Cemeterio Del Terror

 

Last night’s cheesy YouTube movie was El Cemeterio Del Terror (Cemetery of Terror), a Mexican horror film from the mid 80’s. It was very funny, corny, and had some fun kills.

The plot revolves around some teenage boys who convince their girlfriends to ditch their planned rock concert on Halloween night and come with them to a fun party instead. Turns out they’re lying and just want to get the girls alone for some romance, so they take them to an abandoned house. The girls are naturally pissed and demand to be taken home. One boy goes wandering and finds an old book of black magic. He shows it to the others and the girls start getting scared. This gives the guys’ the idea to pull a prank and to scare them into their arms. They decide to steal a corpse from the local morgue and bring it to the nearby cemetery to revive it using spells from the book. Unknown to them, the body they stole is a man who used to be a Satan worshipping serial killer who vowed to return to life again. The spell brings him back as a zombie who starts hunting the teens. Meanwhile, a professor who wants to destroy the body goes looking for it with the help of a police officer after they discover it was stolen. And some younger kids decide to go hang out at the cemetery instead of trick or treating.

The zombie killer finds the teens at the abandoned house and slaughters them. Then he uses his Satanic powers and the spell book to revive the dead from the cemetery. Now, the young kids are being terrorized as the undead start rising from the ground, while the professor hurries to find the body of the killer before it’s too late. I found myself laughing and smiling throughout its runtime. It had bad acting, cheesy dialogue, retro synth horror music, and plenty of bloody kills and cool looking zombies. It was a mix of Romero’s early zombie films, Italian zombie films and 80’s teenage horror. 

 

While the film wasn’t overly gory, there was a lot of bloodshed and slashing across people’s faces. The zombies all looked cool, with a good amount of makeup and ripped, dirty clothes to duplicate that undead aesthetic. The sequences with them rising out of their graves were a lot of fun, while the poor kids watched and screamed in terror. I love that it took place on Halloween night, and in a cemetery, with plenty of shots of the tombstones amid the foggy night.

El Cemeterio Del Terror is a cool 80’s flick if you enjoy those old-school, retro horror movies. The film was in Spanish but had no subtitles, so you may need to track a dubbed or subtitled copy if you can’t understand the language (I’m Latino so it was no issue for me). It’s a worthwhile zombie film, if you’re a fan of the older undead movies.