ask him if he has "a really good camera", perhaps so she can judge how good the focus is and how far she'll have to run to get out of it. Yet she is a flirtatious little minx, despite the polluted condition and general aesthetic appeal of the beach. As he reloads the film, she asks him if he is on an assignment and he says that he isn't; he is about to tell her his name, and then she decides what it is for him – Freddy – and so he decides on her name as well: Lisa. After he tells her that she is pretty, Lisa asks Freddy if she is pretty enough to be a model. Freddy does not answer directly, but takes his camera off its tripod and coaxes her into taking pictures instead, which might be a subtle way of saying she isn't pretty enough to have sex with, but pretty enough to sell some photos of to some homeless people further up the beach. He remarks that he'll put the pictures in Playboy, and he probably means that literally as he intends to superimpose her face on a better body. This is encouragement enough for Lisa to show Freddy her breasts, and that is enough to make Freddy hesitate. Even after she asks him if he wants her, he replies "Right here?" because, as anyone knows, if you're going to have sex with a stranger on a beach you don't want a camera lying around. But as Freddy ponders the logistics of having sex on the dirty sand, she grabs his camera and takes a picture of the stupid face he makes as he tries to figure out why on Earth she would want a picture of him if they were just about to have split-second anonymous sex. Well, to be exact, alter-ego sex, but insincere sex all the same. Freddy is attacked from behind by what appears to be a band of sailors in some desperate collusion with Lisa, as she doesn't scream or run away from them. The sailors beat Freddy and tie him to a pole with a fishnet before taking his picture again, a fishnet that might have served other purposes had Lisa been sincere with her offer for sex. Then they welcome him to Potter's Bluff and pour gasoline on him. Another woman appears and sets Freddy on fire with a match while the sailors continue to take pictures, although why is a question I am sure does not concern Freddy at the moment. Freddy came to the beach to take pictures of trash and has met a bad end at the hands of a lying woman, who for all Freddy knows, might have put an ad in a fetish magazine asking for a man who could fulfill this particular fantasy with her and Freddy just happened to show up horny and with a camera to boot. The movie then cuts to a car that has flipped over with its tires caught on fire. A Sheriff is on the scene and calls the accident in to the dispatch center, run by an elderly lady who wants to know if she should call the funeral home while he waits for the "meat wagon". The "meat wagon" shortly arrives, driven by an old man playing light jazz on the sound system as if he had been on a hot date prior to being called in and does not want to spoil the mood, gory accident or not. The next day Sheriff Gillis goes to a diner and is invited to sit with some other officers who are having coffee. Sheriff Gillis has a Master’s Degree in criminology but decided to come home and work at Potter's Bluff instead of taking a more prestigious job elsewhere, which begs the question of how the events in this movie might have been different if a less educated Sheriff was on the scene. A woman brings Gillis some coffee; she is the same woman who was on the beach taking pictures of Freddy as he burned alive. In the next scene a drunk is singing at night, drinking from a bottle in a brown bag in the heavy fog that would obscure whatever he's drinking without the brown bottle if deception is his goal. He begins to have an argument with an imaginary person about boats, although it is unclear whether this is someone from his past or an imaginary friend who only insists on arguing about boats when he comes out of the bottle. He sits down and a pair of arms burst from the brick wall behind him. A redheaded boy in a high school sweater takes his picture and then tells him to smile, an inversion of the typical order of things but I suppose the world has been askew for this drunk long before arms grabbed him from behind a brick wall. The man behind the wall holds the drunk with a pair of hooks while another man attacks him with a harpoon. He scratches the drunks face with the harpoon before deciding to impale him with it. Mr. Dobbs is in his office, home, or perhaps both (his predilection for jazz has not given me a clear indication of which). He is interrupted from listening to jazz by the redheaded boy who took the drunk's picture last night, who announces Sheriff Gillis. Mr. Dobbs was embalming an old woman before Jimmy came in, and it is perhaps out of agitation over being interrupted that Dobbs makes a joke about Jimmy selling weed, indicating to Gillis the precise place it can be found. Gillis laughs this off in such a way that I think Gillis already found the weed before going to see Dobbs in his jazzy embalming-lair. I might have smoked some weed myself had I known Dobbs was going to give an impromptu lecture on the art of embalming that Gillis didn't ask for. Gillis wants to know if the body "fished out" of the car wreck could have been burned elsewhere and then put in the car. Their conversation is interrupted by Betty, the woman at the dispatch center, who calls to tell Gillis there is another dead body at the boat yard. This can only be the drunk. Gillis tells Dobbs to meet him at the boatyard "as soon as possible", although Dobbs just explained the depths of the embalming process to him and Gillis should know it might take Dobbs a while to get there, especially if he smokes some of Jimmy's weed while Jimmy takes pictures of the corpses and then asks them to smile. The boat yard has a lot of junk lying it, one piece of junk being a dead body lying on what I can only guess are old boat or car parts. Mr. Dobbs is at the scene with his ambulance. Mr. Dobbs thinks the man was murdered, and Sheriff Gillis agrees. Sheriff Gillis has also formed some conclusions he is keeping to himself, because in the next scene he goes to a hotel and asks its owner Bill if anyone has checked out without paying or disappeared. If the man had paid, it would be natural for him to disappear. Bill remembers a man who was there for a couple of days whom he hasn't seen since, but the man left his suitcase behind. They open the suitcase, which is full of photography books but no form of identification. Then Bill suddenly remembers that Gillis's wife knows the photographer. After this Gillis goes home, kisses his wife, and then takes off his gun belt and leaves it right by the front door he also didn't lock. This is the second Sheriff I have seen in 1980s-horror movies with a clear disregard for where they leave their guns in their own homes, and the first Sheriff's habit of doing this led to people getting killed. His wife tells him the photographer is George and he sells photography equipment. However, when Gillis tells her that he thinks George was the one in the accident, she says that is the sort of thing that happens to other people and not those she knows. This implies that she either did not know George that well or that she doesn't care if it was George or not because whatever affection she had for him was based on something the car wreck took away. Gillis seems jealous of George, but his wife seems unconcerned about this. In the next scene Gillis has one of those infuriating conversations with the principal, which is infuriating because they both stop their cars on the road to have it. If Gillis and the principal are behaving this way I am not surprised the killer chose a car accident to cover up a murder. The principal denies that George ever sold them photography equipment because the school never bought it, which, if Sheriff Gillis is in fact jealous enough to murder – and I'm at least entertaining the notion for my own entertainment – his might make him think that the principal was involved in a love triangle that George was snuffed out of. Speaking of George, he is in the hospital wearing a full-body cast. Sheriff Gillis arrives and wants to talk to George now that he is out of the coma and Gillis knows two facts about him no man would want to explain in such a condition. The doctor won't allow him to talk to George, which is a good thing because if George tells him who the real killers are Gillis might not go after the principal and I want to see the principal die. While the doctor is explaining to Gillis that George has no lips, a fact that makes me want Gillis to interview him even more, Lisa enters George's room dressed a nurse. Word has gotten out that George survived the burning as well as the accident to cover it up, and so Lisa must have been sent to finish this unfortunate business George has somehow brought on his own head. She gives him a shot with a very long needle, sticking it all the way through his eye, and I fully expect him to die from this injury based on an analogy I'm drawing from yet another similarity with Bloody Birthday. George jumps and then dies with the syringe still sticking out of his eye. An alarm goes off that must have been rigged to his life-support system, a very loud alarm that sounds like a fire alarm, which could be confusing in the case of an actual fire that would cause more alarms to go off as someone within the building dies from it. In the next scene Sheriff Gillis is at the cemetery. Dobbs arrives and berates Gillis for not having discovered who George was earlier. He is also upset that he had to use a sealed casket that prevented him from showing off his skills to an audience he is presumptuous to assume exists, and especially because George is an unknown quantity in Potter's Bluff. In the next scene Mrs. Gillis arrives home wearing what appears to be a purple cape. Gillis is not in a pleasant mood, sitting by himself in the living room where he gives perfunctory replies to his wife's questions. She rambles on about shopping, PTA meetings, and microwave dinner options for Gillis in the fridge. Considering that her husband is a cop, and she spends a lot of time shopping and wears purple clothing throughout the movie, I suspect that Mrs. Gillis is a kleptomaniac. Mrs. Gillis has a chore for him as well: she wants him to drop off a film her students made. Before she leaves, she reassures Gillis that he will catch the murderer, but Gillis is not uplifted and after a ceremonious goodbye kiss he stares at the cylinder containing the film as if it is a porn his wife made behind his back and had the gall to send him to develop. A family arrives at Potter's Bluff: a husband, his wife, and their son. The father goes inside the dinner to ask for directions. He is about to get back in his car without directions when the waitress who burned George appears. The son wants ice cream, but the dinner doesn't have any and the waitress is not too upset about this on account of the kid. Then the wife asks about gas, which is something the waitress also knows a lot about, so she asks Freddie if he can get it for them. George turns around on a bar stool with a bashful grin that seems to expresses the actor's pleasure of still being in the movie more than it pleases George to be alive. I do not know why Lisa did not simply name Freddie George and spare me the confusion. There is thick fog covering the road as the man drives. The father "can't see a thing in this stuff”, so if he runs someone over the family will have to wait until the fog clears to be able to tell who it is. Something flies across the street and the father runs into a pole. The son, who was asleep in the back reels from the sudden stop and slams his head against the front seat. He cries about it in a way that eradicates the initial sympathy I always try to furnish kids in horror movies but have not once been able to maintain. The wife sees a light on in a nearby house, which goes off after she tells her husband about it and he will not believe her, such things being unheard of. They decide to go to the house anyway, as the son is injured and requires medical attention from a stranger. Where George is and what happened to the gas objective of the mission are questions more things to me. When they knock on the door, no one answers so they go inside, one bad premise following another that will lead to a grisly conclusion of their affairs. No one is inside, so they begin to explore the house. They discover that there is no electricity in the house, yet continue to shout "Hello?" as if someone who lived there and didn't pay the power bill would be someone they would want to meet. Meanwhile there are people outside the house stalking them; I can see their shadows behind the curtains although the family cannot, or at least the son does not see them because I am sure he would either whine about it or ask them for ice cream if he did. The husband goes into the basement to fix the fuse box. Now the mission that originally was to get gas, and then became a medical emergency, is now a mission to fix an electrical problem for someone who hasn't dusted their house since the Cold War began. The father comes upstairs and surprises the family with a jump scare. Then one of the people outside jumps through the window at the family, and another person takes their picture at the same time. This picture will be a prize for their collection no matter what theme it has. The man who jumped through the window has a large cleaver in his hand and welcomes them to Potter's Bluff. The family runs away; they make it into a bedroom, where they shut the door and a girl immediately starts to hit the wall beside the door with a hammer. Although that is a stupid plan, it will eventually work. The father starts ripping boards off a barricade on one of the windows, and the owner of this house becomes even more interesting than the family who is about to be murdered in it. If his reason for barricading his house was paranoia, he failed because the mob has gotten inside without alerting the family. But if his purpose was to lure people inside with cobwebs and no power and then trap them with barricaded windows, that purpose he has achieved most spectacularly. The family climbs down from the bedroom with a ladder. They make it to their car. A large faction of the mob that thought they would do this – and are excited about being correct – comes towards them with what appears to be a spotlight. The car won’t start. A woman in the backseat jumps out and grabs the kid, but before she can get away with him – who might be the only person the mob is after and if that is the case, Mr. and Mrs. Whoever can always have another one –the wife rips the hair off an entire hemisphere of her head as if she was waxing the hair off a testicle. The car finally cranks and they get away. They enter the town, passing in front of Sherriff Gillis, who also runs over a man who was chasing them. When Gillis bends down to check the body, a hand grabs him from inside the grill, and for a brief second I have the happy thought that he had run over another person feet first before this accident and was too preoccupied mulling over the murders to even notice. But it turns out this is the arm of the man he just ran over, which stuck to the grill and yet is alive independently of the man he ran over. The owner of the arm jumps up behind Gillis and karate-chops him on the neck, which knocks Gillis out fortuitously because I know this man learned that chop by watching TV. The man grabs his arm and runs away. Sheriff Gillis pursues the man into the barn. Inside the barn there is nothing but a jump scare with a bird that causes Gillis to fire his gun at it as it flies out of the window. Gillis wasn’t trained with jump-scares in mind at the academy. Back home Gillis is looking for some shells he had in a drawer and asks Janet about them. He finds a book about witchcraft in her panty drawer, which is book-marked and puts a precise cap on exactly how many spells she can cast on Gillis. There is also a cruel-looking dagger in the drawer. Having both, Gillis confronts his wife with a swagger he would not have if he had read about the dagger in the book but not found it. Janet tells Gillis that she’s teaching her students about witchcraft, which begs the questions where and what she teaches even harder than why she has the knife, which in all probability came with the book at whatever garage sell she bought it at. She wins the debate pretty quickly and turns the table on him for not having delivered the films to Ernie, which, considering the witchcraft, must be a rather interesting film indeed. She throws his bullets at him, saying she found them in the cabin, and although he asked her where they were five minutes ago and although I don’t know where the cabin is, I’m goddamn sure it isn’t inside the house. Sheriff Gillis takes the film to Ernie the very next morning, although he makes a point to Ernie that nobody can pick them up but him. The next scene is back at the same trashy beach where George was killed, the opening shot focusing on a tow truck. The truck has pulled a car out of the surf, and I knew it was the family’s car from the hole in the windshield, but then movie shows me the kid’s airplane to drive the point home. Anyone dumb enough to have liked the little bastard will have no ambiguity now about whether he died or not. In the next scene Sheriff Gillis retrieves particles from the grill of his car. He asks a lab assistant to check them for human skin. Mrs. Gillis is teaching her class in the next scene. Her class is composed of young children, and she’s teaching them about Voodoo. Sheriff Gillis arrives as she tells the kids that in order for the Master to keep control of his undead zombies, he has to cut out their hearts and keep the hearts hidden; I wonder if the scriptwriter even read the witchcraft book she is supposed to have pulled that from. In the next scene, a female hitchhiker hitches a ride with an old man into Potter’s Bluff. His windshield is broken so I think he’s involved in the murders, for no better reason than that they tend to be a sloppy lot. The girl is attractive enough to allow me to bring up a problem I have with 1980s horror movies and nudity, which I call The Modus Tollens Nudity Syndrome. Except only rarely, when a moderately attractive woman gets naked early on and then a slew of more attractive women follow, none of the latter will get naked because horror movies operate on some negative premise that if a moderately attractive woman gets naked first, then all the others must maintain their dignity. Expressed logically: If A gets naked, then B, C, and D will not. A gets naked. Goddamnit. The old man pulls into a boatyard, then pulls a camera out of his glove-compartment and then tells her to smile. She is pulled out of the car by a gang of people who have popped up out of nowhere. It seems rather lucky that the old man had accomplices there waiting for him. Then another man takes her picture after they throw her to the ground. Then an old man hits her over the head with a rock, apparently so hard it knocks her out of one shoe but not the other. Gillis finds her in the middle of some road with a trail of mud behind her. Mr. Dobbs promises to make her beautiful again, which be a challenge because she is already fairly decomposed and half of her face is bruised. Then there is a scene that I didn’t expect to see: he pulls all the skin from her face and then adds layers of plastic and rubber before eventually restructuring her entire face. This is a method I’m almost certain does not exist in any funeral home anywhere, and would be insanely impractical if it did. After he leaves, another person enters, caresses her hair, and then she sits up. Next, the lab assistant tells Sheriff Gillis that the skin samples he sent him have been dead for months. After his meeting with Gillis, the assistant goes back into his lab; the fact that the camera followed him in there at all revealing that this will be his final scene. He looks at something in a microscope, exclaims “It can’t be!”, and then the camera focuses on him dialing a number on a rotary phone. I wonder if he dialed the right number from the script. He’s grabbed from behind, and then killed by Lisa in a strange and humorous fashion: she puts two hoses up his nose, which inject some fluid that steams as it goes in and makes his face bubble with welts that explode in black, purple puss. His last moan sounds like a stoic soda losing the last of its fizz. In the next scene Dobbs has come to see Sheriff Gillis in his office. He’s there to report a theft, the theft of the “pretty young waif you found brutalized”. Perhaps Gillis’s initial thought was that the killer was caught unawares and had to leave. Perhaps he might think there’s a necrophile on the loose who is tired of all the corpses in town reanimating themselves and walking around. I honestly don’t know what Gillis is thinking. Mr. Dobbs reveals that Janet has been coming to see him in the hopes of finding out more of the black arts. Gillis goes back to the graveyard, but the grave is already open and the casket has been pulled out with a pulley. The only thing in George’s coffin is his heart – which is still beating. Gillis has to conclude that his wife is using Voodoo to make zombies, because otherwise a necrophile wanted George’s body without his heart getting in the way. Gillis has Betty send a Telex to a crime database for information on Dobbs. Then he goes to retrieve his film from Ernie. When the Telex arrives on Dobbs, it is revealed that he was a pathologist in Rhode Island but things didn’t go well after he made “unauthorized use of dead bodies in a county morgue”, and I’ll let you fill in what that euphemism means in pathology circles. Gillis goes home, where he asks for Janet and then pulls a projector out of her closet that also has the three-bulb spotlight that has been annoying me throughout this movie. The film is a movie of a couple having sex in bed. The man is stabbed to death with the skull knife, then after a series of people come in, it is revealed that his wife was the woman having sex. This makes Gillis squeeze his fist in anger and scream, and then the film shows Dobbs, which makes him scream even harder. Gillis confronts Dobbs, who has already set up a screening of what little exposition remains before one man can kill the other and this movie can end. Janet was Dobb’s first zombie, which means Gillis has been fucking a corpse for God-knows-how-long. Gillis does not react to this well, but then he also doesn’t shoot Dobbs right there on the spot, and he even has his gun already in his hand. Gillis is about to kill Dobbs, but then Janet comes in and Gillis gets sentimental. Janet is sort of like a Stepford Wife, the only difference being that she is a walking corpse. He loses control after a piece of her flesh peels off in his hand and he shoots her a few times. She doesn’t die, but admits that she is dead and probably needs to be buried. Dobbs sneaks up behind Gillis, who turns around and shoots him. Gillis then runs to the graveyard looking for Janet as Dobbs struggles on the floor. Janet has gotten into George’s grave and still very much wants to be buried. So Gillis covers her with dirt, leaving only her face, which she covers herself after she tells him that she loves him. He lays on her grave a bit, then runs back to the funeral home, where Dobbs has killed himself with two long prongs attached to rubber tubes. Then, in one of the best endings to any horror movie I have seen, Dobbs comes back to life and tells Gillis there is one more thing he should know and points to the movie screen. The man on top of his wife rolls off, only to reveal himself as Gillis. Gillis turns around with his hands over his eyes, then takes them away as they begin to rot. |