...resident of the Twilight Zone. There's a signpost up ahead: Spoiler Alert, as we have a review of I Spit on Your Grave... I mean, I Bury the Living. A simple story about a simple man, a local hero, if you will. But this Boon(e) is about to find that being a respectable member of the community isn't all work and no play. He's about to realize that actions have consequences...Sorry about that, but it's just to let you know what you're in for. Richard Boone's an odd fellow. I suspect he's never done a movie with Leslie Nielsen. All that leading man gravitas competing for the silver screen's affection at once... they would be bound to rip each other's throats out, JMHO... just as I thought. No results. Obviously his IMDb page misses the larger picture. Surely he's best known and loved for "Have Gun, Will Travel"... at least, as a good guy. (39 episodes in a season! Doesn't seem worth it some how) He was also rather prolific as a bad guy, especially in such films as The Shootist and Hombre. Unsettling for someone like me, trying to separate the two in my mind.
Anyway, here he is in the evocatively titled I Bury the Living. I hate to spoil the setup any more than I already have, which means I must have some affection for this thing. Sometimes simplest is best, and it even manages to sneak in a couple surprises! I must've been enjoying myself. Still, the lesson is clear... no, I dare not give the lesson, but it does come early, and rather abruptly! Perhaps I can point out that there's a character even more central to this movie than even Richard Boone: the map. An awful map on the wall containing cemetery plots and pins. Black and white pins. Black pins to indicate the deceased, white pins for the living who have reserved plots in advance. Something about the bare lines on this map reminded me of Picasso, Kandinsky for another of my viewing companions. We get to see quite a bit of this map during the show: at different times of day, through that special curved glass to make it look like it's under water... there's even a moment where Boone is silhouetted against it like James Bond! There's a couple scene breaks where the picture gets smaller, fading away from us, with dramatic music in tow... perhaps to indicate a nice commercial break! That was our concensus view... consensus? That's more like it. No red underline on the latter.
There's a nice prologue about science at the beginning of the movie, that there are some things that man does not know, was not meant to know... something like that. Not the (Donald) Rumsfeld knowns and unknowns, and not a right-wing refutation of science. And apparently I could go on to the IMDb and see the whole movie, but I think the point is something about the divine. If there was a divine or accursed force at work in our world that defied explanation... wouldn't we know about it? And wouldn't we end up exploiting it for maximum profit? Maximum... let me get my econ textbook... something to fight that damn law of diminishing marginal utility? Close enough. Help us conquer space, O Lord!
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-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan
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