Buried Alive (1990)

Strong and Moving!

From my favorite movies..

Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

To all those who have watched it: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do.

After a big Brazilian channel showed this movie and many people liked it, I decided to give it a chance. From it's title I imagined it would be a movie with a guy agonizing after being buried alive, in the style of 2010's "Buried". Fortunately, Clint being buried alive is just a detail and a short scene-- thank god. Clint's wife tries to kill him to have his money-- which would be a homicide qualified by a vile reason in Brazilian's law. Story is pretty much vindictive, since the main character (Clint) ends the movie burying her wife alive, just like she did to him. Although it looks pretty evil in a first moment, if you watch the movie you'll feel he did just the right thing. Joanna deserved that. "Buried Alive" doesn't have anything special, but writing, directing and acting are professional enough to make this whole picture entertaining, convincing and with a "happy" ending. Frank Darabont's debut couldn't be any better, and I have to confess I find this picture more believable and interesting than "Shawshank Redemption"-- yes, I have such weird taste. To sum it up, "Buried Alive" is a good low-budget movie that you will probably enjoy if you prefer realistic stories to Hollywood clichés.

Pretty decent horror cum thriller from Frank Darabont, director of the critically acclaimed The Shawshank Redemption.Way above average in terms of both direction and acting for a made for TV movie, with some genuinely disturbing ideas, and some pretty creepy scenes, this is a chiller of surprising quality.The waking in the coffin scene is superb, as is the 'zombie' awakening sequence, and the last 20 minutes or so are excellent once the trap is set.Decent performances from the lead guy, Tim Matheson and Jennifer Jason Leigh is as reliable as ever.Check it out - it won't blow your mind but it certainly will entertain.

The plot of this film actually would make a wondrously extravagant "Love is …" cartoon! You know, the drawing of that cute little naked couple holding hands and looking into each other's eyes with a text underneath stating: "Love is … poisoning him with Japanese fish fluids, refusing to pay extra for his embalming and burying him in a rotten coffin barely two feet under the ground!" This modest and well-directed early 90's made-for-TV thriller guarantees decent suspense and entertainment as long as you don't set your expectations too high. The plot, which is absolutely unrelated to the similarly themed Edgar Allen Poe story, is full of far-fetched and utterly implausible story elements and you better don't contemplate about it too much, but it's definitely compelling enough to keep you on the edge of your seat for an hour and a half. Hard-working family man Clint Goodman *thinks* he has a good marriage going on, but his spoiled wife Joanna is actually sleeping with her doctor and planning to run off to California with him. They need money first, though, and so they conceive a plan to kill Clint and sell his profitable business to a frequent bidder. Their plan kind of backfires, because tropical fish-poison is a worthless murder weapon, and Clint literally crawls back among the living. He wisely decides that killing his wife and her lover with a shotgun is "too easy" – and right he is – and prepares an inescapable death trap of his own. The implausible part of "Buried Alive" is how sloppy the murder scheme is. Here you have a formula for murder that you could actually get away with, but it almost seems as if they want everything to fail. You make sure the last words your husband is supposed to hear aren't "Die! Damn you! Die", you pay for the embalming because it means extra security he's dead and you make sure everybody in town witnesses a proper funeral with an expensive coffin! Other than the occasionally lacking plot, "Buried Alive" does contain a surprisingly large amount of intense fright-moments, superb acting performances and tight direction from Frank Darabont (acclaimed director of "The Shawshank Redemption" and "The Green Mile") in his long-feature debut. Tim Matheson is good, but the always very sexy Jennifer Jason Leigh is terrific as the battle-ax wife and William Atherton is simply brilliant as the sleazy scumbag lover. Since this is a TV-movie, we unfortunately don't get to see a lot of gore. Certain moments are reasonably icky, like the image of Clint's scratched-open fingertips and a sink full of hydrogen peroxide, but Darabont merely keeps the emphasis on atmosphere Moral of the story: don't use poisoned fish if you want to kill someone! Homer Simpson didn't die after eating the allegedly poisoned dish of sushi, either.

This is a film, which although having a somewhat implausable story line, isentertaining enough to keep you watching until the end. Joanne (Jennifer Jason Leigh) plays the villianess of the film, administering the poison in an attempt to kill her husband and make off with the loot. She plays the part well, right up to the last part of the film which ends in an unliely manner with the interior of the house undergoing structural changes which would take weeks to do in real life.Notwithstanding this it does enough to be worth watching, indeed I have seen it on several occasions when there has been nothing to watch on the TV.