Tagline: “When the moon turns red the dead will rise”.
I must say Andrea Bianchi’s zombie epic commands viewing for any true fan of the gut ripping undead. And if you’re an Italian film freak you already have it and know what I’m talking about. Fulci’s “The Gates of Hell” and this sleazy gory gem where my introduction to Italian horror back in 82-83 and I have been a huge fan of the Italians ever since. “Le Notti del Terrore – The Nights of Terror” finds Mariangela Giordano and her questionable and disturbing breast-loving son Michael [a 30-ish Peter Bark] settling in at a secluded estate. Looking for a carefree weekend with some friends things take a turn for the worse after a professor has unknowingly broke a seal that sets free Etruscan zombies. In turn unleashing loads of gory violence forcing our poor cast of zombie fodder to lock themselves in the estate in hopes of avoiding the zombie horror-caust.

After a little sleaze gets the ball rolling they must deal with what are commonly referred to as, living corpses, the walking dead, flesh eaters, the undead, maggot wielding dirt heads, yes fans we are talking some of the most decrepit looking zombies you’ll ever see people; next to Armando De Ossorio’s “Blind Dead”. Thanks to the crude but gruesome make up work of Rosario Prestopino and the plethora of crusty and gory f/x by Gino De Rossi; who spilled outstanding gory violence all over favorites “Cannibal Ferox”, “City of the Living Dead”, “Zombie”, and “House by the Cemetery” for example.

“Burial Ground has it’s share of critics and quite frankly they are fools. Yeah, yeah, it’s trashy, unintentional laughable at times, and has a wafer thin plot from “Patrick Viva Ancora” scribe Piero Regnoli. But we are talking near non stop zombies, slow motion cranium crunching, decapitation, gut munching gore, green blood & maggots and general mayhem with a spacey tripped-out Elsio Mancuso & Berto Pisano psychedelic score that’s really quite awesome.

So hell yeah! I’ll say it with pride and admiration. This cheap tawdry affair is classick zombie fun of the highest order and defiantly one of my all time favorite zombie noshers. In closing, if you’re keeping track like me, Mariangela Giordano, who had her leg sawed off in “Giallo a Venzia-Giallo in Venice” and was graphically skewered though the vagina in “Patrick Vive Ancora” finds her fate this time…in the mouth of her son Michael, [the cannibal kid] who displays the true meaning of breast-feeding. IL DIVERTIMENTO DI ZOMBIE CLASSICO!!

Burial Ground had a terrible VHS release in the U.S. on the crappy very dark Vestron Video. Many of us hunted down one of those import prints as “Zombie 3: The Nights of Terror” which is much lighter and letterboxed, but there’s those damn Japanese subtitles. Finally I settled with the Shriek Show DVD in a beautiful letterboxed print that bares the English translation “The Nights of Terror” of it’s originally title “Le Notti del Terrore”, while the package title is indeed “Burial Ground”. Shriek Show has done a bang up job with this one. Sporting a re-mastered UNCUT anamorphic widescreen 1.78:1 transfer that looks better than ever rounded out with a decent set of Xtras;
Interview with Mariangela Giordano;
Interview with producer Gabriele Crisanti;
The Original Theatrical Trailer;
Gallery of the Undead: Still and Poster Gallery;
Trailers for Zombie Holocaust, Last House on the Edge of the Park, Spasmo, Eaten Alive.

24” x 36” Video Poster I bought about 22 years ago at a record store for 5 bucks.

My old Vestron Video