Graveyard Alive

Elza Kephart's Graveyard Alive is both an homage to ultra-cheap zombie pictures such as George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, and a wink-and-nod parody. Highly stylized (in part to overcome the obvious limitations of a modest budget), this black-and-white feature (which includes cute chapter title cards) tells the story of a mousy nurse named Patsy Powers (Anne Day-Jones), who is infatuated with the hospital's golden-boy surgeon, Dr. Dox (Karl Gerhardt). Unfortunately, the doctor is already attached to blonde bombshell Goodie Tueschuze (Samantha Slan). But Patsy's drab existence changes when after being bitten by a patient—a goofy woodsman, who also just happens to be a zombie—she's transformed into a sexpot and soon catches Dox's roving eye. Of course, she also develops a taste for human flesh, which attracts the attention of a janitor who fancies himself a small-town Van Helsing. Putting a sexual spin on the zombie genre (in much the same way the Hammer Dracula films did for vampire flicks), Graveyard Alive isn't really successful as camp, but it is an intermittently interesting and inventive film. A strong optional purchase. [Note: DVD extras include an audio commentary track by Kephart and her fellow producers, interviews with the two leads, and a trailer. Bottom line: a decent extras package for a half-successful spoof.] (F. Swietek)