Buried Alive and Survived (Swirl Films, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, November 9) I watched a couple of Lifetime movies in quick succession, Buried Alive and Survived and Searching for a Serial Killer: The Regina Smith Story. Buried Alive and Survived is one of Lifetime’s “race movies,” in which all but one of the characters and the actors playing them are Black. The central characters are Alicia (Eva Marcille) – I thought I heard a mention in the dialogue that her last name was “Silverstein,” an odd but not impossible name for an African-American – and her ex-husband Victor (Tyler Lepley). Victor has just been released from prison after serving eight years because the prisons were full. It’s not that clear from the script by Nigel Campbell (story), Gregory Small and Richard Blaney (screenplay) just what crime Victor had committed, but it involved an accomplice named Stevie G. (Lamar K. Cheston) whom Victor protected by not turning state’s evidence and naming his co-conspirators. In the intervening years Stevie has built up a legal business restoring old trucks, and in a scene that suggests someone on the writing committee saw the 1948 film I Walk Alone (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2024/10/i-walk-alone-hal-wallis-productions.html), Victor shows up at Stevie’s garage to demand his share of the profits from their criminal enterprise. When Stevie says he doesn’t have it – he spent it all, though he pleads with Victor to wait a while until he earns back the money and can pay him – Victor is impatient and gets his revenge by smashing the window of a truck Stevie has just painstakingly restored. Then Victor spots a new black truck Stevie has just bought for himself and says he’ll accept it as payment.

Victor drives off in the truck and seeks out Alicia, who’s living as a single parent and raising their son Malcolm (Jaeden White). She has a support network consisting of her sister Kamlyn (Christie Leverette) and their all-wise Aunt Jo (Cocoa Brown). Victor shows up at Alicia’s place, all smiles and on his best behavior, but making it clear that he intends to retake his place at the head of their family whether she likes it or not. Then Victor leaves, and Alicia immediately decides to move, taking as much stuff as she and Malcolm can carry and staying with a friend or relative until she can re-establish herself and find her own place. Malcolm is understandably perturbed – he’s overjoyed that he finally has a real father instead of the ghostly image of one – but Alicia insists. Only as soon as she’s packed and ready to go, she opens her front door – and Victor is still there. He overpowers her and forces her into the truck, takes her to the motel room where he’s staying, and ties her up in the bathroom, then heads back to Alicia’s place to pick up their son Malcolm. This all happens half an hour into the movie, though it isn’t until half an hour later that Alicia gets literally buried alive. Victor finds an old wooden box made of slats and decides to bury Alicia in it because, as he tells her, “When I was in prison I felt like I was buried alive. Now I’m going to give you that same feeling.” Victor blames Alicia for his incarceration since she was the one who ratted him out to the police in the first place.

The second half of the movie consists of elaborate chase sequences, as Victor shoots a redneck – the only white person we see in the entire movie – who owns the property on which he buried Alicia alive. The guy came after Victor with a long gun, but Victor was able to wrestle it away from him and shoot him with it, killing him. Meanwhile Alicia is able at great effort to dig herself out of her premature grave; she has some sort of tool containing a flashlight and some keys with which she’s able to make a hole in one of the slats. Fortunately for her, it was heavily raining that night, which turned the earth in which Victor had buried her into mud. There are some nicely done suspense scenes from director Manu Boyer (a man, and mostly known as an actor; he directed some previous Lifetime movies, including one called Secrets of a Marine’s Wife [https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2021/06/secrets-of-marines-wife-2021.html], in which the titular secret was she was married to one Marine but having extra-relational activity with another) as she slowly digs her way through both the box and the mud before finally getting out. Alicia finds the redneck’s truck and uses it to escape to civilization – fortunately, its headlights were still on after all that time (wouldn’t they have run down, rendering the battery dead and the truck undrivable?). At first she stops by her house, where she finds Kamlyn knocked out by Victor, who has kidnapped Malcolm and driven him off heaven knows were.

But the good guys have another stroke of good luck: Malcolm thought to take along the electronic tracker with which Alicia had outfitted the new pair of shoes she’d bought him for his birthday. Alicia and Aunt Jo are able to track him with the device on Jo’s computer, and though Victor discovers the device and smashes it, they’re able to fix his location before that. Jo sensibly asks Alicia to let her call 911 and get the police involved, but Alicia, like so many stupid Lifetime heroines before her, insists on driving off in her own car to confront the villain herself. Ultimately the film ends in a church – conveniently open even though no one from its staff is there – in which Victor corners Alicia with the long gun and fires at her every chance he gets, insisting that he’s going to fulfill the marriage vow, “‘Til Death Do Us Part.” Only just as he’s about to knock her off, his gun turns out to have run out of bullets, and ultimately the police arrive and Victor decides to commit “suicide by cop,” walking out with the empty gun and getting himself shot fatally. The first half-hour was pretty slow going and the rest verged all too often on the silly, but Buried Alive and Survived had two saving graces: the performances of Tyler Lepley and Eva Marcille. Lepley is tall and drop-dead gorgeous – he flashes a very nice basket both in the light brown pants he wears to the confrontation with Stevie and the blue jeans he wears thereafter – and he’s an expert actor at playing the rapid-fire mood shifts of his character. Victor is a psychopath who can make himself genuinely charming, and for once in a Lifetime movie we aren’t shaking our heads wondering what on earth attracted this woman to that man. And Marcille matches him, nailing the character’s desperation and also her resourcefulness. Their performances and Boyer’s tough, no-nonsense suspense direction help Buried Alive and Survived overcome a silly, plot hole-filled script as well as a title that is itself a “spoiler.”