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.

Stan Winston

The 1972 TV movie Gargoyles wasn't the first monster movie that I saw. At an early age I was already familiar with all the Universal classics - Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, the Wolfman, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and the Mummy. But it's likely that Gargoyles represents the first time that I'd ever seen monsters in a modern film, a color film. If it wasn't, then it was the first film of its kind to leave an impression on me strong enough that I'd continue to remember it. And Gargoyles' impact was entirely due to the work of special effects genius Stan Winston. I didn't know his name at the time, of course. At the age I saw Gargoyles, I'm sure I believed that the gargoyles were real (I'm certain I did because years later I refused to believe that Chewbacca was a man in a suit). But Winston's work was leaving a mark on me long before I knew his name as an artist or even before I was aware of what special effects were. In the wake of his passing at age 62, some Gen-Xers have referred to him as "our generation's Harryhausen" and it's fair to say that he was the preeminent monster maker and FX man of his time.

I won't try to enumerate his accomplishment here as they're too familiar to every fan of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror. But when I heard the news of his death, I instantly flashed on the many moments in his unmatchable catalog that left me awestruck over the years. I'll never forget watching the first Terminator (1984) with my buddies in the now long-gone Ingleside Mall theater and feeling an euphoric rush during that film's climax at the sight of the Terminator trucking on, sans skin.

To see that sleek metallic skeleton continuing on with its mission to kill the future was a magical moment that obliterated any adolescent jadedness I might've brought into the theater with me that day. I was a newly-minted splatter kid back then, scouring video stores for the latest atrocities from Italy and elsewhere. But Winston's work in The Terminator - with images that looked as if they jumped straight out of pulp comic book illustrations - cut right through that and took my breath away. It proved to me that when it came to appreciating movies, that cynicism could never trump wide-eyed wonder. And Stan Winston delivered that message over and over again during the course of his career.

He didn't just make monsters - he made memories.

Thanks for all the great ones, Stan.