Cemetery of Terror (Ruben Galindo Jr., 1985)
I spent the first seventy minutes of this hour-and-a-half-long feature wondering what on Earth the title had to do with the movie, since there was only one cemetery, and it wasn't really all that scary. But then, neither was the rest of the movie, a generic slasher with Satanic/supernatural overtones. I was inclined to dismiss it, but then we got to the cemetery bit, and it got kind of halfway okay, in that Lucio-Fulci-wannabe way, so the movie ended up not being a total loss. It went back downhill pretty quick, but I didn't outright hate it. Welcome to what Jonathan Rosenbaum calls the Criticism of Lowered Expectations...
In this Mexican attempt at Italian horror, a bunch of young-and-beautifuls end up at a big old abandoned mansion (the guys conspire to get the girls there by asking them on outrageous dates. You've never heard overacting until you hear one of these lasses talking about jet-set parties!) for a Halloween night of premarital sex. While exploring the place, one of them finds an old book, and they all tromp out to the local cemetery to see if they can use its Satanic invocations to raise the dead. (Woo, satanic panic!) When it doesn't seem like anything's happened, they all tromp back to the house and resume the carnal-getting, not realizing that they've managed to pull a psycho back into the living realm, who then goes around killing people whilst searching for either the doctor who killed him in the first place of the kids who raised him. (Either I or the script was a little unclear on the concept; I'm more than willing to assume I fell victim to bad subtitling.) In any case, you know the drill: kids, premarital sex, slasher movie, etc. There's an added dollop of fun about a group of pre-teen trick-or-treaters, but for most of the movie those scenes are unrelated to the rest (they only actually show up at the house for the big climactic battle there before the action starts telling us why the movie is called, depending on the language you speak, Cemetery of Terror or Zombie Apocalypse).
It's a weird mix of The Evil Dead, Halloween, and any number of late-seventies/early-eighties Italian zombie films (you could actually pin this on anything from Tombs of the Blind Dead to Dr. Butcher, MD and people would recognize what you were saying), but stripped of any of what made those films better than the rest of the pack and updated for the hot new styles of 1985--which of course makes this dated, viewing it 25 years later. It does have that 80s-trash feel that gives it a nostalgic kick (a la Night of the Comet) despite it otherwise being pretty worthless, but the cemetery scenes are kind of fun, and make it maybe worth watching if you catch it on late-night TV and tune in halfway through. (I'm put in mind of a scene early in Videodrome where a sales-type is trying to sell James Woods a 13-episode miniseries that ends with the last episode being what we would today call torture porn; Woods replies "play me the last tape. My viewers won't see the first twelve.") * 1/2
