Somewhat a forgotten kooky 90s zombie low-budget horror film that seems loosely inspired, tonally and set-up wise at least, by Return of the Living Dead. Slow to get going, real slow and mainly set in the one location; the graveyard shift at a mortuary on its last legs. However during the slow first half of nonsensical story exposition, and drawn out character exchanges. I actually found the character banter (by a stellar cast) rather amusing, especially Phyllis Diller's bark (which could be more ferocious than her poodle) and Ed Nelson's deadpan reactions to keep you engaged before the ludcrious thrills and ghoulish FX finally breaks out. And when it does, it doesn't disappoint.

Trapped inside with creepy rotting, and gooey zombie kids (from an age-old curse) munching away on corpses that suddenly turns into some wild, and goofy mutated monster fun. Maybe at times low-scale in its excitement and gets you wanting more than what's presented by rushing through the mayhem, but the imagery (FX I mean) is indeed a sight to behold... permed muscle-bound monster poodle anyone?

P.s. Diller's stunt double diving over a table in a grey wig won't be fooling anybody... that moment made me chuckle.

Of course I wasn't expecting much good from this movie but I still didn't expected it to be as horrible as it turned out to be.

Basically everything about this movie disappoints. It's an obvious cheaply made and fast put together, that fails to impress or even entertain. You would at least expect from a zombie movie that it's being somewhat remotely entertaining and features some decent gore as well. But no, for the fans of the genre there are hardly any redeeming qualities in this movie.

It's not really a movie in which an awful lot is happening. It's one of those horror movies that is being set at mostly just one location (for budget reasons obviously) and you're constantly waiting for the movie to finally start to take off. It's not because of the lacking script that not anything or interesting is ever happening but also really due to the lacking directing from debuting James Cummins. This guy doesn't know when to say 'cut' it seems. Some sequences needlessly drag on and take away any of the movie its effects that it potentially still could have had.

I started to loose interest in this movie really fast. It also didn't had any really compelling or interesting character in it, that you could feel for. Not even the zombie/horror moments could spice up things, mainly because there were far too few moments like that and half of the time I couldn't even understand what was happening on the screen. I also still don't understand what its story was all about and how some of the corpses came back to live but perhaps I simply wasn't paying attention enough, since the movie failed to keep me interested.

What makes the movie all the more annoying and bad to watch is its acting. The movie stars a whole bunch of people that only starred in an handful of movies and never made it big time, with the exception of some of the supporting characters. Of course a lot of their lacking acting performances can be brought back to its bad writing but I also doubt a the same time they would had pulled things off any better with a different script.

But if I have to mention one good things about this movie I would be the puppets. I liked that they mostly went with this approach, rather than using just make-up effects. Puppets can often be creepy looking, far more so than any make-up or computer effects can ever achieve.

A movie that really isn't worth your time.

3/10

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"The Boneyard" appears to be a guilty pleasure of many people around here, but I certainly can't write too many positive things about it. This is just another cheap B-movie put together by a guy who got himself noticed in the early 80's by providing the special effects for some decent films ("House", "Strange Invaders") and therefore assumed he'd be good in directing his very own movie as well. There's a fair amount of gruesome make-up effects to be found in this film, but there's no story and the comedy elements just downright suck. By now, I'm pretty sure you've already heard about the stupid poodle that transforms into a gigantic zombie-monster during the finale? Well, this particular gimmick is why so many horror freaks like the film. The oddly named Miss Poopinplatz (Phyllis Diller) and her dog are the nightly caretakers of a little town mortuary where the horribly decomposing bodies of three children are kept. Police detective Jersey Callum and spiritual medium Alley Cates investigating the case and they're in the mortuary when suddenly the dead youngster rise from the autopsy table and go on a rampage. The kids are creepy and good ol' Phyllis has some cool one-liners, but the majority of the film is lame and disappointing. The "zombies" (supposedly ancient Chinese monster-kids without background) never leave the basement of the mortuary and they don't even kill that many people! James Cummins' directing is uninspired and his script is even worse, as it doesn't have the least bit of continuity. Avoid, unless of course you fancy giant zombified poodles.