Buried Alive Review
FX master and genre fav. Robert Kurtzman makes his second directorial effort after 1997’s Wishmaster with this straight-to-DVD release via Dimension’s new “Extreme” label.
Working with numerous genre films from Night of the Creeps and Evil Dead 2, to In the Mouth of Madness and From Dusk Till Dawn, one would think he knows his horror and would deliver some pretty good flicks. Wishmaster was decent and so was his third feature The Rage, but his attempt at the supernatural/slasher genre has failed with this second effort. Not only do we get very few kills throughout the entire thing, they’re so spread out that it almost makes you question whether you’re watching another needless straight-to-DVD American Pie sequel (without the mediocre comedy) or an actual horror flick. I say this, because the movie is essentially just one long college party with a handful of actors. We’ve got cheesy pranks, lots of drinking, sexin’, and gratuitous nudity. There’s one single kill 30-minutes in, then a second kill nearly 45-minutes later, and at this point the movie is reaching its climax!The story is your standard cheesy horror fair, with a group of young college kids heading off to a secluded ranch house in some desert area. Most of which think they’re there to help pull a prank on a couple young sorority girls, while our lead and his “nerd” partner have gold in mind, thinking the old stories of buried gold somewhere in the land will come true for them if they look hard enough. Whatever their reasoning for the trip is, they end up unleashing the vengeful spirit of an old woman, who likes to take her sweet time killing off the young punks. New genre fav. Tobin Bell makes an appearance as the caretaker of the ranch home, and dishes out a couple good scares towards the kids and his antics, and the nudity, were the only reasons why I kept watching. Speaking of which, there’s a nice (pointless) scene half-way through the film, in which the two wanna-be sorority girls are forced to run across a desert path from the ranch to the caretaker’s home with only one strip of clothing. Naturally this scene is only there to keep the viewers watching, as we’d all likely have turned it off by now.
The outcast in this film is the “nerd” who happened to seem buddy-buddy with our lead guy, but is easily forgetting thirty minutes in when he steps out for some fresh air and gets an axe straight through his head to his crotch. The rest of the characters simply shrug him off, as his silhouette is inside their car, thinking he’s just sitting in the driver’s seat, motionless, and in the hot-ass sun for literally two days, because that’s what “nerds” usually do with their spare time right? Then once they uncover some “old documents” they discover a little dark history behind the property, and naturally one of the characters just so happens to be an expert on the matters of witchcraft and Native American folklore, and we’re given all the answers we need as to why this old woman has a grudge against these young punks. The remaining characters in the film literally have no idea there’s an evil spirit after them until 15-minutes remaining in the running time, and the pacing finally picks up to give us the last (and much needed) kills. On the plus side, the make-up job on the old lady was well done (as expected) and there were a couple somewhat gory death scenes, but they’re so far apart that it’s almost not worth even mentioning.
Despite all the negative, the reason why I decided to be generous and give the film a 5-rating, was mainly due to the decent production values (and the females weren’t bad either). If the project didn’t have such a talented man behind the effects, things might have been quite a different story. Even so, there aren’t many other redeeming values here. The acting was decent, and so was the directing, but the script was hollow and the pacing was entirely too slow for this type of film.
OVERALL
Unoriginal and way too slow-paced for a movie of this nature. The death scenes were few and very far between, while the rest of the movie plays out as one long house party. However, the effects were decent and so was the acting (for a B movie anyway). Not recommended.
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