Graveyard Disturbance (1988)

Nearing the end of the October Challenge on IMDb's Horror board,I decided that it was time to watch an easy-going flick by Lamberto Bava. Looking round for info on his titles,I stumbled on a Bava Horror that has recently been put online,which led to me deciding to disturb the graveyard.The plot:Stealing sweets from a shop,a gang jump in their van and drive off. Traveling to the outskirts of town,the gang find a tavern.Entering the tavern, the group meet the inn keeper and notice a pot of priceless valuables. Interested in getting their hands on the loot,the gang accept a bet where they have to spend a night in the catacomb and graveyard under the tavern.Expecting a quiet night,the gang start to notice disturbances in the yard. View on the film:Screened on TV during the final wave of Italian Horror,co- writer/(along with Dardano Sacchetti) director Lamberto Bava (who has a pretty funny cameo) & cinematographer Gianlorenzo Battaglia use the low budget to their advantage,as waves from Simon Boswell's Shoegaze score brew a dreamy atmosphere of fog drenched blue surrounding the group. Signally the direction he would soon go in,Bava pulls the Horror outline away for a "Family" Fantasy flick,featuring no serious threat,and all the ghostly creeps they faced being de-fanged.Despite reuniting with cute actress Lea Martino,the screenplay by Bava and Sacchetti leaves the gang running in inane circles,with the writers giving up on making the characters anything but flat,or giving them any real challenges,as the graveyard is left undisturbed.

Given the macabre subject matter (accompanied by a heavy-metal soundtrack), I knew I would be less enthused about watching this Bava effort. Still, the opening is not too bad, with even an effective empty coach ride shot in slow-motion and set against a misty backdrop that actually evokes the director's father's BLACK Sunday (1960; which Lamberto would himself remake 30 years later!). However, the teen protagonists of the film under review do not exactly set the screen on fire: after robbing a grocery store just for kicks, they head for a weekend of mindless fun but lose their way and end up smack in the middle of a cemetery! After abandoning the van in a river, they have to continue on foot – occasionally, a shady figure that is clearly observing them makes itself felt.Anyway, they find a spot where to spend the night but one of the kids decides he cannot sleep in such a morbid atmosphere and, wandering about, stumbles on an inn! He wakes his pals and they go in, where the one-eyed and incessantly cackling bartender proves to be the same man we had seen spying the group. After they unwisely attempt a wise-cracking approach a' la AN American WEREWOLF IN London (1981; which they even refer to!), the teenagers notice a pot full of money and, asking about it, are told that those are the as-yet-uncollected funds of a wager coming to anybody making it though the night spent in the maze of catacombs underneath the inn. More out of sheer greed than a sense of adventure, the group accept to undertake this proposition.From here on in, the tone is necessarily claustrophobic, heavy-handed (involving some flat EVIL DEAD-style attempts at gallows humor) and repetitive (since the characters often find themselves in a room already 'visited'). In the end, when the time is almost up (and after having encountered a variety of ghouls), one girl suggests that they follow their instincts rather than logic. The latter makes for a nice surreal touch but it arrives too late to save the film – especially when it transpires to not even have the courage of its convictions (interestingly, albeit unoriginally, the plot seems to be leading to a revelation in which the whole journey proves to be an acceptance of their own death by the protagonists – since we are shown their van being unaccountably found overturned by the Police – but, when the group finally emerge from the inn with their pockets filled with the bounty they had just won, these are taken by the oblivious law enforcers as merely additional loot, to the initial and long-forgotten petty crime, they will need to account for! Ultimately, for a much more artistically valid look at "A Night At The Cemetery" (the film's original Italian title), I would recommend Jean Rollin's THE IRON ROSE (1973)...

After pulling off a supermarket job (stealing... candy bars???) and busting through a police barricade, five teens - hunky Robin (Gregory Lech Thaddeus), pretty Mikki (Beatrice Ring), her brother David (Karl Zinny), brainy Tina (Lea Martino) and their getaway driver Johnny (Gianmarco Tognazzi) end up passing through a thick blanket of fog and from then on out find themselves lost in the middle of nowhere. After getting their van stuck trying to drive over a creek, they grab their camping gear and decide to hike to the nearest town by foot. As night falls, they stumble upon a huge crumbling church where they decide to spend the night and also discover a spooky tavern located on the other side, go in and find it populated by a bunch of strange, ghoulish people with red glowing eyes. The deformed tavern keeper (Lino Salemme) promises them a treasure if they're able to survive the night in an underground catacomb of crypts located beneath the church, and like all moronic horror movie teenagers, the five take up the challenge. Yeah, like allowing yourselves to be locked up in a dark, spooky place by creepy and, from all indications, inhuman strangers is ever going to have a good outcome...So after cracking a lame "American Werewolf in London," joke, down below they go, finding themselves even more lost than they were before in an Escher-style maze of staircases, ladders and various tombs and crypts. Other than encountering the expected cobwebs, gravestones, coffins, spiders and rats, there are also zombies, an animated eyeball, some kind of large wolf creature and a skull-faced Grim Reaper complete with a scythe he never uses. Unfortunately, the zombies never come off in a threatening way and are used mostly for pathetically unfunny and completely out-of-place comic scenes (such as when a male zombie grabs a female zombies boob and she slaps him) and the werewolf itself is never once shown. Boo! In fact, this entire movie, which I believe was made for Italian TV, is virtually gore free.On the plus side, the art direction and sets are (surprisingly) quite good, and mix that with the cinematography, score and liberal use of a fog machine, and the film manages to be fairly atmospheric at times. I found myself really enjoying the first half, but soon after the teens enter the crypt, the film becomes annoying, repetitive and even more illogical than it already was. After encountering various creatures, I seriously doubt you'd be giggling, cracking jokes or even lying down to take a nap if you only have to survive until dawn. The characters are extremely annoying and do consistently stupid things, the dialogue and English-dubbing are both terrible and the tone uneasily fluctuates between being jokey to wanting to be taken seriously. A senseless twist ending drives the final nail in the coffin, relegating this potentially good film to failed opportunity status.

Made for cable-TV, a cheesy synopsis and director Bava who had just delivered his very weak "Demons 2" sequel...There were more than enough omens to warn me that this "Graveyard Disturbance" would be a waste of time and not worth purchasing. Yet, I'm a fan of most of the man's work and even a mediocre Italian horror film is still better than an over-hyped American one, so I gave it a look anyway. Since this is a TV-production, you can't really compare it with Lamberto Bava's more serious horror films and that also explains the lack of gore and controversy (aspects that are normally well-present in Bava-films). The story is light-headed, simple and cliché, introducing five rebel-teenagers who strand at a ghostly cemetery after a fleeing from their daily shoplifting routines. They meet a spooky looking bartender who offers them a bet they can't refuse. They're promised a pricey reward when they manage to spend the night in the eerie catacombs underneath the cemetery. The script (partly written by Lamberto Bava himself) is really weak and the dialogues are pitiful. The film is only made endurable by a few ingenious sequences (like the freak-family's dinner party inside the crypt), some atmospheric set pieces and professional make-up effects. The zombies look good and the giant eyeball scene is the only slightly suspenseful moment in the entire film. Bava also obviously attempted to insert humor and parody in his screenplay but this was far from effective (I didn't laugh, at least). I'm not even going to waste words on the acting performances as they are truly amateurish. Most cast-members are nonetheless Bava regulars who acted remarkably better in "Foto di Goia" and "Demons". Overall, Graveyard Disturbance is worth a peek in case you've already seen every other Italian horror film or when you're really bored.