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.

One of a slew of Edgar Allen Poe adaptations released in the late 1980s/early 1990s by cheapo producer Harry Alan Towers, which also included THE HOUSE OF USHER and THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM. To be kind, we could have done without these films but they did offer something in the way of atmosphere and also included ageing movie stars overacting as madmen (Oliver Reed, Donald Pleasence, Robert Vaughn to name but three). This one was filmed in South Africa (due to budget costs perhaps?) and is not based on any one Poe story, instead using devices such as bricking up alive and burying alive (really?) from some of the author's stories. BURIED ALIVE is actually not that bad, and it passes the time amiably enough, with occasional flashes of inspiration. However the film is lifted by a single factor which I'll discuss later. Firstly, though, the bad points.The film is incredibly clichéd. Most of the deaths are standard slasher fare - trowel in the head (remember NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD folks? It was innovative there, not here.), a girl getting her hair torn out by a blow dryer gone mad. The main actors in BURIED ALIVE are a group of high school girls, and let's just say that these girls are not the best of actors. All have big '80s hair, all are incredibly obnoxious and seem to have been chosen for their ability to stand around in revealing clothes rather than any depth or insight for their roles. I don't know but I'm pretty much sick and tired of seeing obnoxious American teenagers like these who seem to permeate every single horror film of the 1980s and 1990s. The main heroine too is a peroxide blonde who is annoyingly bubble headed and screams a lot. I find this kind of portrayal sexist and hey, I'm not even a girl! However bad the acting on show here, it's countered by enlivened performances from three stars whose names should mean something even to those who are not horror fans: these are John Carradine, Donald Pleasence and Robert Vaughn. Carradine has only a tiny role as a wheelchair bound, long haired psycho but he's pretty effective in a lunatic, giggling madly kind of way. Interestingly this was Carradine's last performance in a film before he died of natural causes, the film is dedicated to his memory accordingly. Also on hand we have Donald Pleasence, another actor nearing the end of his career. While his performance isn't as over the top as in THE HOUSE OF USHER, he's pretty cool as a weirdo doctor bloke who wears a spooky toupee and eats from a bag of sweets all the time. In fact his role is a lot of fun and he is his usual creepy self. However Carradine and Pleasence have relatively minor roles whereas the brunt of the overacting lies on Robert Vaughn, the Man from UNCLE himself! Although Vaughn starts off as a dignified scientist, by the end he is an axe wielding maniac! Yes, this is the only film which has the dubious distinction of Robert Vaughn running amok with an axe. And it certainly is a sight to see.Apart from Vaughn's frenzied performance, there is a palpable air of Gothic menace hinted at in a few scenes (although not nearly enough), especially in the dungeons below the school. The nightmare scenes with the bulging wall are also good, the special effects here are tremendous. Ants feature prominently in the horrific areas, and they do pretty much make your spine tingle, I hate insects and their use here is an effective one, creating real feelings of repulsion. There is an excellent scene where two dead characters are buried with only their heads showing, and Janet finds the rotted heads crawling with ants! Another classroom scene is not for the squeamish and involves sheep's eyeballs and yep, you guessed it, more ants. Altogether this film is quite average and nothing special, yet it's not as bad as it could have been and it is elevated by Robert Vaughn's hysterical performance.

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.

Although the overall plot is obvious, the details are baffling; characters have dreams/visions/hallucinations that are never explained; most exposition parts seem to have been cut out; the film moves from one warped scene to another instead of trying to build some atmosphere. Robert Vaughn is utterly unconvincing in the first half of the film (though he improves later on), and Donald Pleasence is irritating as the doctor/possible suspect who mostly comes across as just a senile old man. (*1/2)