Everything Dies, That's A Fact. But Maybe Everything That Dies Someday Comes Back

Every time I watch director Gary Sherman's Dead & Buried (1981), I'm struck all over again by how nasty a piece of work it is. There's a heartlessness to the violence in this movie that I never get used to. Its fantasy elements of voodoo, zombies, and black magic gives the movie's acts of sadism a slight buffer but it ranks high as one of the most hardcore American splatter films of the '80s.

Dead & Buried was written by Ron Shusett and Dan O'Bannon, who were coming off of a big success with Alien (1979), with the posters for Dead & Buried boasting that "the creators of Alien bring a new kind of terror to Earth." Sherman had been MIA since helming the 1972 cult favorite Death Line (aka Raw Meat) but even after almost ten years, Dead & Buried wasn't a rusty re-entry to the director's chair - it's clear that he hadn't missed a step. Sherman went on to direct two more notable exploitation films - 1982's Vice Squad and 1987's Wanted: Dead or Alive - before stumbling with the troubled Poltergeist III (1988) and never quite recovering his momentum.

But Dead & Buried remains a real dark gem. This got in just before the MPAA got tough with horror films in the '80s - I can't imagine that it would've earned such a lenient R-rating even a year later. And while it's storyline is absurd and shouldn't work, it does, thanks to Sherman direction never copping to how preposterous it all is. William G. Dobbs, the small town mortician with the ability to resurrect the dead that Jack Albertson (in his last role) plays here, is a villain right out of a comic book and while his ghoulish deeds seem to have no real purpose, the movie is never less than convincing as pulp horror.

The sick joke of Dead & Buried is that it's a film about the dead desecrating the living. This isn't a zombie film about the dead mindlessly devouring the living for subsistence; it's about the dead not just taking life, but maiming and mutilating life. As directed by Dobbs' will, the undead residents of Potter's Bluff don't just kill their victims, they go the extra mile to make them into unrecognizable corpses - burning them, crushing their skulls with stones, melting their faces with acid (FX genius Stan Winston really outdid himself on this early assignment). In Dead & Buried the dead are like zealots to a cause, coming together as one to destroy and disfigure life anywhere they find it in their tight-knit community. If you want to live in Potter's Bluff, you have to die first. And even if you don't want to live in Potter's Bluff, you still should be prepared to die.

Typically in zombie films, the dead are either pathetically mimicking the living (the zombies still compelled to wander the mall in Dawn of the Dead) or else are completely inhuman (like the thoroughly rotted forms seen in Fulci's Zombie or the Rage-fueled crazies of 28 Days Later) but in Dead & Buried the dead are true works of art - their mangled faces restored post-mortem with painstaking skill by Dobbs, the Michelangelo of the morgue to whom a closed casket was a sin (one of the most striking sequences in the film is a time-lapse depiction of a hitchhiker's crushed face being reassembled). His zombies weren't a parody of life but in his eyes, an improvement. It's no surprise that he learned how to bring back the dead - he loved his work too much to let it stay buried.

Swimming In The River Of The Neon Slime

Director Gary Sherman's brutal Hollywood-set actioner Vice Squad (1982) is a film that most Gen-X genre fans were first introduced to through the 1984 horror 'greatest hits' compilation Terror in the Aisles. Why this film and other crime thrillers like Nighthawks (1981) and Klute (1971) were included in that film alongside the likes of Halloween (1978) and When A Stranger Calls (1979) is a mystery. But thanks to the glimpse that Terror in the Aisles provided of Wings Hauser's electrifying performance as the villainous pimp 'Ramrod,' those clips made seeing Vice Squad a priority. What's amazing about Vice Squad is that the film - and Hauser's performance - manage to surpass whatever expectations one may have. If you see one movie about a killer pimp in your lifetime, it absolutely has to be Vice Squad - otherwise you haven't seen shit.

While household names like Hannibal Lecter and Darth Vader are always mentioned in the annals of classic movie villains, Ramrod could school them all. To call this character 'villainous' is like calling Saddam Hussein a capricious malcontent. As Ramrod, Hauser is on fire from start to finish in this film. While almost every movie villain is allowed at least a small moment of empathy, or some insight into their deeds, Ramrod is irredeemably evil and yet somehow Hauser avoids coming off like a cartoon bad guy. Even as you can't believe the extremes that Ramrod goes to as a character, Hauser's performance never feels overplayed or exaggerated. He makes it easy to believe that someone like Ramrod is really stalking the streets of Hollywood, able by sheer tenacity and force of will to frustrate the efforts of an entire police force to stop him. He's not superhuman, he's just bad but he shows just how far being truly bad can get you.

A lot of pimps in TV and film may have beaten hookers to death over the years, but not with the gusto that Ramrod does (and to MTV's Nina Blackwood, no less, in her role as a not-so-savvy hooker named 'Ginger'). Ramrod is so hardcore that he even literally rips the balls off a lesser pimp (played by Fred "Rerun" Barry of What's Happening fame), just because he hates it when other pimps can't keep their bitches in line. In the course of Vice Squad's tight 93 minute running time, Ramrod is on a mission to kill the hooker (Season Hubley as 'Princess') who helped the cops set him up after Ginger's murder. Once Ramrod escapes from custody while en route to the police station, the chase is on with Princess still turning tricks, unaware that Ramrod isn't safely in a jail cell. And whereas other criminals may have used their lucky break to flee further away from the law, Ramrod has no thoughts of letting Princess survive the night. To paraphrase a famous movie tagline, you will believe a man can choke a bitch.

Vice Squad is a movie that sadly could no longer be made today. It's lurid in a way that genre cinema is no longer allowed to be - an example of an era of exploitation when violence was still allowed to be ugly and hard to watch rather than sensationalized (ironically, one of the executive producers is Frank Capra Jr.!). Even the 'gritty' crime films of today, like Street Kings (2008), have a sanitized quality to them whereas Vice Squad - outside of the occasional canned-sounding cop dialogue - still feels like the real deal. And as riveting as Hauser is here, Hubley matches his intensity in her own way with a bravely unguarded and unapologetic performance. No movie made today with a hooker as a protagonist would ever pass on forcing an element of redemption onto the character's arc. But in Vice Squad, there's no change of heart for Princess. Even though she has a young daughter to think of (who's unaware of her mother's occupation), she isn't turning away from prostitution. A lesser movie than Vice Squad would've surely had Princess find a way off the street through the attentions of the concerned police sergeant (Gary Swanson) who's out to put Ramrod away - a movie-style romance between these two would've been a guarantee. But there's no such false sentiment to be found in Vice Squad. Princess has no illusions about life and she isn't waiting to be rescued. No matter how degrading her existence is, it's the only way she knows how to make a buck and throughout Vice Squad she never turns down an offer.

Even though Sherman allows Princess to make it through her ordeal intact, the sting of Vice Squad is that we know that the next night will only bring more of the same. As one character says, "this city sucks." And while you'd be hard-pressed to disagree, the movie itself is another story altogether.