Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2013 February 22 • Friday

In I Bury the Living Richard Boone (of Have Gun Will Travel fame) plays Robert Kraft, the new manager of the town cemetery. In the office is a map of the graveyard with black pins in plots that are occupied by the dead and white pins in plots that are reserved for those still living.

When a young couple buy plots for themeslves, Kraft puts black pins, not white ones, in the map. Within twenty-four hours, the two healthy young people are dead and Kraft finds the coinicidence disturbing.

Is it a coincidence? Kraft replaces a white pin with a black one, and the man whose name is on the plot dies also. He repeats the experiment again and again, always with the same result, the death within twenty-four hours of the name speared by the black pin.

I was hoping that I Bury the Living would be a proto-Death Note but Kraft has no desire to take advantage of his power over death. (Later in the movie he decides to find out if he has power over life, also. Could he raise the dead by replacing a black pin with a white one?)

Despite some neat hallucinatory scenes in which the map appears to gaze malevolently at Kraft, the story doesn't intensify or live up to its title. It leads to a ludicrous and disappointing ending of the Scooby Doo variety.

Still it's a neat idea and the first two-thirds or so are engaging enough for lazy matinee TV viewing.