Halloween Horror Month - Burial Grounds: Nights of Terror

A professor with a beard that would make Daniel Bryan jealous heads down into an old crypt muttering about the "discovery" he's made. As he's chiselling away at some stonework, some heavily clay-faced zombies turn up, attack and eat the professor even as he's begging them not to hurt him because he's their "friend". Then we cut to three couples (one with the strangest-looking son in existence, who we'll get to later) arriving at a villa that just happens to be next door to the crypt and where the professor was staying. It doesn't take long before the Etruscan zombies turn up there and lay siege to the villa, hoping to get to chow down on the tasty humans inside.

Yes, this is a zombie movie, and even better, an Italian zombie movie from that wonderful time period of the late 70s/early 80s. Bad acting, bad dubbing, bad writing, remarkable zombie makeup, gore and a fair amount of female nudity. None of this is what makes Burial Grounds: Nights of Terror so infamous in the zombie movie subgenre, however... but again, we'll get to that a little bit later.

The zombies in Nights of Terror aren't like your average zombies, however. In addition to having heads that looked like baked clay pots gone terribly wrong, they can also think well enough to use tools and lay traps. At one point in the film they even use a battering ram to break into the villa. There's no explanation for why these zombies scored higher on their cognitive skills rolls than the average zombie - but then again there's no explanation for why they're up and walking around either, save for the professor's vague mutterings about his "discovery" at the beginning of the film. The audience is really just expected to go with it and not ask too many questions.

With that in mind, there's not too much of a plot or any coherent writing in the film, either... and this is where the earlier points I alluded to come into play. You see, someone in their infinite wisdom when writing the screenplay for this movie decided that two of the characters would be a mother and her 12(ish)-year-old son, and that the best thing to add into the mix of a zombie movie would be an Oedipal/incest subplot. To accommodate this, they cast a 26-year-old dwarf in the role of the son. It's safe to say that the actor, Peter Bark, steals the film in this role, because you just cannot believe what you're seeing whenever he's on screen trying to act like a small child one minute and feeling up his mother the next. Truly, in the ranks of batshit insane Italian horror films, Burial Grounds: Nights of Terror has a special place.