Buried Alive

Buried Alive_360P

A woman goes to teach at the Ravenscroft Institute , finding that some secrets better stay buried.... This movie has a pretty good cast which includes Donal Pleasence, Robert Vaughn, Nia Long , and even John Carradine. There are even early appearances by Arnold Vosloo (The Mummy),and William Butler ( NOTLD'90). Donald Pleasence is a very versatile actor, but is wasted in this movie. Carradine appears for only 10-15 seconds. The lead actress Karen Witter doesn't do anything at all , except for screaming. The plot is OK, but i expected more gore. Though, there is one good death scene, the movie lacks the intence, and is very boring at times. There's enough suspense, but its not compensated with enough action. I wasn't satisfied. Maybe someone will. 5/10

A pedestrian, confusing and inadequately constructed horror, whose only connections to Poe are the theme of premature burial and the arbitrary appearances of a black moggy. Stars Robert Vaughn and Donald Pleasence were hardly noted as being discriminatory in their choice of roles, while Karen Witter's lack of acting experience is all too evident. Ginger Lynn Allen who displays more spirit would have been a better bet for the part. There are probably not quite enough gory murders and sadism for those who relish such carnage, and more than sufficient for the rest of us. John Carradine is glimpsed only fleetingly towards the end.

Is this Poe or a sequel to "Reform School Girls"?! The plot has something to do with a young teacher who arrives at a girls' mental facility (or is it a home for delinquent girls?) to discover that some of them are disappearing without a trace. It turns out they're being sucked through the ground into little tubes for whatever ominous reason. My favorite scene is when a teen girl (who looks 35) is curling her hair in the kitchen with a mixer (!) and ends up getting scalped with it. There's something fabulously trashy about this movie, but it has no right to carry the Edgar Allen Poe moniker before it's title. It has about as much to do with Poe as it does with Shakespeare.

Compared to some of the other films based on Poe short stories that were made during the late eighties - Alan Birkinshaw's "The House of Usher" and Fred Olen Ray's "Haunting Fear" to name a couple - former * director Gerard Kikoine's "Buried Alive" isn't all that bad ... but then again, that's not saying much. In fact, it is extremely difficult to make sense of it, and I for one couldn't help being annoyed by Donald Pleasance's character Dr. Scheffer. He has the obligatory German accent and a fake looking wig to boot, and for some reason he is presented in closeups most of the time. A real pity that this turned out to be horror legend John Carradine's last picture. I don't know whether he died during filming or after the film had been made, but for his sake I hope that he left before he got a chance to see it. Watch Stuart Gordon's "The Pit and the Pendulum" - or even better, Dario Argento's contribution to 1991's "Two Evil Eyes" - instead.

Apparently the inspiration for this woof fest was a story or stories by some obscure person called Edgar Allen Poe (guy probably drove a DeLorian), not the Poe you thought they meant... not by a long shot. There is no connection with the more famous Poe beyond the two words, Edgar and Poe, and the idea of walling up a living victim. Full stop. I can't find one redeeming feature in this howlingly bad piece of dreck, except perhaps that Pleasance was a little more restrained than in some of his more lamentable efforts.

The movie boasts a fine cast, with Robert Vaughn, Donald Pleasence, and John Carradine (in his final film appearance). Playboy Playmate Karen Witter is very beautiful, and might make a passable supporting character. However, she is not a good enough actress play a teacher convincingly, not to mention being the main character in this film. On the other hand, adult movie star Ginger Lynn Allen does a very good job of playing the rebellious student Debbie. Robert Vaughn chews the scenery, Donald Pleasence acts goofy, and poor John Carradine is in a wheelchair, and looking every bit as old as he was. The story is only slightly connected to Edgar Allan Poe's writings at most. The DVD has no theatrical trailer or bonus features of any kind. All in all, it's a little disappointing, but watchable.

Before now, if you had told me that Donald Pleasance had starred alongside '80s hardcore *-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.

I love this movie to death. Its b-grade schlock of the highest caliber. My mother rented it around '95 or somewhere around that time, thinking it was a made-for-TV movie with the same title. I would've sworn it had been made in the early '80s for its pure b-movie quality. I honestly can't say if the overall effect was intended, but it succeeds effortlessly to capture the last days of the slasher film (* Poe inspired imagery) genre. Long story short, a new teacher arrives at the Ravenscroft Institute, a girl-school staffed with lunatics. Not surprisingly she begins having hallucinations/nightmares as her pupils disappear one by one--in laughingly inventive ways. The only complaint I have is with Robert Vaughn who I absolutely can't stand. But even so I wouldn't have changed a thing. Get some friends (or develop multiple personalities) together, get a pizza and watch this movie. Its the essence of life.

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.