GRAVE ROBBERS (1988) Blu-ray/DVD combo
Director: Straw Weisman
Vinegar Syndrome

Her new husband's occupation is death and dying but he also likes his bedmate cold and still in the black comedy GRAVE ROBBERS, on Blu-ray/DVD combo from Vinegar Syndrome.

A former prostitute with a record, Nora Mae (Elizabeth Mannino) would rather suffer the monotony of a job as a diner waitress than turn another trick. It is definitely too-good-to-be-true when wealthy John Henry Cox (David Gregory) proposes to her moments after meeting her, but a swooning Nora takes a chance on comfort and returns with him to his idyllic home town of Newbury to get married that very night. She thinks she can learn to live with his job as the town undertaker, but his desire for her to remain absolutely still during lovemaking sets her imagination running and her suspicions about her husband's intimacy with his clients is seemingly confirmed by Evan Matthews (Jerry Rector, VAMPIRE'S KISS) when he covertly exhumes his sister's coffin and discovers it empty. Stalked by ghouls and headless chauffeurs, Nora Mae is unable to tell for sure if she is hallucinating and having nightmares or if everyone in the town has a hankering for cold bodies.

A co-production between Lew Mishkin (CARNAGE) – son of William Mishkin who bankrolled the major works of Andy Milligan (BLOODTHIRSTY BUTCHERS) in the seventies – and Films Around the World's Alexander Kogan (DOOM ASYLUM), GRAVE ROBBERS' necrophilia kink and its eighties gore (courtesy of THE DEADLY SPAWN's Arnold Gargiulo) seems tailor-made for the grindhouse of half a decade before; but writer/director Straw Weisman keeps things relatively "tasteful" with cinematographer Anghel Deccaa's stately and mobile coverage of the picturesque upstate New York settings and its emphasis on black comedy from Nora's deadpan narration to the broad supporting performances. The result is something closer to the suburban cannibal comedy PARENTS than DEAD & BURIED with the sequences featuring gut-ripping gore, decapitations, and ghouls handled fancifully while the film's central sequence of machine-assisted necrophilia scored with reggae as the electroshocked feet of corpse spasm to the beat. The film stumbles at the very end with a more overtly comic coda than was needed after the "it was all a dream… or was it" penultimate scene, but GRAVE ROBBERS is worth checking out even if it could have been both kinkier and more horrific.

Released direct-to-video by Prism Entertainment under the title DEAD MATE, GRAVE ROBBERS was subsequently released under its original title as a fullscreen transfer on a double feature release from Video Kart with Andy Milligan's MONSTROSITY, another Kogan/Mishkin production that was even more obscure (yet is also now scheduled for a Blu-ray release in the near future by Garagehouse Pictures). Transferred from a 2K scan of the original 35mm camera negatives, GRAVE ROBBERS looks spectacular on Vinegar Syndrome's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen Blu-ray owing to the professional standard of the photography and lighting as well as the archiving of the elements. While the seams of the prosthetic effects are certainly more evident than on tape, the contrasts between more overtly nightmarish sequences and supposed waking reality are also more evident photographically. The DTS-HD Master Audio1.0 mono mix is clean but also reveals the tendency of the sound mix to use the synth score of Katherine Quittner - better known as a music supervisor but also a musician who provided temp scores to bigger projects - in place of ambient effects.

The film can be played with an optional introduction (0:26) by director Straw Weisman who also shows up on an audio commentary track in which he recalls having worked as a writer for the Mishkins before getting into advertising and moving to the West Coast. Upon return he was contacted by Lew Mishkin about ideas for a low budget production with Kogan – one of a handful that never found theatrical release including Jose Ramon Larraz's DEADLY MANOR (released on tape as SAVAGE LUST), THE INHERITOR, and TRAPPED ALIVE – the film's theatrical ambitions, its origin in a letter written to his romance editor wife about a husband's kink, and the affirmation that it was always intended as a black comedy satirizing the eighties concern for safe sex and AIDS. More interesting is “Digging Up the Past” (18:50), an interview with Weisman in which he discusses in more detail his relationship with the Mishkins that included writing two hardcore loops for them in the seventies as well as scripting hardcore inserts for some of their pickups – including a scene with Kim Pope (INTRUSION) and Marc Stevens (THE PRIVATE AFTERNOONS OF PAMELA MANN) that might have been for PENETRATION, the XXX-insert version of the Italian giallo SO SWEET, SO DEAD also released in R-rated form as THE SLASHER IS A SEX MANIAC – as well as film advertising career writing copy for films like THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK and CUJO and his later career as a post-production supervisor starting with the late eighties horror flick THE SLEEPING CAR and including more recently HATCHET along with ghost-directing some unfinished films, the names of which he cannot divulge. Also included is a video trailer (3:30) under the GRAVE ROBBERS title which actually looks more like a spoilersome promo (possible what Kogan took to Cannes to sell the film) while the disc is packaged with a reversible cover (the first 1,500 copies ordered directly from Vinegar Syndrome include a limited edition embossed slipcover designed by Earl Kessler Jr.). (Eric Cotenas)

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