El sepulturero

Forerunner to director Vick Campbell's cut-rate omnibus pic TALES FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE, THE GRAVEDIGGER is a more ambitious single narrative that, unfortunately, wears out its welcome despite a similarly abbreviated running time.

Despite sharing GRAVE's baffling stylistic conceit of looking like it was shot on an out-of-date Nokia cell phone, THE GRAVEDIGGER features surprisingly decent costumes and period décor, making it all the more unfortunate the director couldn't plunk down a few thousand (or even hundred) bucks for a decent camera. The opening is surprisingly involving, introducing us to a gravedigger and sexy town doctor who join forces to look into the return of several female corpses from the dead.

In contrast to TALES, which seemed like it was striving to be a gutter-punk version of an EC Comics film, GRAVEDIGGER plays things surprisingly straight, doing little more than throw in a brief, gratuitous sex scene with the hunky doctor at the outset. For the rest of the first half, it proceeds as relatively straightforward Victorian horror, before things begin to get weird. Following a consultation with a gypsy fortune teller, the protagonists end up transported to the land of the dead, where they must square off against a Sadean torturer who is responsible for the Earth-bound course reanimations.

To be honest, by this point I had completely lost most of the plot, and was basically taking the film at its word regarding the logic of each subsequent development. If all the above sounds like glorious lo-fi cinematic anarchy, however, it unfortunately isn't - it's a muddled mess and a slog of stodgy (and incomprehensible) exposition to get to the naked corpses and throat rippings in the back half. On a technical level, this is far superior to the director's subsequent film, but again, that effort is undone by the nearly unwatchable cinematography and fact that TALES, at its core, is faster moving and more fun. I wouldn't write off Mr. Campbell entirely based on these two efforts - it's clear he has the acumen to talk family and friends out of their clothes and into wallowing around in fake blood, a must for any trash-horror director - but he really ought to invest in some better equipment before undertaking subsequent productions.