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

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.

Buried Alive (1990)* (out of 4) This was one of three Edgar Allan Poe movies to be filmed in South Africa and while none of the three are very highly remembered today this one here at least can say it features the last screen appearance by John Carradine who would die of mysterious circumstances shortly after finishing work on this. While Carradine had a few others films to be released after this one, all of them were just footage shot by Fred Olen Ray in the early 80s.A teacher (Karen Witter) goes to a school for troubled women where she finds that things aren't all they seem to be. Not only does she have to put up with constant fights between the girls but she soon realizes that they are terrified and one by one they start to runaway. Being a horror film you know that they haven't actually ran away but instead someone in a mask is taking them into the basement and burying them alive. The principle (Robert Vaughn) and doctor (Donald Pleasence) at the school might know a few things as well. BURIED ALIVE is a pretty poor movie that doesn't work on many levels and today is only of interest for it being Carradine's swan song and there's some mild interest in the fact that Harry Alan Towers produced this with Menahem Golan who was just out at Cannon. This film is pretty much like the typical junk you'd find at rental stores back in the day as we get a confusing story, horrible acting and of course a little gore thrown in so that horror fans would have something to talk about. The film borrows from Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado", "The Black Cat" and "The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether" to name just a few. I'm really not sure what the filmmakers intended but the story is all over the place as it's never quite clear if they're wanting some women-in-peril slasher flick or if they want it to be some sort of psychological terror. The psychological stuff is poorly done and the ultra-cheap acting doesn't help matters much. The supporting group who play the "teenage" girls are just downright awful and their cussing and fighting at one another is downright hilarious and it's these unintentional laughs that help keep the film moving. The special effects are all rather bland but you have to give them credit because one scene has a girl trying to curl her hair with a blender, which ends up scalping her to death. Vaughn is clearly just picking up a paycheck but you can't blame him too much. Pleasence at least adds some nice comic timing and manages to get a few laughs. Witter isn't too bad but then again this isn't Hamlet. The great Carradine has very little to do here and only appears in a few sequences terrorizing the teacher. BURIED ALIVE was coming in just as the horror-on-VHS cycle was starting to cool off and you could point your finger at films like this for the reason why it began to die off. The film is a complete mess from start to finish and there's very little to recommend.

The taglines that were sprawled across the colourful cover of this movie would lead you to believe that it was some sort of a bizarre zombie flick! ‘Some secrets are best left buried. But will they stay there?' and ‘The dead return!' make this sound as if it's yet another attempt at a DAWN OF THE DEAD rip-off! I bought it anyway, as it was one of those titles, which I had seen many times on my travels, and I often wondered what it was like. (Stalk and slash films aren't my only vice, you know!) I was pleasantly surprised to find that it's pure slasher/whodunit right down to a masked killer preying on young female students in an all girl reform school! Another point that also first attracted me was the fact that it claims to be adapted from the works of Edgar Allan Poe. By that I'm sure they must mean his short story ‘The premature burial'. There's a TV movie with exactly the same name, that funnily enough was also released in the same year (although this was made two years earlier) that also ‘based itself' on that novel! To be thoroughly honest, apart from the odd black cat popping up here and there, it looks as if director Gerard Kikoine – who started out in the business filming porn – had only added the homage to that renowned horror author as a smart publicity stunt to put bums on seats! I couldn't have seen Poe writing a script for a silly slasher, no matter how insane he was!It opens with some gloomy shots of an eerie looking building silhouetted by the foggy night sky. The sign outside reads ‘Ravenscroft Reform School' and Inside we see a group of teenage girls all deeply sleeping, except for one dark-haired youngster who looks as if she's packing her things to make a daring escape. She puts her rucksack on her back and heads towards the exit. Just before she leaves, her friend calls her back and gives her a leaving present - a blue switchblade – and then she says her goodbyes and heads out into the misty night sky. (Cushty security for a reform school don't ya think!) She hotfoots it through the woods, until she spots a car driving along a road in the distance. She takes a break for just a second, and all of a sudden a masked assailant jumps out from within the bushes and violently knocks her on to the floor. He picks her up and drops her into a man made pothole and she falls into a corrugated steel tube that leads into a dank and spooky underground chamber. She awakes to see the grisly psycho standing menacingly above her. He injects her with a sedative, puts her in a straight jacket and then drags her by the feat to a cramped cell-like room. Once inside the assassin begins to brick and cement up the doorway, effectively leaving her ‘Buried Alive'…(Hence the title!) Next we meet a young science teacher named Janet Pendleton (Karen Witter) who has just got a job teaching at the college. We also see the head doctor Gary Julian (Robert Vaughn), his twitchy assistant Dr. Schaeffer (Donald Pleasence) and a group of bitchy female co-eds who enjoy nothing more than pulling each others hair out! (Literally!) When another girl goes missing from the campus, Janet becomes suspicious and investigates the history of Ravenscroft, only to find a sincere and shocking secret. But who is it that is violently killing the young helpless girls? With a cast including Robert Vaughn, Donald Pleasence, John Carradine as well as porn star Ginger Allen, and plot that pits a group of saucy female co-eds against a vicious psychopath, BURIED ALIVE seemed like a dead cert for a decent splatter flick. Director Kikoine attempts to seduce you with his claim that it's adapted from the twisted mind of Edgar Allan Poe, but sadly he fails to deliver on most accounts. For a start, what the hell was wrong with Donald Pleasence here? He plays arguably the most obnoxious character ever set to the silver screen, - a million miles away from his legendary Sam Loomis - complete with phoney looking toupee and an overly dodgy German accent! The dialogue is also laughable. In one scene Miss Pendleton has another of her strange nightmares, which begin plaguing her as soon as she arrives on campus. She ends up lying on the floor, panting, sweating and chillingly screaming. Dr Julian witnesses her strange ‘fit' and instead of rushing to her aid, calmly asks ‘is something wrong?' I expected her to say sarcastically ‘nah, I'm just hysterical for the fun of it' (!) but instead she quickly recovers and mutters ‘I'm fine'…Hmmm! Also at one point the doctor asks the shaky ‘scream queen' if she'll marry him. The funny thing is, the two of them only met a couple of days earlier and haven't even shared so much as a date yet? I kept wondering if I missed something when I blinked or sipped on my warm cup of tea!There are some creative ways to kill of the cast on offer here. These include a painful looking electrocution; a trough in the side of the head and a young girl gets buried up to her waste in wet cement! When she screams for help, she gets a mouthful of the soggy muck to shut her up! There are also those victims who get bricked up in a cold room and effectively ‘buried alive', which are the main ingredients of the feature. The director at least shows promise with a couple of decent ideas. There are some morbid shots of each rotten corridor of the creepy chamber accompanied by victim's screams as they get dragged to their demise. Each unlucky individual spots a black cat before they are dispatched, which is clearly the only real noticeable element lifted from Poe. There's also at least one pretty gory scene to liven you up if you're nodding off. A female teen is curling her hair on a food mixer (?) when she's scared by an unseen menace (presumably the masked killer), and ends up drilling into her head and pulling her hair completely off…Ouch!This was the last film that John Carradine worked on before his unfortunate death in 1988, which sadly wasn't the greatest flick to finish off a 5-decade career in the movies with. It's not that it doesn't try; it's just that it never really manages to go anywhere. It's occasionally interesting but mostly dull and un-atmospheric. To be honest, you're better of taking a look at the other made for TV flick with the same moniker…it's a much stronger effort!