Cheap Drive-In Discs, Vol. 3: I Bury the Living/The Hand (DVD) (Albert Band) Price

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Customer Reviews of Drive-In Discs, Vol. 3: I Bury the Living/The Hand

This is what a Cartographer's nightmare feels like...
Marketing ruined this film. Think about this for a moment. The taglines to I Bury the Living have absolutely nothing to do with the actual film. The distribution team behind this feature was obviously trying to connect to the zombie fan-base when attempting to release this film. With taglines like, "A creature to freeze your blood!" and "A story to chill your bones" it becomes clear that the creators of this film did not realize the full potential of what they were sitting on. I Bury the Living is better than most zombie films and gives us a powerfully original story that will capture your attention and keep you guessing until the final moments. While most films will clutter the center of most films of this nature with meaningless love stories or idiotic secondary character development, I Bury the Living keeps us focused throughout the film on one centralized and intense character, Richard Kraft. By keep our attention based on this one man, we are able to feel the insanity beginning to creep up on this mild-mannered executive. Take this decent "B" acting and couple it with a director that knew, and felt passionate, about the story and a cinematographer that challenged the predetermined structure of most films like this during the 50s, and you have the collective body of I Bury the Living. <
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>For me to sit here and say that the acting in this film was phenomenal would be a downright lie. This was a "Midnight Movie" special meaning that there was "B" grade actors attempting to break into the bigger Hollywood pictures. Typically, especially in today's horror/suspense genre in the independent arena, the acting is what generally hurts the film. You cannot create amazing special effects for your film if most of your money is going into bigger named stars, so this is why you see very original horror films coupled with terrible acting. In this film, it is a little better. Richard Boone is a decent lead that actually conveyed quite a bit of human emotion and fully demonstrated the obsessive nature surrounding the events. I believed in him both as an actor as well as a character. This is tough to pull off, but Boone did a decent job. He seemed like a regular "Joe" that was caught up in a supernatural force that he could not control. The character of Andy McKee (played by the energetic Theodore Bikel) was also another great character. What made I Bury the Living great was that the characters were simple, you didn't need this deep complex story to fully bring these guys to life, they did it themselves. They were fun, yet freaky instantaneously. This is a rare combination in modern Hollywood horror cinema. <
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>While the acting was decent, it is the map that fully takes credit for stealing the film. While I have watched other films where inanimate objects rule the screen, this one was by far one of the best. The map in this film was spooky. It nearly had a face when you removed all the pins and backdrop. It felt, and looked, like a demonic face staring at you. It allowed this possessed feel to come through the television screen. Throughout the film I found myself staring at the map when the other characters were talking about the plot. The map was that engrossing and perplexing. I wished there were more discussed about this map, perhaps a back-story on its arrival to the cemetery or a quick opening on how it was made. Director Albert Band did a great job of giving the map the spotlight it deserved. He even did a fantastic job of bringing suspense to the pins which determined who would live and who would die. There were several scenes in which the camera lighting would shift, we would zoom into the marked plots, or follow the pin symbolizing death. This was extremely creative and effective tool used especially in the 1950s. It is hard to find films today that would use that type of emphasis on the elements, but Band was not afraid to experiment. That is why this film succeeded. It went beyond your typical suspense film and brought you an original tale that kept you engrossed until the final scenes. Even at that time, Band doesn't quite give you all of the truth, leaving some parts up to the imagination. <
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>While I do speak very highly of this film, it wasn't perfect. I don't expect many horror/suspense films of the 50s to be unless big-budget Hollywood released them. With I Bury the Living, there could have been more dedicated to the plot. I couldn't help but laugh as I watched this film because Robert is causing these deaths by replacing white pins with black ones. Yet, after the second occurrence, nobody seems to believe him so they keep asking him to put more pins in. You would think that somebody would play the counter-conscious with Robert saying that if he does put another pin in the map, another will die. I think we needed a stronger bond between death and humanity. I didn't think Robert cared about those he was obviously marking for death. I especially saw this when the entire Board of Directors asks Robert to place black pins on their plots, then nearly following this horrific event, the police officer asks Robert to put another pin on the map. I would think that by this time Robert would be mad with obsession. I wouldn't think that he would want to do that again, but even with this minor sidestep, I Bury the Living is still a deeply conceptual film. <
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>Overall, I thought this was a great early horror/suspense film that will play Parcheesi with your mind. The characters are strong and enjoyable (who doesn't enjoy a good Scotsman?); the plot needed some more work, but was carefully balanced out by the exceptional work by director Albert Band and his cinematographer. I didn't see the ending happening until the final door opened revealing the truth. It didn't overdevelop useless plot-points like love, secondary characters, or that annoying alien copout. I Bury the Living kept it simple, and it succeeded. I would not be ashamed to show this film to my friends on a dark and spooky night. For being created in the 50s, I believe this film could challenge the originality of some of the Hollywood hits today and find itself victorious each and every time! <
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>Grade: **** out of *****

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Black pins mean death for the living. And the white pins?
Despite such garish taglines as "A creature to freeze your blood! A story to chill your soul!" and "Out of a time-rotted tomb crawls an unspeakable horror!", the 1958 film "I Bury the Living" is one of the best long episodes of "The Twilight Zone." The only problems with that assessment is that this film came out a year before the classic television anthology series started and the script was not written by Rod Serling but by Louis Garfinkle, who had teamed up with director Albert Brand in his only other screenplay at that point, "The Young Guns" (he would eventually get a story credit for "The Deer Hunter"). But you watch this movie and you would swear you were entering a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man that constitutes the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. <
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>The plot for this film shows why such comparisons are inevitable. Richard Kraft (Richard Boone), is a local businessman who becomes the committee chairman of Immortal Hills Cemetery. In the cemetery office there is a huge map of the cemetery, with white pins for the unoccupied plots and black pins for the occupied plots. The first day on the job a young couple purchase plots and Kraft accidentally puts black pins instead of white to make their plots on the map. When the couple are killed in a car carsh, Kraft is understandably spooked. He picks a name at random and substitutes a black pin for a white and again the person suddenly dies. Kraft is now becoming convinced that he has the power to kill anybody by put a black pin on their plot (the working title for the film was "Killer on the Wall"). <
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>Obviously at some point Kraft is going to see what happens when he substitutes a white pin for a black one, but what helps this film avoid becoming painfully predictable is that Kraft does not hide his fears. He tells his fiancé (Peggy Maurer), a reporter (Herbert Anderson), he tells a cop (Robert Osterloh), he tells the other members of the cemetery committee. They all insist what is happening is mere coincidence, and that come up with ways to test this hypothesis. The only person who takes Kraft seriously is Andy McKee (Theodore Bikel), the old caretaker that the committee is trying to get to retire, but people keep dying and Kraft is obsessed by what is going on. <
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>Boone's performance underplays the part a bit too much. There is a fine line between restraint and lethargy, but you cannot argue with the fact that he is not forcing the character and is leaving ample room for the viewers to impose their worst imaginings on Kraft's plight. But director Band and cinematographer Frederick Gately deserve most of the credit for what works best here with some quite stylish camera shots and a rather effective use of close ups on the pin pushing. I was quite surprised that Band did not direct a lot more movies given what he did with "I Bury the Living," which was only his second director's credit. What will make or break this film for you is whether or not you think the ending works in terms of the set up. I was a bit disappointed in this regard and end up rounding down, but otherwise this is a very solid black & white chiller.

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I Bury The Living VHS Hi-Fi
Richard Boone, Theodore Bikel, Peggy Maurer, Howard Smith, Herbert Anderson, Robert Osterlon. <
>80 Minutes. B/W. 1957 Digital Video Transfer (VHS) <
>MGM Home Video UPC # 027616814630 <
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>Fun Facts on the VHS Box. <
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>Director Albert Band's magic hit came as Executive producer of 'Honey, I Shrunk the Kids'. <
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>I Bury the Living writer Louis Garfinkle honed his craft and was nominated for a 1978 Oscar for 'The Deer Hunter'. <
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>Gerald Fried, whose eerie musical score dominates the picture, created the themes for TV's 'Star Trek', 'Mission Impossible' and 'Gilligan's Island'.