ZOMBIE 3 (BURIAL GROUND) (1980)
Directed by Andrea
Bianchi
Starring Karin Weil and Gian Luigi
There never really was a "Zombie 2." When Lucio Fulci directed "Zombie" in 1979, it was given the title "Zombie 2" in Europe to fool those Euro-gore fans into thinking it was a sequel to "Dawn of the Dead" (entitled "Zombie" in Europe). Needless to say, "Zombie 2," as it was called in Europe, was released in the United States as "Zombie." A sequel was inevitable to that mega-hit, so producers made this piece of crap of a movie, "Zombie 3," which often goes under the title "Burial Ground" or "Night of Terror" here in the U.S. of A.
Well, enough of that
nuttiness. Onto the movie. It sucks. It bites. It reeks. It casts a midget as a child and
makes him lust after one of the hotter female characters in a disgusting (but
predictible) way, producing one of the more tasteless scenes ever to grace a
zombie film. The effects are weak and it's
so dark it's often impossible to see what the hell is going on. (That problem
may not be true of the DVD of the film that was released in 2002.)
The story involves a group
of people trapped in a funeral parlor as the dead are revived in the cemetery outside via
some kind of black magic. The storyline has no relation to Fulci's "Zombie" in
any way and Fulci was not involved in this project.
It's hard to imagine a zombie film worse than this, but they exist. See "Dawn of the Mummy" if you don't believe me. Part of the reason "Zombie 3" (best known as "Burial Ground") in the U.S. enjoys a pretty big cult following is precisely because it is so incredibly bad. In the film's opening scene, a victim tries to convince a group of zombies not to eat him by saying, "I'm your friend!" The midget, Peter Bark (pictured above), now enjoys an international fan-base, even though this was his only movie and no one knows what happened to him after he starred in it. "What's wrong?" his character asks his mother after he tries feeling her up. "I'm your son!"
Despite the amateurish story, cheesy special effects, and adult cast as an incestuous child, "Burial Ground" manages to be a pretty action-packed zombie film. It's actually better than the other film that was released under the title "Zombie 3." Fulci himself is credited as being the director of that one, although he quit about halfway through the project.
Another title of "Burial Ground" was "Nights of Terror." Check out the misspelling of the word "nights" during the last scene of the film, which features this profound quote over the screams of a zombie victim:
