Cemetery of the Dead

Clark's horror debut, and it is worth noting that between it and the following notches Black Christmas and Dead of Night, he has come a long way. This is still noticeably an amateur piece full of wordy cotton and funny performances by the local cast, which "gifts us with its talent and charm" with an hour-long excursion into trashy emptiness. Only in the final 20 minutes do the zombies start crawling out of the graves and reduce the high number of heroes to zero. However, it is not enough to wake us from a deep sleep, unfortunately, not even through the nice "old school" setting of an old house and an adjacent graveyard. (28.05.2012)

Bei diesem Zombie-Film sollten die Zuschauer nicht zu hohe Erwartungen haben. Bob Clark war einer der ersten Nachfolger von George A. Romeros Die Nacht der lebenden Toten und zusammen mit dem Drehbuchautor Alan Ormsby (einer der Regisseure des recht guten Horrorfilms Deranged), der auch die Hauptrolle spielte, brachten sie eine eher unauffällige Horror-Komödie über eine Gruppe von Theaterschauspielern auf eine verlassene Insel, die eine perverse Mutprobe erfüllen. Unter der Leitung des manischen Manipulators Alan (Ormsby) treiben es die "Kinder" mit dem Spielen mit den "toten Dingen" ein wenig zu weit, und sie erwecken die Toten auf dem benachbarten Friedhof zum Leben. Erwartet jedoch kein großes Zombie-Inferno von Anfang an, die lebenden Toten erscheinen erst im letzten Drittel des Films, was viele Zuschauer dieses Films frustrieren wird. Clark hat sich einfach Zeit gelassen, bis er den Zuschauern die Wende zeigt, auf die sie lange gespannt warten. Trotzdem hat mich die etwas weniger aufregende erste Hälfte des Films mit ihrer dichten Atmosphäre unterhalten und das, was danach kam, hat mich ziemlich zufriedengestellt. (16.03.2019)

Bob Clark was one of the first directors to pick up the gauntlet thrown down by George Romero, who not only fundamentally transformed the canon of pop-culture zombie mythology, but mainly used the walking dead as a catalyst for social criticism. Clark focused primarily on the latter aspect, so rather than horror, he presents a biting satire in which the zombies appear at the end as a form of divine, or rather infernal intervention. Unfortunately, the rest of the film conversely focuses on a heavily thesis-based and stiff depiction of the dynamics within a group of hippie bon vivants. As such, Clark and Alan Ormsby’s screenplay presents a caustic picture of the hippie community in the era of its decline, revealing that the internal workings of that group are subject to the same social pressures and power struggles as in mainstream society. Besides naïve and crazy people, the group is also composed of cynics, materialists and manipulators, with a charismatic leader standing at the centre of everything, though he gradually proves to be not only a manipulator and egocentric, but mainly his own construct, desperately trying to build a cult of his own personality and whose flowery speech conceals his calculating nature and systematic efforts to hide his own insignificance and pitifulness. Unfortunately, everything said in the film is delivered in an extremely stiff manner. Perhaps thanks to that, on the other hand, the excellent staging and dramatic elements shine through even more, particularly the final sequence, during which even the corpses themselves seem to marvel at the central character’s spinelessness. (01.05.2014)