Buried Alive is of interest more for historical reasons than any particular quality of the film itself. Funded by Sony, Buried Alive is culled from a series of 100 2 minute webisodes that were originally hosted on Facebook, YouTube, FearNet, and MySpace. An interesting behind the scenes extra on this disc reveals that Sony wanted to develop something for their New Media division and the Buried Alive series was the result. This DVD collects footage from this series into an hour-length feature with decidedly mixed results.

Buried Alive's premise is creative and compelling. Five high school friends are abducted and placed in elaborately large coffins. Each coffin has a camera to record their reactions, and each has both clues to the kidnapper's motives and a method to execute the abducted. The creepiest coffin involves a character in desperate need of medication. The top of his coffin is glass and the medicine bottle is above it - as is several feet of dirt. A hammer and a chisel are left for him, and the character must decide - in a Saw-like scenario - whether to attempt to break the glass and retrieve the medicine, risking a suffocating avalanche of soil.

The characters can intermittently communicate with each other, and they try to figure out who is responsible for their abductions. Concurrently, footage from various events in the past year reveal more about the characters and a mysterious guy named Tommy who is in love with one of the characters.

A third level of footage involves a brother / sister sleuth team. Melanie and Travis break into several homes and businesses on a hunt to find the five missing teens. It's a horror movie, so of course, they don't do anything sensible like involve the authorities. Melanie is particularly desperate to find her girlfriend, Sage. Travis tags along and records her investigations.

That's a lot for a film that clocks in at 65 minutes. Thus, the pacing of the movie is brisk and involving. However, budgetary limitations are very clear. A collection of relatively unknown actors are wildly uneven in their performances. Since everything is filmed by a participant camera, the story is told in very limiting ways. The whole thing ultimately looks like a student film project inspired by The Blair Witch Project and others of its ilk.

Buried Alive, it's revealed in the behind the scenes extra mentioned above, was meant to be an interactive experience, with viewers interested in the webisodes able to uncover more information about the characters and events online and through other means. One buried character has a phone number scrawled on his arm, and viewers of the webisode who dialed that number would receive a text message supposedly from the killer himself.

I suspect the "fun" of watching Buried Alive as a series is undercut by seeing it cobbled together in this format. Rent it only if you're interested.

The DVD

Video:

Buried Alive was shot in HD, but then the footage was "dirtied up," according to editor Jacob Vaughan in the DVD's extras. Vaughan states that scan lines, static, rolls, and other video glitches were added to make it seem like various amateur and web cameras were used to shoot the footage. This works to convey what the filmmakers intended (obviously, rating the video quality of the movie for this review became tricky). I found that static time jumps in the film were annoying, though, and not really explained by the events in the film. Oh, the image is widescreen and it is anamorphic.

Sound:

The film's audio track is Dolby Digital 2.0. It's a rather limited mix that obviously tries to mimic the quality of various webcams, etc. Subtitles are available in English and French.

Extras:

Making Buried Alive (27:28) is the behind the scenes extra referenced in the review above. It's actually more interesting than the film itself, with a lot of comments from the filmmakers themselves. The extra is presented in widescreen but isn't anamorphic.

Deleted Scenes (23:08) provides additional footage from the original webisodes not included in the feature cut of the material.

Finally, a lively commentary track is provided by the producer Jay Michel, director Paul Etheridge, and actors Brit Morgan and Jeff Blum.

A Previews link provides trailers for Zombie Strippers, The Tattooist, The Counterfeiters, 88 Minutes, The Fall, and Tortured. There's also a commercial for Fearnet.com.

Final Thoughts:

An interesting experiment from Sony in web content is presented here as an hour-length film that loses some of the original webisodes' episodic punch. The "behind the scenes" featurette about the making of the series proves more entertaining as a historical time capsule about film content produced for the web. Rent it, if you're interested.

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