Romantic Cannibalism in Black and White

Graveyard Alive (2003) is one of those tongue-in-cheek/campy takes on horror that’s actually kinda interesting, kinda like Cheez-Whiz™, but with blood and medical boobies.

Done as an eight-act play with dubbed voices (even though it isn’t a foreign flick), a farmer hick shows up at a hospital with an axe in his head. This doesn’t seem to bother him as he’s already dead after being infected by a viral thingamajig.

Farmer Hatchet Gash falls for the mousey nurse and bites her hand. She slowly starts to turn into a zombie, which means she craves raw meat, easily found in the hospital’s morgue grocery store. She also smells like panty hose that hasn’t been changed in a month. This makes all the other doctors drawn to her like flies. I can’t explain it, either, but I can totally relate.

As she eats more flesh, her decomposition reverses. The meaty goodness acts as a sort of fountain of youth, making her more sexy and sexually promiscuous. In other parts of the movie, the hospital’s supermodel nurse is getting jealous that the doctors no longer want to give her a pelvic examination, so she discovers her rival’s truth and sets out to make zombie nurse stop living/un-living.

This is all done in a very comedic sort of way, kinda like a silent film. It’s also black and white, which means you’ll need to use your imagination as to the color of the bloody body parts the nurse graphically snacks on. (Think a slightly lighter shade of chartreuse, something in a spent tampon, perhaps.)

Every so often I open my brain to let a little art in.