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Buried Alive
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray A - America - Vinegar Syndrome Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (26th September 2022). |
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The Film
 Janet (The Vineyard's Karen Witter) has taken a new job as a biology teacher at the Ravenscroft Hall, a reform school for delinquent girls, after being impressed by a lecture given by its impassioned director Gary (The Man from U.N.C.L.E.'s Robert Vaughn). Upon arriving at the school, she learns from a local cop (The Mummy's Arnold Vosloo) that one of the girls had run away the night before. The girls are a volatile bunch lead by Debbie (adult film actress Ginger Lynn Allen, later of The Devil's Rejects) and colleague Dr. Schaeffer (Halloween's Donald Pleasance) seems a bit unhinged. At night, the girls meet up with guys from the nearby town to party in the off-limit cellars beneath the school which Janet learns was once a mental institution run by Gary's father (Blood of Dracula's Castle's John Carradine). When Fingers (Stigmata's Nia Long) finds the switchblade she gave the missing girl in the cellars, she approaches Janet who is already contending with nightmarish visions of breathing brick walls, swarms of ants (even outside of her visions, the school does seem to have a major ant problem), and Carradine's scene-chewing. Gary dismisses the continuing disappearances of the girls as runaways that he has failed, but Janet is drawn deeper into the depths of the former institution. Not to be confused with Frank Darabont's 1990 TV movie (and its sequel), Buried Alive was one of three Edgar Allan Poe "adaptations" produced by Harry Alan Towers' Breton Productions for Menahem Golan's 21st Century Film Corporation (the company was part of Golan's severance package from his The Cannon Group partnership with Yoram Globus), the other two being the Alan Birkinshaw-directed pair The House of Usher and The Masque of the Red Death. All three of the films featured special make-up effects work by Scott Wheeler, who was nominated for an Academy Award for his make-up effects on Star Trek: First Contact (his grisly prosthetics for the sketch show MADtv have more in common with his work here). Although the script by Jake Chesi and Stuart Lee would seem to allude to Poe's "The Premature Burial" as its source story, Buried Alive actually has more in common with "The Cask of Amontillado" and "The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether" (besides the school's name "Ravenscroft," the appearance of a prowling black cat precedes each of the murders, although the script does not utilize the final twist of Poe's "The Black Cat").  Towers had previously collaborated with former porn director Gérard Kikoïne and his regular cinematographer Gérard Loubeau on the made-for-cable Private Screenings softcore erotica pics Lady Libertine/Frank and I and Love Circles as well as Cannon's late 1980s Mandingo retreads Dragonard and The Master of Dragonard Hill). Loubeau's photography is attractive but the heavy use of canted angles becomes monotonous, and whatever style he and Kikoine achieve is dispelled as soon as any of the actors start speaking. Most of the supporting actors sound like they've been dubbed (which is likely since they are probably South African production quota talent). Witter is good at the hysterics but projects no authority as a teacher – although she is required more than once to intervene in confrontations – and goes through the woman-in-peril motions. Vaughn chews the scenery effortlessly (by the 1990s, were we really supposed to believe that actors like Vaughn in a horror movie might possibly be red herrings?) and Pleasance is his usual kooky self (besides The House of Usher, Pleasance also appeared in the aforementioned Cannon Films/Towers Ten Little Indians around this time). A raving, wheelchair-bound Carradine pops up at random points to terrify Witter (the film is dedicated to his memory since he passed away in Rome shortly after the film completed production). Allen earns her prominent "and – as" opening credit as the bitchy Debbie, and Long gives a good supporting performance and is the most sympathetic of the girls (and the most tolerable of the main cast, period). William Butler – later of the Night of the Living Dead remake, produced by Golan – shows up as Debbie's townie boyfriend who meets a sticky end (Butler also assisted on the film's make-up effects and also worked on John Carl Buechler's MMI crew for some of the late 1980s Charles Band Empire Pictures titles in the US and Italy). Vosloo's cop pops in and out of the picture at convenient points to remind us that there is supposedly a small California town beyond the South African locations including the historical Jeppe School for Boys that serves as Ravenscroft. Frédéric Talgorn's synthesizer score is perfectly proficient, but not particularly distinctive (according to his website, Talgorn only wrote ten minutes of new music for the film with the rest filled in by his synth demo tracks for Kikoine's Towers-produced Edge of Sanity). The song heard during the basement party is "Love Bites" from Cannon's Ninja III: The Domination. Kikoine's son Gilbert served as the film's editor while the sets of production designer Leonardo Coen Cagli's – whose surname is misspelled in the opening credits – are attractive but not as baroque as his work on The House of Usher which shared some of the same sets that were later were rearranged, repainted, and redressed for Birkinshaw's follow-up Masque of the Red Death. Ultimately, Buried Alive is less interesting as a film than as a point of intersection of exploitation film history for Towers, Kikoine – who edited a number of Jess Franco films not produced by Towers – Cannon Films, and executive producer Avi Lerner (who also produced the dreadful South African supernatural slasher The Stay Awake before moving into the American direct-to-video action market with his company Nu Image and the big leagues with his company Millennium Films). The opening credits misspell Poe's middle name as "Allen". 
Video
Released direct-to-video in the United States on VHS and laserdisc by RCA/Columbia, Buried Alive eventually wound up along with most of the 21st Century Film Corporation and Cannon libraries with MGM who utilized the existing tape master for their manufactured-on-demand DVD-R line. Vinegar Syndrome's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen Blu-ray comes from a new 2K scan of the original 35mm interpositive. At first, it does not seem like as massive improvement as the Blu-rays of The House of Usher and Masque of the Red Death (both better lit and photographed by Jossi Wein), but this appears to be a matter of the original low-lit photography than that of the elements or Vinegar Syndrome's grading. The night scenes under credits opticals are very dark, somewhat flat-looking, and there appears to be a light leak on the edge of the frame in some shots, but things pick up after the credits. The subsequent night scenes and dark gobo-shadowed basement sequences boast a better sense of depth, sharpness in the well-exposed areas, and the overall high definition upgrade calls attention to the textures of the settings – which look less like stucco than they do recycled in the other Poe films – creeping ants in the frame, as well as details in the production design like the a bulletin board with the name of the reform school's former incarnation "The Ravenscroft Health Facility." Wheeler's prosthetic gore effects hold up well but some dummy heads very much look the part. 
Audio
The DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track boasts clear dialogue and effects while also calling attention to the heavy amount of ADR for the South African extras. A side effect of making some of the lower-mixed music cues more prominent is the monotonous reuse of some pieces. Optional English SDH subtitles are included with some proofing errors.
Extras
Extras consist of a pair of new interviews. In "Ginger's Antics" (12:35) – the stylized lettering of the title card placing emphasis on the "ant" – actress Allen recalls being contacted by Towers and auditioning with the kitchen scene in which she threatens another girl with an electric mixer. She recalls becoming good friends with Butler and Verna Bridges – sister of actor Todd Bridges – who was on location as seventeen-year-old Long's adult escort and went on safari with Allen in between the production of the film and a subsequent film they made in South Africa: Let the Music Be. She recalls her relative inexperience as an actress and hoping that Kikoïne would rein in her performance, and blames him for her becoming a smoker because he threatened to fire her if she kept getting sick while smoking fake joints that had real tobacco. She recalls Vaughn being standoffish, Pleasance amusingly upstaging him with the actor's habit of snacking (as evidenced in other films), and her sadness at seeing Carradine wheelchair-bound and seemingly checked out mentally on the set.  In "Well, I Wanna Be an Actor" (18:38), actor/prosthetic effects assistant Butler recalls having met Towers in South Africa during the shooting of American Ninja 4: The Annihilation and amazing the producer in knowing his past genre credits. He initially balked at being asked by Towers to appear in Buried Alive in South Africa during apartheid and recalls the party atmosphere on the set, as well as his continuing friendships with Allen and Witter, as well as being star-struck by Pleasance (their post-shoot dinner was canceled because someone was murdered in the lobby of their hotel). He also recalls Wheeler who he knew from Buechler's effects shop and helping where he could when he was not acting. Amusingly, he recalls friction with Vaughn and being at the actor's mercy when stuck in a hole having shovels of dirt thrown in his face (as well as the production unwise move of using African ants that bit the actors). He also reveals that he first saw the completed film on VHS while he was roommates with actor Viggo Mortensen (who starred in the Empire production Prison on which Butler worked in the effects unit). The interviews have optional English subtitles. NOTE: Whoever transcribed the interview dialogue or proofed an auto-captioned transcript obviously has no familiarity with the people discussed in the other interview, transcribing Butler recalling that Wheeler knew him from "John Buechler's shop" as "from John Bieglershop."
Packaging
The cover is reversible with original art on the inside - regrettably not the RCA/Columbia VHS artwork - while the first 5,000 copies ordered directly from Vinegar Syndrome include a special limited edition embossed and spot gloss slipcover designed by Chris Barnes.
Overall
The Edgar Allan Poe slasher Buried Alive isn't great, but you could do a lot worse with films to which the author's name is attached.
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