Cemetery of Terror (1985)

It's almost Halloween, when people foolish venture into cemeteries and are terrified, so in the spirit of  public service I provide this warning.  Don't do it, kids.  Heed the warning of this Mexican occult meddling / slasher / zombie / something or other.  

There are two films here, in Rubén Galindo Jr's messy directorial debut. The first one is rubbish.  The second one isn't exactly good but is actually quite fun in spite / because of its cheapness and overall silliness.

The first film is a fairly standard "Witless teens meddle in the occult, awaken a demon and it eats their faces" type of deal, only not as much fun as that sounds.  Our "teens" are distinctly older looking and unlikeable; perhaps fortunately unlikeable as they are doomed to die in pretty short order.  No final girls here.  Bored, horny guys trick their girlfriends to accompany them to An Old Creepy House on Halloween, promising them they are attending a "Jet set" party.  

Jet Set parties can get pretty wild

There they discover an old book of dark magic, steal a cadaver from a local morgue - which just happens to be the corpse of the recently deceased warlock who owned the book - and perform a resurrection ritual at a local cemetery.  Yup, you read all that right.  The plot is that silly.

Even weirder, having been tricked into going to a creepy old house, then involved in the criminal theft of a corpse, and made to participate in a Satanic ritual in the pouring rain, the long suffering girlfriends agree to go back to the creepy old house and engage in some excessively awkward and joyless looking making out.  At which point the resurrected warlock turns up and slaughters them all.

Then we move into the second part of the film, when a genuine group of Pesky Kids show up at the house.  This is where Cemetery of Terror starts to get a bit fun, because kids are allowed to be annoying and silly, scream lots and make dumb decisions; and it is hard not to feel a bit of sympathy for a terrified child.  The MacGuffin here is the kids have somehow become lost in the massive cemetery and are trying to find a phone.  

The terror of this cemetery defies my powers of description

So they gamely wonder through the house looking for a friendly adult (the is a nice shot of one of the earlier victims stuck, Halloween style, to a wall in the foreground, while the kids scuttle about in the background, unaware of) until they eventually discover the slaughtered teens, at which point they have to run around the graveyard some more, while zombies erupt from the ground and maraud them, and then - assisted by Dr Loomis the psychiatrist who warned everyone about the warlock but who no-one listened to- back to the house to end things once and for all, while zombies and warlocks and try to stop them.

This second part is much more fun because it is mostly just silly, our expectations have been lowered and the zombies rising from their graves like a bad Thriller remake is entertaining.  And the children are better actors and believable than their adult counterparts.  It's like a live action Scooby-doo chase sequence, with everyone running around, screaming, silly monsters and a general air of high spirits, in contrast with the first half's aimless banality.

No Stars