John S Berry says that he’s a pretty low key guy. He has a few articles on the Rupert Pupkin Speaks site. I asked him to tell me a little more about himself and he replied that he loves bargain bin horror movies, his cat Walter, Terry Gordy and most people.

A few years ago I saw a great movie called The Canal. In the opening scene a man gets an auditorium of noisy kids to pipe down asking them if they want to see ghosts. The “ghosts” he is referring to are the people in the film and how none of them are alive today.

I often think of these “ghosts” when I watch older movies. How odd (and wonderful)it must be to get to see relatives long gone. Not just the visual but also their mannerisms and hearing their voices. I Bury the Living has that feeling for me. I am seeing ghosts pleading, going mad and caring that have been gone for some time.

I Bury the Living was released in 1958 and I am not sure how well it was received. Most of the reviews and articles I read about it compared it to a longer episode of the Twilight Zone. It runs an efficient 77 minutes and was made by Albert Band father of Charles. Looking up his career I found the sweet support of a father who served as a producer for many of his son’s projects including one of my favorites Castle Freak. I wonder what he thought of his son’s films then I realized he was the director of Dracula’s Dog and Ghoulies 2. Their Thanksgivings must have been a lot of fun.

Stephen King is a huge fan of this film but hates the ending. That is a fact steeped in irony since I often find the endings of his books to be lacking (throw rotten tomatoes at me here). I am not going to spoil the ending, but I have watched this several times and am still undecided. I don’t hate it but after some viewings I think they could have done more with it. But I am not sure how or what (no not a giant spider).

I Bury the Living is very atmospheric and you can feel the coldness of the main set of an office at a cemetery. Richard Boone is kind of a grumpy 50s businessman that has to take his turn in being the chairman for the cemetery. When he is sworn in they tell him it is not a tough job but slowly it possesses him and he goes from a confident and well-groomed man to a confused, flustered and downright scared man.

Andy is the caretaker who does the real day to running of the cemetery. There is something charming and sweet about him and he is a man who truly loves his job. It was a sign of the times and a sad reminder of how people used to have pride in their work no matter how lowly or menial the job was. Andy didn’t have nice suits and slick hair like Mr. Kraft but he appreciated the scenic views at the cemetery and the comfort and peace.

Mr. Kraft imposes his values on Andy and thinks he is doing him a favor when he tells him it is time for him to retire and to find his replacement. Kraft being the typical businessman asshole pats himself on the back not realizing work and this place provides Andy with most of his purpose. And a man can be truly lost when he has lost his purpose.

The giant map has a great look to it. In it are white pins for unoccupied spots that have been sold and black ones are for the ones that have bodies in them. Kraft makes a mistake and puts the wrong color of pin into the map and starts a chain reaction of doom (or does he?)

Kraft’s lady Ann comes to visit and she seems a bit younger than Kraft. I like the fact that the leads are older. It seems like films these days never cast older people (they consider mid 30s old now)and I think it adds to how Kraft actually wear all the bad things that start happening around him. He even questions his sanity and wonders if he is truly to blame which is what we often do as we age. Much more meaningful then Archie trying to spend time with his best gal no matter what is going on around him.

No one seems to believe Kraft and he in a sense is doing the math. They seem to think he is buckling from all the pressure of being a modern businessman. A few costly experiments are done and Kraft really starts to go off the rails. The music used is top notch and eery and Band does some very interesting visuals for Kraft’s descent into possible madness.

It is hard to write without spoiling the film. But it is definitely worth a watch. Sure it could be a supernatural force at work or a who done it. I feel it is a film about the upper class not truly understanding how the working class feel about life and their jobs and that is all you are going to get out of me. I am still not sure how I feel about the ending, but really I love the room to speculate and wonder about the ending of a film.

I’m so glad that I got Bill Van Ryn to write about this movie! If you like what he has to say, check out his other projects like the website Groovy Doom and the zine Drive-In Asylum. Thanks again for your multiple articles and sharing everything else out, Bill!

Ultra low budget films really turn me on sometimes, and House of the Dead has another sexy thing going for it: it’s a horror anthology. It’s one of those obscurities that received a very limited theatrical release, and was then relegated to cruising the backwaters of VHS. A recent blu ray resurrection by Vinegar Syndrome is a welcome chance to get acquainted with one of the more imaginative films of its type.

For some reason, the film was packaged theatrically under the misleading title Alien Zone, which says nothing about the actual content of the movie. It’s actually a supernatural film that deals with a man who finds himself lost in a rainstorm. He’s just come from seeing his mistress, and takes a taxi back to his hotel in order to phone his wife. The cab leaves him off in an area that isn’t familiar to him, and it drives off, leaving him stranded down a dark alley. A strange, older man emerges from the darkness and offers our protagonist a chance to get out of the rain, taking him inside the building and giving him coffee. The protagonist soon realizes his host is a mortician, and the old man insists on giving him a tour of the facility. The individual stories emerge as the mortician opens each casket and letting the protagonist look at the bodies.

House of the Dead gives you some bang for your buck, because it has four stories — five if you count the wraparound segment. The tone is definitely that of an old EC comic book, with nasty people doing horrible things and then suffering some kind of karmic justice. The first is about a schoolteacher with a disdain for children who is confronted by monsters, the second deals with a serial killer who lures women to their doom inside of his apartment, the third is about two dueling detectives who set out to murder each other, and the fourth shows an arrogant businessman’s rapid transformation into a derelict after he is trapped and tormented inside a warehouse of torture.

The stories are intriguing, although a few of them are awkwardly realized. Most disappointing is the story about the serial killer, because it starts out so damn good. It’s a found footage short, a collection of private films shot by the killer on a hidden camera. Each one shows him inviting a different woman to the apartment and finding ways to lure them into perfect position so he can murder them in front of the camera. It becomes increasingly disturbing, and you wonder where the story will go, and then suddenly it is over and it went nowhere. It had such an interesting setup, too, with a non-linear timeline and intercut news footage of the subject being attacked by camera-wielding reporters while being arraigned.  

The best of the four stories by far is the fourth, which is a damn near brilliant piece of film. Most of it is performed solo by actor Richard Gates, who portrays a cocky businessman with a serious lack of empathy for others. He is confronted by a derelict outside of what he thinks is his office building, and he dismisses the man rudely, yelling after him “Why don’t you get a job?” Once inside the building though, he realizes he has walked into an unfamiliar storefront, with a vacant office space inside. Lured to an open elevator shaft by noises from below, he leans inside too far and falls down into the shaft, landing on his face. It’s a brutal moment that looks terrifyingly real, even though it’s just clever editing. This begins a gradual erosion of his humanity by some unseen antagonist; he is now in a Saw-like chamber of horrors, where he is wordlessly tormented by a falling elevator, a room where a wall of blades threatens him, and ultimately a prison cell where he is fed only bottles of alcohol. A door automatically opens some undetermined length of time later and he emerges into daylight, himself now a drunken man in a dirty suit approaching passersby for help and being rejected.

The film has a distinct visual look, which is often difficult when shooting a low budget movie. It’s not exactly striking, but it does creep into your brain a little by what it *doesn’t* show you. This movie does “anonymous and vacant” extremely well. Alleys are dark and vague, with strategically lit doorways and dark alcoves. That abandoned building is both ordinary looking and totally sinister, with simple but effective traps for its victim, almost like anybody could have set it up. Even the “house” of the title, which is purported to be a funeral home with a mortician’s workshop, is rendered onscreen only as a series of vague hallways and dim areas lit only by carefully directed lamps and bulbs, leaving most of the rooms in shadows.

A lot of the wraparound story is clunky, to say the least, like the awkward way the mortician narrator abruptly disengages from several of the stories, especially the ones with protagonists who don’t end up dead on screen (after all, he’s explaining to someone how these people ended up corpses in a funeral parlor). But the runtime is short (79 minutes), and it contains a few moments that are effectively creepy. It’s exactly the kind of thing you’d hope to find in a budget DVD collection.

Emily Fear is a librarian by day, professional wrestling lover and accordion player in the band Bitter Whiskers by night. You can catch her as the co-host of Talking Honor on PWTorch and read her new blog all about intergender wrestling, Boy Girl Party.

Like the straight-laced, grim-faced cousin of Roger Corman’s A Bucket of Blood, The Bloody Brood (1959) grounds its tale of murder and suspense in the hypocrisies and nihilism of the Beat Generation. While Beatnik caricatures steal scenes with bad improvised poetry and arhythmic, wide-armed dancing to spare bongo beats, the movie is dedicated to a more realistic portrayal of the majority of its hipster coffeehouse denizens – who may talk the talk of the culture, but are definitely working day jobs to support their nighttime wanderings.

That is, except for Nico (Peter Falk), whose business is those same too-jaded truth-seekers. While they flock to his wisdom – “They spend millions developing toothpaste to stop cavities, then they spend billions on bigger and better ways to blow us to bits” – they also partake of the drugs that he is selling, without even realizing that he is the one selling them. While Nico may be about the “truth,” he is happily raking in the profit of the drug deals without the shame or scrutiny, which is left to his rougher mules.

Early in the film, Nico, advertising director Francis and a few Beatnik cronies witness the death of an old newspaper man. What might be a traumatizing event for most warm-blooded civilians is a source of twisted inspiration for Nico: “What do we do? Watch. Gentlemen, this is the greatest show on earth. Spontaneous, unrehearsed, only one performance.”

Turned on by this ultimate kick, Nico ropes Francis into a plan to create more of these “spontaneous” moments and before you know it, they’re bringing a messenger boy into a party to feed him a hamburger laced with ground up glass.

The boy dies and it’s up to his brother, Cliff (Jack Betts), to solve the mystery of who killed him, aided by a sympathetic detective – who honestly doesn’t seem very good at his job – and Ellie (Barbara Lord).

If Cliff inching closer and closer to the truth wasn’t enough trouble, Nico’s also got mule problems, as Studs and Weasel demand a larger cut of the drug money, considering that they’re taking all the risk. Meanwhile, the drug-dealing powers that be above Nico are concerned that he is becoming a bit too immeshed with the scene in which he is profiting from.

What The Bloody Brood lacks in the entertainment factor of A Bucket of Blood, it makes up for with a certain earnestness – and that creates characters that are more effective than even needed for pulp like this. For every Dave, with his straight-out-of-costuming beatnik uniform and slang nonsense, there’s an Ellie, whose fear of wasting away her life blinds her to the snobbish contradictions of her hipster peers, or even Francis, an effete posturing jerk whose pompousness is second only to his cowardice.

The nuance, however, ends with the main characters. Cliff is a fairly bland hero who is also not particularly good at masking his covert operations. And while Falk tries to give Nico complexities, many of his actions, particularly later in the film, seem to be against his own self-preservation. The whole “murder for kicks” idea overall doesn’t seem to gibe with a guy whose just trying to profit off the self-important obliviousness of the subculture he’s infiltrated.

But perhaps that is the point. Nico’s boss is concerned that he is getting too close with his customers. While others might exhibit that over-closeness with feelings of love and affection toward their peers, thus inhibiting their ability to sell them drugs, for Nico, the effect is that he buys all the bullshit that the others drink down like cheap table wine. He may have started off as conning them, but he became the biggest mark of all.

Despite its technical flaws and a few glaring holes in the storyline, as far as low budget pulp thrillers, you can do a lot worse than The Bloody Brood.