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Graveyard Disturbance (1987)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

A rather bizarre, made-for-TV Italian film has five teenage punks shoplifting from a small store and then running off from the police. They end up staying the night in the woods when they discover a small club with a lavish treasure. In order to get the treasure they must "enter the gates" into a strange world of zombie/vampire creatures. If you're expecting gore and violence like in Bava's DEMONS then you're going to be disappointed because there's really not too much of anything here. We really don't get to any horror elements until the 45-minute mark and even then the stuff is very small, really boring and in the end really doesn't go anywhere. There is a decent twist towards the end of the movie but at the same time the ending is so bad that you really just have to sit there a few minutes after it's over with and wonder why they even bothered. The screenplay is really all over the place as its never quite sure what it wants to do and the more supernatural elements never really work because there's really no backbone to what's going on. Even the twist comes way too late and it really goes against everything that came before it and then we get cheated even more because what happens after wards goes against the twist. The performances range from bad to poor but Bava's direction does add a few nice touches. The first appearance of the zombie and how it comes to "move" is quite effective and handled very well. There are a few scenes with some atmosphere but just not enough to warrant the 96-minute running time. The zombie/vampire make up effects are decent for such a low budget film but they can't save the movie and in the end there's no real reason to watch this unless you have to see every horror film released in Italy.

Lamberto Bava's "Graveyard Disturbance" is pretty lame.It starts off with five teens doing their daily shoplifting in a grocery store.Evading the police they drive off in their van to eventually come to the creepy inn.They are welcomed by a strange man with glowing red eye,and soon take on the bet which they simply can't refuse.The script by Lamberto Bava and Dardano Sacchetti is mediocre,the acting is pretty bad and the gore is non-existent.There are some atmospheric moments and the zombies look very creepy.The scene,where someone falls into a pit of rotting corpses is clearly borrowed from Dario Argento's "Phenomena".Give it a look,if you have enough time to waste-just don't expect anything special.

Really, this movie is big dissapointment - plot is weak (what plot?), there is no euro-horror style, everything is so lame (especially ending) ... pretty dull, boring, silly ... Bava's weakest job! Only good thing here is FX makeup which is pretty decent and really very gory for one TV film.

All in all, sad product of Lamberto Bava.

2/10

If you could try to act poorly in a movie, you couldn't pull of a better job than the actors from Graveyard Disturbance.

What a dumb and useless film.

The scene where the "undead" zombie tries to touch the breasts of the female "undead" zombie and she slaps him across the face literally made my day.

How on earth can you take this movie seriously? How can anyone take this movie seriously?

The individual performance of the "teens lost in the woods" actors is by far the worst I've ever seen in my life, if you would try to act this poorly you couldn't possibly do it.

It's as if they intentionally went on a mission to create the worst move in cinema history.

Starring Beatrice Ring (of Fulci's great bad good awful brilliant Zombie Flesh Eaters 2 (Mattei remix) and Lino Salmonne of Fulci's just plain awful Sweet House of Horrors, Graveyard Distrubance is an Italian TV horror movie by Lamberto Bava, who is not exactly Mr Quality Control himself either.

Just like Fulci's TV horror movie House of Clocks, a bunch of annoying teenage thieves high tail it out of town and find themselves somewhere far more sinister. This time it's a cemetery with it's own pub (run by an eternally laughing Lino, complete with flashing eyeball).

Lino bets our annoying eighties teenagers, with their custom painted van (including an Inferno reference!), walkmans etc that they won't be able to stay the night in the crypt. They're all up for that, and so it's down the crypt they go so they can run around scared and lost for the remainder of the film.

Made at the same time as Dinner with a Vampire (and similar, too), Lamberto forgoes gore and gives us weirdness instead, what with the surreal zombies, bizarre dinner party, other zombies, and various haunted house things we're used to as the masses of people who love watching late eighties Italian films.

If you set your sights really really low (where they should probably be anyway), this one is not too bad. It's now classic either though, but it's much better that The Ogre, which Bava also made around this time.