Original title: Le notti del terrore; aka: Nights of Terror; Zombie 3; The Zombie Dead; Zombie Horror

By any objective standard, Andrea Bianchi’s Burial Ground, a shameless knock-off of Lucio Fulci’s far better Zombi 2/Zombie Flesh Eaters/Zombie (1979) – you’ll get to see the eye dragged onto to a shattered window gag done again – is appalling old rubbish. The barely developed characters are atrociously acted and given to reciting ludicrous dialogue (“this cloth smells of death!”), the plot is paper thin and just an excuse to tide us over until the next bit of zombie business and Bianchi’s direction is as lacklustre as usual. And yet it’s so loopy that it manages to entertain almost in spite of itself. No-one’s going to make any claims for it being even in the top 10 of Italian zombie films, but its catalogue of absurdities should keep all but the most demanding happy enough for a very off hour and half.

What little plot there is gets under way with a heavily bearded archaeologist (Raimondo Barbieri, credited as Renato Barbieri) disturbing a horde of Etruscan zombies in an ancient crypt near a large country mansion (“played” by the ever-popular Villa Parisi, also seen in Mario Bava’s Il rosso segno della follia/A Hatchet for the Honeymoon (1970), Blood for Dracula (1974), Patrick vive ancora/Patrick Still Lives (1980) and many others). After a feeble attempt to placate the hungry dead (“No, no! Stand back! I’m your friend!”) the professor is killed but is soon replaced by three couples – George (Roberto Caporali), Evelyn (Mariangela Giordano), James (Simone Mattioli), Leslie (Antonella Antinori), Mark (Gianluigi Chirizzi) and Janet (Karin Well) – arrive at the mansion with Evelyn’s very peculiar young son Michael (played by the at the very least 20-something Peter Bark) in tow.

Any attempt at a story is soon abandoned and we’re left with a series of surprisingly gore-light zombie attacks. Fans have long been disappointed that the presence of Rosario Prestopino and Gino De Ross’s names in the credits – both veterans of Zombi 2 – doesn’t make for the spectacularly grisly film that one might expect. There’s certainly a lot of zombie action, and they’re a particularly resourceful bunch, using scythes, axes and even power tools, in their siege of the villa. But their depravations are largely bloodless, even if some of the make-up, notably on the “hero” zombies seen in close-up, are very effective.

One of the bloodier moments is also the film’s most infamous moment. The relationship between Evelyn and Michael is deeply odd, his attachment to her becoming increasingly sexual as the film plods along (hence the casting of an adult midget in the role). After he’s killed and revived as a zombie, he seeks comfort from his mother only to bite off her breast. Freudians would wet themselves…  

The only sensible way to deal with any of this nonsense is to treat the film as a comedy. Bianchi doesn’t really seem to be trying, though he pulls off one decent set-piece in which Kathryn the maid (Anna Valente) has her hand skewered to a first-floor window by a surprisingly skilled bolt-throwing zombie and her head subsequently removed by a scythe. But otherwise, he just doesn’t seem all that interested in what’s going on, lazily threatening to wear out the mechanics of his zoom lens such is the ferocity with which he deploys it in a vain attempt to spice things up a bit.

This sloppiness spills over into all areas of the film. The script, by Piero Regnoli, previously the writer of I vampiri/The Devil’s Commandment (1957), Il terzo occhio/The Third Eye (1966) and Incubo sulla città contaminate/Nightmare City (1980) among others and director of L’ultima preda del vampiro/Playgirls and the Vampire (1960), simply runs out of things to do and screeches to a halt with an infamously misspelled closing caption that raises more questions than it answers: taken from the “Profecy of the Black Spider” it tells us that “The Earth shall tremble… graves shall open… they shall come among the living as messengers of death, and there shall be the nigths (sic) of terror.” So what exactly is this “black spider” and why is it making “prophecies”? What does it have to do with all the silliness we’ve just watched? What happens to the handful of survivors at the end? What on Earth is going on?

Underpinning all of this is a crazily diverse soundtrack from Elsio Mancuso and Berto Pisano, the latter masquerading here as Burt Rexon. A sex scene (and there are plenty of those, mostly of the fumbling about mostly still clothed variety) is accompanied by a romantic piano piece overlayed by Hawkwind-style synthesiser wooshes and bleeps, the main title comes with a somewhat cheesy knock-off of the main theme from Antonioni’s Blow-up (1966), and the zombies march about the landscape to the racket of a full-on electronic freakout. It’s all maddening stuff.

And yet for all that, in the right frame of mind its idiocies are almost endearing. The characters are among the most idiotic in horror film history, constantly doing exactly the wrong thing, be it sitting around screaming when they should be fleeing or reasoning that it would be OK to allow the zombies into the building given that they move so slowly. They are such clueless buffoons that it’s almost a pleasure to see them meeting their various ends. Their idiocy simply adds to the jaw-dropping, can’t-believe-what-you’re-seeing stupidity of it all. It’s not a film for those looking for atmosphere, a plot, credible acting or even gore (though incredibly 13 minutes were still hacked out of it for its initial UK video release) but park those expectations, embrace its madness and it might – just might – tick all your zombie viewing boxes.