Stometer Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Chirphymium It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Fleur Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

BA_Harrison Before now, if you had told me that Donald Pleasance had starred alongside '80s hardcore porn-star Ginger Lynn Allen, I might not have believed it; my mind would have certainly boggled at the many sordid and potentially upsetting possibilities. But here it is... Buried Alive, which sees the ageing bald horror actor as kooky Dr. Schaeffer, employee at Ravenscroft, a reform school where the girls (whose number includes Ginger Lynn as Debbie) start to disappear in mysterious circumstances. There are, thankfully, no XXX scenes between Pleasance and Allen.The film starts with the capture of one of the girls by a masked maniac. The next day, the school's beautiful new teacher Janet (Karen Witter) arrives at the institution, but quickly becomes confused by goings on (but not as much as me), and thereafter suffers from hallucinations in which a hand grabs her from the ground and out of a toilet bowl while ants crawl everywhere. Meanwhile, the school's director Gary Julian (Robert Vaughn) professes his love for Janet (having made her acquaintance only a few days earlier), which turns out to be a big problem for the lovely lady when it transpires that he is the deranged lunatic who has been walling up the missing girls in the basement.To be brutally honest, the film's plot is a colossal mess, but the whole thing still manages to be fairly entertaining nonsense nevertheless, with a few gore effects (the rotting corpses of Debbie and her boyfriend are particularly grisly) and the requisite nudity (a group shower scene ticking that particular box). The film also features John Carradine in one of his last roles, as Julian's crazy coot of a father, who may or may not be a ghost; by this point in his career, I'm not sure if Carradine even knew what his films were about.

Leofwine_draca One of a slew of Edgar Allen Poe adaptations released in the late 1980s/early 1990s by cheapo producer Harry Alan Towers, which also included THE HOUSE OF USHER and THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM. To be kind, we could have done without these films but they did offer something in the way of atmosphere and also included ageing movie stars overacting as madmen (Oliver Reed, Donald Pleasence, Robert Vaughn to name but three). This one was filmed in South Africa (due to budget costs perhaps?) and is not based on any one Poe story, instead using devices such as bricking up alive and burying alive (really?) from some of the author's stories. BURIED ALIVE is actually not that bad, and it passes the time amiably enough, with occasional flashes of inspiration. However the film is lifted by a single factor which I'll discuss later. Firstly, though, the bad points.The film is incredibly clichéd. Most of the deaths are standard slasher fare - trowel in the head (remember NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD folks? It was innovative there, not here.), a girl getting her hair torn out by a blow dryer gone mad. The main actors in BURIED ALIVE are a group of high school girls, and let's just say that these girls are not the best of actors. All have big '80s hair, all are incredibly obnoxious and seem to have been chosen for their ability to stand around in revealing clothes rather than any depth or insight for their roles. I don't know but I'm pretty much sick and tired of seeing obnoxious American teenagers like these who seem to permeate every single horror film of the 1980s and 1990s. The main heroine too is a peroxide blonde who is annoyingly bubble headed and screams a lot. I find this kind of portrayal sexist and hey, I'm not even a girl! However bad the acting on show here, it's countered by enlivened performances from three stars whose names should mean something even to those who are not horror fans: these are John Carradine, Donald Pleasence and Robert Vaughn. Carradine has only a tiny role as a wheelchair bound, long haired psycho but he's pretty effective in a lunatic, giggling madly kind of way. Interestingly this was Carradine's last performance in a film before he died of natural causes, the film is dedicated to his memory accordingly. Also on hand we have Donald Pleasence, another actor nearing the end of his career. While his performance isn't as over the top as in THE HOUSE OF USHER, he's pretty cool as a weirdo doctor bloke who wears a spooky toupee and eats from a bag of sweets all the time. In fact his role is a lot of fun and he is his usual creepy self. However Carradine and Pleasence have relatively minor roles whereas the brunt of the overacting lies on Robert Vaughn, the Man from UNCLE himself! Although Vaughn starts off as a dignified scientist, by the end he is an axe wielding maniac! Yes, this is the only film which has the dubious distinction of Robert Vaughn running amok with an axe. And it certainly is a sight to see.Apart from Vaughn's frenzied performance, there is a palpable air of Gothic menace hinted at in a few scenes (although not nearly enough), especially in the dungeons below the school. The nightmare scenes with the bulging wall are also good, the special effects here are tremendous. Ants feature prominently in the horrific areas, and they do pretty much make your spine tingle, I hate insects and their use here is an effective one, creating real feelings of repulsion. There is an excellent scene where two dead characters are buried with only their heads showing, and Janet finds the rotted heads crawling with ants! Another classroom scene is not for the squeamish and involves sheep's eyeballs and yep, you guessed it, more ants. Altogether this film is quite average and nothing special, yet it's not as bad as it could have been and it is elevated by Robert Vaughn's hysterical performance.

acidburn-10 I remember viewing this many years ago and thought that given the colourful descriptions and taglines, that this was gonna be a zombie flick, but know what it turned out to be is a pure cheesy slasher flick through and through, with a masked killer stalking young girls at an all girls boarding school.The opening we get gloomy shots of a foggy night sky and an eerie Gothic building called Raven's croft reform school, where one of the girls plans her escape while the others are asleep. But as she heads out into the woods she is attacked by a masked stranger and is knocked out and dragged underground to a underground cell, where she awakens in a strait jacket and the stranger begins to brick and cement her in, effectively leaving her buried alive.While that premise is creepy and very unsettling and this does boast a decent cast in veteran actors including Robert Vaughn, Donald Pleasance and John Carradine. All this should have made this an all-time classic entry, but sadly it does kinda fall short and bland at times, while none of the characters are fleshed out enough and the mystery element wasn't up too much, I figured the identity of the killer within 20 minutes and therefore became much too predictable. While the deaths are quite inventive, they are just poorly staged and on the whole this movie lacks thrills and tension and the performances even from the well known stars was quite disappointing.All in all "Buried Alive" was quite decent and has all the right ingredients, but just doesn't quite hit the mark, but it's still good.

djderka Come on folks, this is a really good B type thriller.If you don't like seeing the teacher Janet (Karen Witter, former playboy gal) in sexy professional outfits being chased by the evil doctor (Vaughn) through the dark basement, you need to pop a Viagra pill.I enjoyed seeing the girl school atmosphere and the hot, saucy, petulant chicks trying to get "reformed".Sure there are some faults, like the brick wall, undeveloped love interest with the cop. more mayhem, more nudity, etc.But as a fun movie with some popcorn and beer. it can't be beat. I will gladly buy this for a couple of bucks, if I could find it. It seems to be one of the later or last films of the director's career.Can't believe this genre isn't made again and again.Plot: hot chicks in various sexy outfits in a girls school are menaced by the evilcontrollers of the reform school. Ya' got the green light on this one.