Dead & Buried

I remember, or maybe just imagine I remember, the novelization of Dead & Buried showing up the Scholastic Book Club in elementary school (there's a chance- I recently found a Scholastic edition of The Amityville Horror), somehow though, I never managed to actually see the movie.
So I was pleasantly surprised to see it on Shudder.

The one thing that stands out the most is Melody Anderson, best know as Dale Arden in the De Laurentis Flash Gordon.

She plays the wife of the sheriff, who's investigating deaths of strangers in the small Maine town of Potter's Bluff.  As viewers, we're treated to the deaths, so the circumstances are no mystery: crowds of locals, armed with rocks and pipes, are beating these people to death and taking pictures- lots of Kodak Instamatic flash bulbs.

The mastermind behind this- no spoilers, don't worry- will be apparent to anyone who's seen an episode of  The Avengers or Murder, She Wrote.

It's an effective and atmospheric small town chiller, with a couple of rather gruesome episodes- an eye impalement and death by acid- that somehow managed to get it on the infamous British "Video Nasties" list of banned movies.  Aside from the Kodaks and rotary phones, it holds up very well.

(I almost forgot- it was promoted as being by the creators of Alien, but Dan O'Bannon, the man who wrote the screenplay for Alien, didn't actually have anything to do with it and disavowed the movie.)