It has reanimated corpses, it has a small New England town with residents of suspicious biology, but 1981's Dead & Buried isn't based on an H.P. Lovecraft story, though that venerable author's influence is certainly present. It's not a landmark of horror or anything but the film has some decent qualities, not the least of which is effects work by Stan Winston.
Winston really shines in a scene where an intriguing, eccentric mortician named Dobbs (Jack Albertson) reconstructs a beautiful hitchhiker called Chance (Lisa Marie). He removes the mutilated flesh from her face and starts almost from scratch.
She's only the latest in a string of murders being investigated by the local sheriff (James Farentino) who wonders with exasperation how this could be happening in a town the size of "a postage stamp".
We know right from the first scene that it's a big group of various townspeople committing the crime. The first scene sets up the story as though it's going to be about the Gaze--a professional photographer (Christopher Allport) is getting photos on the beach when suddenly he finds his camera trained on a pretty woman's feet.
She (Lisa Blount) coyly asks if she could be a model and he starts taking glamour shots of her. She takes off her top and invites him to have sex with her when suddenly she takes his camera and starts photographing him while a mob of townsfolk start beating him to a pulp before setting him on fire.
The dead come back but the motives for killing them in the first place are never made entirely clear, leaving us to extrapolate from the subtext that it's about asserting absolute control over human life. It seems dead people are much easier to control and, once they're fixed up, maintain their looks longer. There's a moment in the climax that kind of reminded me of Vertigo, where a man finds the woman he loves was essentially created by another man.
It's not a bad movie. Slightly messy. I also love the grimy, greenish hospital interiors.
And the little hole in the wall cafe where the undead mob cool their heels.
Dead & Buried is available on Amazon Prime.
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