Graveyard Disturbance (1988)

To me, this movie is perfection.

the audience applauded

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Starring Beatrice Ring (of Fulci's great bad good awful brilliant Zombie Flesh Eaters 2 (Mattei remix) and Lino Salmonne of Fulci's just plain awful Sweet House of Horrors, Graveyard Distrubance is an Italian TV horror movie by Lamberto Bava, who is not exactly Mr Quality Control himself either.Just like Fulci's TV horror movie House of Clocks, a bunch of annoying teenage thieves high tail it out of town and find themselves somewhere far more sinister. This time it's a cemetery with it's own pub (run by an eternally laughing Lino, complete with flashing eyeball).Lino bets our annoying eighties teenagers, with their custom painted van (including an Inferno reference!), walkmans etc that they won't be able to stay the night in the crypt. They're all up for that, and so it's down the crypt they go so they can run around scared and lost for the remainder of the film.Made at the same time as Dinner with a Vampire (and similar, too), Lamberto forgoes gore and gives us weirdness instead, what with the surreal zombies, bizarre dinner party, other zombies, and various haunted house things we're used to as the masses of people who love watching late eighties Italian films.If you set your sights really really low (where they should probably be anyway), this one is not too bad. It's now classic either though, but it's much better that The Ogre, which Bava also made around this time.

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.

I think Lamberto Bava's Graveyard Disturbance is the very definition of a mixed bag. The plot, characters, and dialogue are a clumsy, jumbled mess. But, what I think Bava excels at in spades is the look and atmosphere of the catacombs where a great deal of the movie is set as a group of irritating, moronic twentysomethings, after robbing a supermarket (the proprietor of the establishment is the director!), drive into what appears to be a wooded area where the van carrying them gets caught in a river, forcing them to hike it to the skeletal remains of a castle, located next to a strange pub with customers who favor ghouls and have glowing eyes (wtf?). Challenged by a creep with a mangled face who had been following them (wearing a slicker), serving as their waiter in the pub, to stay the night in the underground catacombs beneath the establishment, these bratty young adults experience all sorts of bizarre events and encounter a number of undead monsters (rotted vampires, mummies, and zombies), hoping to win a treasure if they successfully make it to dawn. A foggy labyrinth of ancient rooms covered in thickets, cob webs, rats, and skeletal remains, with pits of goopy water, ladders, cells, and gateways that lead to a neverending cycle of similar passageways, the catacombs is an ideal Gothic setting for any horror film featuring young criminals who rob a store for the hell of it (or more like the thrill of it), suffering for their wrong doing by entering a world alien to their own. It doesn't surprise me that this is a television movie as Bava plays it safe with no nudity, sexual themes, or ultraviolence, but he sure put the make-up department to work as there are plenty of rotted faces on display here, not to mention one of the most crazy dinner table scenes you are likely to see (this family is a bunch of icky monsters, such as a mother with multiple eyes, others with gloppy faces, the menu entails such delicacies as "spider pie"). It seems Bava is having a grand ole time as the movie just keeps placing the characters in one weird scenario after another (one of the men falls into a deep, watery hole where a one-eyed creature is floating around looking for him; every time it seems the group is about to hit paydirt and escape from their crisis, climbing up a ladder, they wind up in another room almost identical to the one they just left). It does get a bit repetitive and to be honest, the screenplay is scattershot and schizophrenic, but I had some fun with Graveyard Disturbance. I enjoyed the setting even if I found most everything else poor. The make-up for the monsters really gives them a wonderfully ghastly look. The twist regarding the creep in the slicker is a bit obvious, especially after Bava shows law enforcement coming across the van, but the reveal of the face underneath a skin mask is rather an unpleasant sight certain to earn praise from zombie fans. How the characters are able to deal with him and their eventual fates left me with mixed feelings. I think escaping one perilous situation only to face the consequences of their actions at the beginning of the film (and willing to accept this considering the alternative) is amusing, at the same time, I think the creep in the slicker is dealt with a bit too easily. I think the way the characters behave while facing extremely unsettling and nightmarish experiences, sometimes taking them in stride, other times barely holding themselves together, hurts the film, and the unfocused screenplay is a detriment to the visual merits and technical achievements.

The usually on-target Lamberto Bava, who will always have a special place in my little black heart for giving us the surreally spooky and outrageous ghoulathon "Demons," hits his profoundly putrid nadir with this hideously botched would-be horror flick parody. A quintet of wholly obnoxious and insufferable teenage gals and guys decide to spend an entire night in a musty, creepy, dirty and allegedly haunted old tomb. If these unlikable idiots survive the ordeal -- they're tediously stalked by a woefully ragged and less than frightening assortment of vampires and zombies -- they'll get their grubby paws on a valuable treasure. This completely thudding dud suffers tremendously from Bava's leaden direction, which is sadly bereft of his trademark dazzling style, pungent brooding atmosphere, and frenzied logic-be-damned breakneck pacing. Instead we've got a dreary gradual tempo, insipid and unspectacular cinematography that goes overboard on clunky, murky and unappealing fog-ridden visuals, and an embarrassingly ham-handed attempt at a jokey overripe farcical tone. Worse yet, the adolescent characters are totally detestable: they whine, scream, bicker, play dumb pranks on each other, act in a most selfish and annoying manner, and generally wear out their welcome some 10-odd minutes into the picture. The lame and tiresome dialogue is absolutely painful on the ears (sample moronic banter: "Can't you stretch your vocabulary any further that that?" "Yeah, defecation, okay?"). Bava co-wrote the poor, hopelessly witless and unfunny script with insanely prolific veteran Italian schlock movie scribe Dardano Sacchetti; they presumably slapped this piece of crud together during a single booze-sodden weekend. Actionless, laughless, and basically worthless, this incredibly bad bilge flat out stinks.