Cemetery of Terror (1985)

I often prefer to watch a really mindless stupid movie after work. I don't mean stupid like everything by Rob Cohen, but more naive, more silly. After watching the fantastic Grave Robbers the other day I decided to give Cemetery of Terror another try. I've seen it before, but felt it was the weaker of the two movies. It's still the weaker, but more fun than I remember from last time.

Hugo "The Man" Stiglitz plays doctor Cardan who's patient Devlon, a serial killer and occultist, escapes one final time to murder some more people. This time he's killed by the police, but Cardan still believes that Devlon is dangerous - even when he's dead! And guess what? A bunch of stupid teenagers decides to have a party in the abandoned house by the cemetery - and to spice things up, they steal Devlon's dead body from the morgue and tries to resurrect with some black magic. Of course they don't expect themselves to actually make him come alive, but you know... kids!

Anyway, he comes back to life again as some kinda demon-zombie and starts killing the teenagers one after one. BUT at the same time a gang of Halloween-pranking kids arrives to the cemetery, and of course they'll meet both Devlon... and his army of the living dead!!! Zombies!!!! It's up to Hugo Stiglitz to save the day!

First the bad stuff. It never reaches the heights of cheesy entertainment as the Grave Robbers did. It takes at least forty minutes of boring talky scenes before anything fun happens. If you can get past that, you will have a fun movie with some gore (but not in any massive amounts, so beware gorehounds) and a lot of cool scenes of quite bloodless zombie-mayhem. First it's more or less Grave Robbers again with stupid kids who's getting butchered in different bloody ways. After that the children arrives, and so the zombies, and suddenly we have something like a family-horror-zombie-movie for the last half hour. Devlon is quite scary, and looks dangerous, and his zombies is lifted directly from EC or Tales from the Crypt. We get a lot of scenes when the zombies is bursting out from graves or crawling up from the earth. It's more or less the same five zombies doing all the job, but it's okey and never is distracting. The effects are most of the time well made, and fits perfect in Ruben Galindo Jr's comic strip world.

It's also exciting to see Hugo Stiglitz back in the zombie-slaying biz (he's almost infamous for his insomnia-performance in Umberto Lenzi's masterpiece Nightmare City), but obviously have more fun here with a striped eighties-style suit, his shirt open up down to just above his navel and of course his well known curly hair and beard. He's hardly credible as a serious doctor, but he owns every scene he's in and also get's his chance to fight Devlon in the end - beard vs beard!

A cool house, a spooky cemetery, some goofy Mexican teenagers, a couple of curious brats, Hugo in fighting-mode: this is not as good as Grave Robbers, but still a funtastic and cheesy movie for all of who are young at heart.