People are voting emotionally.

Great Film overall

Absolutely Fantastic

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

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.

Given the macabre subject matter (accompanied by a heavy-metal soundtrack), I knew I would be less enthused about watching this Bava effort. Still, the opening is not too bad, with even an effective empty coach ride shot in slow-motion and set against a misty backdrop that actually evokes the director's father's BLACK Sunday (1960; which Lamberto would himself remake 30 years later!). However, the teen protagonists of the film under review do not exactly set the screen on fire: after robbing a grocery store just for kicks, they head for a weekend of mindless fun but lose their way and end up smack in the middle of a cemetery! After abandoning the van in a river, they have to continue on foot – occasionally, a shady figure that is clearly observing them makes itself felt.Anyway, they find a spot where to spend the night but one of the kids decides he cannot sleep in such a morbid atmosphere and, wandering about, stumbles on an inn! He wakes his pals and they go in, where the one-eyed and incessantly cackling bartender proves to be the same man we had seen spying the group. After they unwisely attempt a wise-cracking approach a' la AN American WEREWOLF IN London (1981; which they even refer to!), the teenagers notice a pot full of money and, asking about it, are told that those are the as-yet-uncollected funds of a wager coming to anybody making it though the night spent in the maze of catacombs underneath the inn. More out of sheer greed than a sense of adventure, the group accept to undertake this proposition.From here on in, the tone is necessarily claustrophobic, heavy-handed (involving some flat EVIL DEAD-style attempts at gallows humor) and repetitive (since the characters often find themselves in a room already 'visited'). In the end, when the time is almost up (and after having encountered a variety of ghouls), one girl suggests that they follow their instincts rather than logic. The latter makes for a nice surreal touch but it arrives too late to save the film – especially when it transpires to not even have the courage of its convictions (interestingly, albeit unoriginally, the plot seems to be leading to a revelation in which the whole journey proves to be an acceptance of their own death by the protagonists – since we are shown their van being unaccountably found overturned by the Police – but, when the group finally emerge from the inn with their pockets filled with the bounty they had just won, these are taken by the oblivious law enforcers as merely additional loot, to the initial and long-forgotten petty crime, they will need to account for! Ultimately, for a much more artistically valid look at "A Night At The Cemetery" (the film's original Italian title), I would recommend Jean Rollin's THE IRON ROSE (1973)...

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.