Starring Gabriele Lavia, Anne Canovas, Paola Tanziani, Cesare Barbetti, Bob Tonelli / Music by Riz Ortolani / Cinematography by Franco Delli Colli
Format: DVD - Image (MSRP $19.98)
A young journalist, Stefano (Gabriele Lavia), receives a used typewriter from his girlfriend, Alessandra (Anne Canovas). Out of curiosity (or boredom), he looks at the old ribbon inside and reconstructs the sentences last typed by its previous owner. After much headstrain, he deduces that Paolo Zeder, a scientist prominent in the 1950s, discovered that certain areas of the world are actually "K Zones" -- supernatural landmarks where dead bodies may be brought back to life after being buried in the soil. Stefano digs further into the history of Zeder, and by tracing a number of strange unsolved deaths, he learns that a small group of followers holed out in an abandomed camp are determined to continue Zeder's studies by reviving a dead priest.
Methodically paced and extremely
grim, Zeder was largely ignored by horror fans until Phil Hardy's
horror edition of The Overlook Encyclopedia began raving about Avati
as an unsung genius. Suddenly everyone seemed to hail Zeder and its
predecessor, Avati's The House with Windows that Laugh (La Casa con
le Finestre che Ridono), as the high points of Italian horror cinema.
While La Casa may indeed support this claim, Zeder suffers
from such extreme appraisals, as it's neither quite a pioneering masterpiece nor a worthless ripoff. 
Avati's
impressive grip of cinematic vocabulary is quite evident here, and he manages
to produce some genuinely unnerving sequences, particuarly the finale in
which a camera hidden inside a buried coffin produces some horrific results.
On the other hand, Lavia, best known for his appearances in Dario Argento's
Deep Red and Inferno, makes for a flat, uninvolving leading
man; he seems so somber and skewed from his first moment onscreen that
his subsequent descent doesn't quite build up the necessary unrelenting
momentum. More noticeably, Riz Ortolani's loud, overbearing score has a
tendency to squash subtle moments into sheer bombast. These quibbles
aside, Zeder remains a highly rewarding film on its own terms, which some impatient viewers may not be willing to meet. As usual, Avati's sense of geography and local color is impeccable, with oddball casting and a fascinating knack for turning mundane camera setups into magical landscapes of shadow and light.
Image's DVD improves dramatically in both sharpness and visual composition upon the old Vestron VHS version, though the original print materials are noticeably in less than prime condition. A few tears and some negative dirt rear their heads now and then, particularly around reel changes, and Avati's washed out color schemes will probably upset viewers expecting a Bava barrage of rainbow hues across the screen. Seasoned Italian horror pros will be more receptive to the film's difficult, eerie charms, however, and the fact that a relatively obscure title like this can get a DVD release in the U.S. is miraculous indeed. The image is either open matte or very slightly cropped from 1.66:1 or less; in either case, no noticeable information seems to be missing, and the compositions appear balanced.
