Buried Alive

Buried Alive is a made-for-TV thriller that was directed by Frank Darabont and produced by Niki Marvin. It was featured on the USA Network and starred Tim Matheson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, William Atherton and Hoyt Axton. Clint Goodman has been very successful in his life. He owns his a lucrative construction company, built his house from the ground up and married the woman of his dreams. The only thing missing in his life is children, even though he and his wife, Joanna, have tried. Every so often he gets a strange feeling that his wife resents him for it, but then he quickly dismisses that idea.

The local doctor, Cortland Van Owen, has been with them every step of the way, but his relationship with Joanna is much closer. In fact, they have been having an affair for a while now and over dinner they plot on how to get rid of Clint for good. They decide poisoning would be the best route and Cortland supplies her with a rare poison from a tropical fish.

At dinner the next night, Joanna puts her plan into action and spikes Clint’s drink. It works and Clint dies almost immediately from an apparent heart attack. In order to speed up the process, Joanna even skips the autopsy and when Joanna thinks she sees him moving at the morgue, she even skips the embalming process. After burying him in a plywood coffin, Joanna and Cortland celebrate.

While they are celebrating, Clint awakes to a storm overhead and darkness; that’s when he realizes that he has been buried alive. After fighting frantically to escape, he finally succeeds and heads to his house. That’s when he finds his wife and the doctor and heads to the basement to clean up and plot his revenge.