Well

I’d love to know the programming philosophy at Shudder. Ben Parker’s BURIAL (2021, Shudder) isn’t the first film I’ve seen on the horror service that isn’t a horror film. In this case it’s really a war film, and it’s not total monkey dump, though it could be better. An elderly Englishwoman (Harriet Walters) easily incapacitates a neo-Nazi who’s broken into her home in search of…something. She then tells him the history of that something, so we get an extended flashback in which her younger self (Charlotte Vega, who has the unfortunate task of having to play the junior version of an acting god) is a Soviet translator at the end of World War II who’s part of a group of soldiers taking Hitler’s body back to Moscow in secret. That means they have to march the body through Germany and Poland, exposing themselves to postwar Nazi resistance fighters, the werewolves. Is that why it’s on Shudder? Perhaps someone there needs a history lesson. Anyway, there are some decent action scenes, lovely photography of the film’s Estonian locations, an interesting depiction of differing forms of tyranny (Hitler, Stalin, the patriarchy) and superb work by Walters, who ends the film with a monolog that’s almost symphonic in its highs and lows, and Tom Fenton as a Polish freedom fighter. But the whole plot to take Hitler’s body to Stalin makes little sense, the final shot pounds you over the head with significance to make sure we’ve gotten a point any thinking person had figured out minutes before and there’s one Soviet soldier (Barry Ward) who is stabbed multiple times but keeps running around the countryside. Maybe the Russians invented the Energizer Bunny first.

Shake off your winter blues with Greg Klyma and Tom Fenton in the 9th Ward tomorrow, Wed 11/26 $10 - doors at 7pm show starts at 8pm http://www.babevillebuffalo.com/events/greg-klyma-thanksgiving-homecoming-w-tom-fenton/