Movie Review: Cemetery of Terror (1985)

the horror continues... 37 nights till Halloween!
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tonight's feature: Cemetery of Terror (1985) on Shudder

I loved this movie. Not that it's a great horror movie, but it's a 1985 Mexican throwback with extra cheese, like watching Michael Jackson's 'Thriller' video with a little bit more storyline. It's also in Spanish, so you get to practice those language skills.

On Halloween night, three medical students (also teenage horndogs) lie to their girlfriends about a rock concert and "jet set" party at some mansion just to get them to come out. They bring many bags of snacks and drinks (including vast quantities of 1985's Pepsi Free) but the mansion is actually an abandoned house next to a cemetery. The girls are pissed and start sulking instead of making out. The lead horndog explores the attic and finds a big black book, which appears to be filled with satanic spells. He tells his brochachos if they REALLY scare the girls, they'll fall right into their arms. So he does what any of us would do in that situation: drive everyone in the hatchback to the morgue, sneak in the back door and steal the biggest and ugliest corpse you can find, bring it to the cemetery to try to raise it from the dead.

Well things don't go as planned, since the corpse they steal is actually serial killer Devlon who is also some kind of demonic spirit. A violent rainstorm kicks up in the middle of their ritual and they abandon the idea and the body and head back to the house to do some heavy petting. Devlon shows up in short order and makes quick work of the murdering kind.

There are also a bunch of Halloween-loving kids in the cemetery and they just happen to run into Devlon and the teenagers bodies in the house before running back to the cemetery where every single corpse starts popping out of the ground for no apparent reason. From there it's one bad decision after another and endless running from zombies. If you factor in the continuity errors and knuckleheaded plot snafus you've got unintentional comedy gold, which is not exactly frightening but at least entertaining. 6 cans of Pepsi Free glowing by the light of the fire out of 10.