Welcome to Potters Bluff, a bucolic little fishing village somewhere in the Northeast, where the inhabitants seem to have stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting. Trouble is, the town isn’t nearly as welcoming to guests as its picture-postcard exteriors might suggest. In fact, the citizenry have a rather nasty habit of violently dispatching unsuspecting visitors to the town. Even more strangely, these victims soon turn up again, having assumed their rightful place among the townsfolk. But Gary Sherman’s Dead & Buried has more than just gory kills on its mind. With eerie atmosphere to spare, and an emphasis on communal terrors and long-buried secrets, this surprisingly wistful film hews closer to folk horror, suggesting Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man by way of Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz’s Messiah of Evil.
The opening scene establishes the mood and modus operandi of the film, a slow-burn sequence that takes its time escalating to full-on horror. Shutterbug George LeMoyne (Christopher Allport) wanders the strand, taking artful shots of flotsam, until he happens upon the alluring Lisa (Lisa Blount), who proves willing to submit to some candid cheesecake poses. Sherman gradually establishes the perfect combination of atmosphere and titillation before springing the trap closed on George. His trial by fire at the stake suggests he’s being subjected to a kind of modern-day auto-da-fé, testing his worthiness to join the ranks of Potters Bluff. And this is only the first stage in a triple-decker set piece that showcases some of special-effects maestro Stan Winston’s most gruesome contributions to the film.
LeMoyne’s death prompts an investigation by Sheriff Dan Gillis (James Farentino) that’s only compounded by further deaths and disappearances. Gillis seeks advice from coroner-slash-undertaker William G. Dobbs (Jack Albertson), who has a noted penchant for big band music and considers himself the Da Vinci of the dearly departed. He’s a wonderfully eccentric character, and Albertson plays the part to the hilt. At home, Sheriff Gillis finds himself distracted from the case by the increasingly strange behavior of his schoolteacher wife, Janet (Melody Anderson). Later, Anderson gets a great scene wherein Janet lays out the film’s underlying “mythology,” involving witchcraft and voodoo, as a scary story for her students.
Though the film never hits you over the head with it, Dead & Buried clearly has something to say about the cost of conformity for the folks lurking behind Potters Bluff’s quaint storefronts and white picket fences. Only through a very literal death and rebirth can foreign elements be assimilated into the village, which is why there’s a decidedly ritualistic aspect to the film’s killings. Not only are they attended by the “congregation” of locals, but they’re all photographed as a way to bear witness to events. The slain are thus positioned as martyrs to the Potters Bluff cause. What’s more, the series of twists and revelations at the end of film indicate quite clearly that the residents possess no real free will of their own. They’re reduced to something between shambling zombies and helpless marionettes.
When Janet’s true nature is revealed to Sheriff Gillis, he reacts violently out of a sort of revulsion at her undead status. Her ultimate fate suggests a direct connection with Bob Clark’s similarly despairing Deathdream, down to the X’d out name of the grave’s former occupant. The final confrontation between Gillis and Dobbs goes fascinatingly meta. Dobbs’s office is filled with piercing shafts of light from numerous film projectors, each projecting a murder scene onto screens of various sizes. The room itself becomes a kind of camera obscura, directed by Dobbs, focused squarely on Sheriff Gillis. He’s about to discover the truth about himself, in one of the most haunting freeze frames in the history of horror films.
Image/Sound
Blue Underground’s 4K upgrade of Dead & Buried looks phenomenal, resolving many of the issues that hounded earlier releases, given the film’s muted palette and extensive use of diffuse lighting and various lens filters. The occasional bursts of scarlet really pop now; blacks are deep and uncrushed, revealing far more detail than before in nighttime and low-lit scenes; and grain levels are well-maintained throughout, never overwhelming the image as they have in the past. Audio is offered in English Master Audio 5.1 surround and mono, French mono, as well as a new Dolby Atmos mix that really delivers on the squishy sound effects and startling sting cues, presents the dialogue clearly and cleanly, and puts the proper focus on Joe Renzetti’s alternately melancholy and menacing score, which is provided on a separate CD.
Extras
Blue Underground carries over a trio of commentary tracks from their earlier releases of the film. The first and best of them finds director Gary Sherman and Blue Underground co-founder David Gregory going over Dead & Buried’s production history and outlining the many changes that it went through from script treatment to post-production. The second track with producer-writer Ronald Shusett and his wife Linda Turley (who appears in the film as the café waitress) is mostly limited to production anecdotes. The third track unsurprisingly contains a lot of interesting technical discussion from DP Steve Poster about his work on the film.
New to this release is a lively, conversational track across which critics Nathaniel Thompson and Troy Howarth cover Sherman’s genre bona fides (as well as those of many others in the cast and crew), draw apt comparisons between Dead & Buried and other horror films, and discuss the state of the genre in the early 1980s, with a few interesting segues along the way, such as a discussion of the complaints from fans about cult films being over-restored.
Also among the other new offerings is a short video piece comparing shooting locations in Mendocino, California, then and now, and over 30 minutes’ worth of behind-the-scenes footage shot on 8mm and accompanied by voiceover commentary from Sherman, Poster, and first assistant director Steve Frankish. In a new interview, Sherman and Renzetti discuss their frequent collaborations and explore the thought process behind scoring certain segments of Dead & Buried. And touching on an aspect of movie marketing that’s rarely discussed, horror writer Chelsea Quinn Yarbro describes her work on the tie-in novelization of Dead & Buried, which was published more than a year before the film was released in the United States.
Elsewhere among the archival materials, the late, great FX wizard Stan Winston can be seen going into great detail about the various “gags” he provided for the film. Actor Robert Englund reminisces about his early career, including his notorious turn as Buck in Tobe Hooper’s Eaten Alive, and goes into his work on Dead & Buried, memorably describing the “latent vampire eroticism” of Lisa Blount’s character. Writer Dan O’Bannon expresses his unease at accepting writing credit for what he considers a job of script doctoring, examines the psychology of fear, and admits to his love for the stories of H. P. Lovecraft. In addition to the aforementioned soundtrack CD, Blue Underground’s packaging includes an illustrated booklet with an essay by critic Michael Gingold on AVCO Embassy’s status as a purveyor of horror films. Finally, there’s a lenticular slipcase that sports one of three alternate pieces of artwork.
Overall
Gary Sherman’s brooding and bloody Dead & Buried gets an exemplary 4K Blu-ray upgrade and an excellent array of extras from Blue Underground.
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