31 Days of Halloween (Day 16) - Zombie (1979)

An image that fueled a thousand nightmares. Well, a thousand of mine, anyway.

Look at that poster. That sold me on this flick when I was waaaay too young to see it. I was actually at a theater to see Battle Beyond the Stars with my folks and saw the poster for this in the lobby. I remember having nightmares about this freaking poster for weeks after seeing it. Like most of my horror-genre nightmares, I’d wake up scared....then try to go right back to sleep so I could resume the dream.

I had a complex childhood.

When I finally saw the film years later, I was a little disappointed. It’s a pretty good horror movie and it does have some neat gore effects. But, like the rest of Lucio Fulci’s work (The Beyond, The House By The Cemetery), the story is a mess and the acting is all over the place. Fulci is good at creating arresting images...but is not very good at directing people.

The film begins with a literal bang as a shadowy figure shoots a shrouded figure in the head. The shooter than says “the boat can leave now.” It is a great opening. We have no idea why this is happening; but, it does kick you in the eyeballs and make you want to find out.

We then cut to “the boat” sailing past lower Manhattan. It is adrift and, apparently, abandoned. A harbor patrol boat approaches, police board the ship and find a bloated zombie aboard. The creature is shot and falls overboard, but not before it bites - and kills - a cop. At that point our main protagonist, Peter West (Ian MCulloch), is introduced. He is a reporter who is assigned to look into the incident. While doing so, he meets Ann Bowles (Tisa Farrow, who has one expression, heavily medicated) whose father owns the boat. The two of them travel to an island in the Caribbean that was her father’s last known location. They meet up with a couple - Brian (Al Cliver aka Pier Luigi Conti) and Susan (Auretta Gay) - who own a boat. En route Susan goes topless scuba diving (and yes, she has nice flotation devices - no way was I going to pass that opportunity up) and is attacked by a zombie. The zombie, in turn, is attacked by a shark and the two wrestle for a while, in what is an inspired sequence.

Scene cut from the final episode of SpongeBob SquarePants

When they arrive on the island, they find it devastated by the zombie plague. They meet Doctor Menard (Richard Johnson) who is trying to figure out what kind of disease is reanimating the dead. The surviving natives are turning to voodoo to try and stop the zombies. However, neither science nor faith have much luck. The hordes of shuffling, rotting corpses are relentless. The protagonists are whittled down by zombie attacks until only Peter and Ann are left. They escape the island, only to discover that New York City is being overrun by the undead. The end.

While not particularly frightening, the movie is gruesome. The zombie makeup and gore effects by Giannetto De Rossi and Maurizio Trani are in general effective. In particular, the aforementioned shark attack is well-executed. One particularly nasty scene occurs when the wife of Dr. Menard (played by Olga Karlatos, who is kind enough to provide us with a shower scene before her death) has a splinter of wood jammed into her eye before being torn apart by the hungry undead. Fulci also stages a creepy cemetery reanimation sequence, including the beauty featured on the movie poster. And the final battle in Dr. Menard's clinic, while a bit long and repetitive, is still well-executed and features an abundance of head shots, throats torn out, zombies on fire and falling apart and other forms of mayhem. The score by Fabio Frizzi (who worked on a number of Fulci films) and Giorgio Tucci is also worth mentioning; it is an effective electronic soundtrack that coveys a feeling of dissonance, of a world out of order, which fits the story perfectly.

Of course, this being a Fulci film, the story isn’t very impressive. Characters repeatedly freeze in terror at the attacking zombies, allowing the slow moving ghouls a chance to chomp into them. The ending - Peter and Ann listening to a radio announcer describing the zombies overrunning new york city - is pretty ludicrous since it ends with the announcer telling his audience that the “zombies are at the studio door” followed by a goofy scream. The central problem, however, is that the story just doesn’t go anywhere. The characters have no arc and are poorly developed and the plot is really an excuse for zombie attacks and gore effects. This doesn’t mean it is a bad film, per se; it does mean that you need to accept it for what it is.

Zombie attack or Monday morning in my house. Hard to tell the difference.

This would be an easy movie to nitpick; but, that would miss the point. Like most of Fulci’s work, it is best to approach this movie as a horror-dream, a nightmare of the undead, not a film with strong characters or much thematic complexity.

If you like horror films and have not seen this movie, I’d recommend it. While there are limitations, it’s a fun, gory romp and well worth watching. If you wind up liking it and want to check out more of Fulci’s work, watch The Beyond, which is his best film...even though it makes almost no sense as a coherent narrative.

A little bonus trivia; the film was released as Zombi 2 in Italy. Why? Because Dawn of the Dead was released as Zombi and the film was marketed as a sequel, even though the two have nothing to do with one another (other than having zombies as the monsters). Even in a zombie apocalypse, marketing matters.