I Bury the Living (1958)

Robert Kraft, a man that is hired as a cemetery chairman - and helps to sell plots and keep track of where everyone is either buried or will be buried on a large map of the cemetery. White Pins on the plots of the map means the person is alive and this is where they will be buried, the Black Pins mean the person is now deceased. Oddly when Kraft accidentally puts a black pin instead of a white pin on the plot map the person dies.. it happens more and more frequently to the point he gets the police involved. Does Kraft have the power to kill people with black pins and a map? Excellent cinematography throughout the film - some great stuff there, a good eerie story and the film builds to a great climax. I enjoyed the film.8/10

If this had come out just one year later, it could have made a great episode of "The Twilight Zone". The idea is certainly interesting, but at feature length the story feels padded and repetitive; after the third black pin and the third death we have already accepted the film's premise but Richard Boone keeps sticking the pins on the map, which would make more sense if his character turned evil, but he doesn't. Albert Band's direction is a plus: some of the visual effects he comes up with are ahead of their time. But the ending of the film is disappointing. It's a surprise, all right, but it's a bummer of a surprise. Not to mention that it doesn't stand up to much scrutiny. **1/2 out of 4.

Richard Boone plays Robert Kraft, the newly elected director of a cemetery who finds himself involved in a morbid mystery when people who have plots in the cemetery begin mysteriously dying, especially when Robert realizes that he mistakenly put a black pin(for dead) in place of a white pin(for living) on a big map representing all the burial plots in the cemetery, for people who subsequently died. This doesn't seem to be a coincidence, since every time he does it, someone else dies... Can Robert stop this jinx, or is something else going on here? Theodore Bikel costars as the retiring caretaker Andy McKee. Despite a good score and direction, this film is ruined by the revelation at the end, which is simply not credible, as if it was thought of at the last minute. Too bad, because this could have been good.

Richard Boone is a executive who somehow ends up running a cemetery as one of his companies' 'helping the community' schemes. However, he discovers that when he puts black pins into the plots on a sinister map, people end up croaking. No one believes him, so he ends up being 'dared' by folks to try out the black pin theory on them, and, obviously, they end up dying too.This film is basically one man versus a sinister map. A lot has been made of the cop-out ending, but I didn't see it that way at all. Even though some sort of Scooby-Doo ending is given, if you look beyond that you can see that the map WAS evil. It changes size throughout the film for a start! And even though they thought they'd caught the guy with the thing and all, Boone even explains that the map made him do it. Plus the sinister chipping sounds, the deja-vu, and that damned heater that won't start up (it gets a proper kicking at the end, that heater).It's like Bay of Blood by Mario Bava - The indicators are there that people are killing not for the lake, but because of it. Don't be so superficial folks!