Umberto Lenzi once again piggybacks his way into infamy. After copying A MAN CALLED HORSE with his MAN FROM DEEP RIVER and unwittingly kick-starting the Italian cannibal film genre, and after riding the wave of giallo and crime pictures, and after several attempts to one-up Ruggero Deodato in the cannibal sweepstakes, he turns his attention to another genre, the zombie film. Well, sort of.
After the release of George Romero's DAWN OF THE DEAD (and its successful Italian release as ZOMBI), Lucio Fulci immediately followed up with ZOMBI 2, a successful cash-in which also stood on its own quite well, displaying his typically misanthropic outlook in a new avenue. Not one to let a potential trend go, the prolific Lenzi knew well enough to go in a slightly different direction. Instead of traditional zombies, we face rampaging bands of radiation victims who have somehow become insanely homicidal. Instead of the shambling army depicted by Romero and Fulci, these guys are FAST. They run, use tools, drive cars, fly planes, shoot guns. But what they make up for in novelty, they lose in effectiveness. What makes the traditional zombie frightening is its sense of "otherness." They were once us, but in death they have become something else completely. Despite a few laughable attempts at makeup, there's nothing really different about the "zombies" of NIGHTMARE CITY. When they're organized and coherent enough to signal each other to move forward, the only thing separating them from a bunch of bullying jerks taken to the nth level is the ability to speak.
But that's not the least of Lenzi's problems. There's a great deal of simply shoddy filmmaking going on here. There's poor set design, as evidenced by the news room set (a blue screen, a desk and a large fern). There's the script, with its inability to make up its mind whether these things are just infected people or zombies (they're not undead, but they can only be stopped by a shot to the head?). There's the ridiculous "zombie" makeup (in which grossly deformed faces only extend to around the seemingly unaffected neck area, and in which you can see holes between eyes and noses). And there's the attacks, in which we rarely see any traditional gore effects -- which would be about the only thing this movie would have going for it, if they were there. We see about 2 or 3 scenes of things actually happening to people. For the most part, what we see are obvious cheats -- knives sliding along the surfaces of people's throats, leaving thin lines of blood; stabbing effects in which we see knives just touch the surface of someone's clothing; the infected leaning in to apparantly lick the wounds of their victims (since we never see any real tearing of flesh), etc. Near the end, we do see some exploding gun-shot heads (though they all look remarkably similar), an eye-gouging (Fulci had nothing to worry about), and a small piece of skin cut from a woman's breast (which never looks any more real than an Andy Milligan flick's effects), but it's too little (MUCH too little) too late.
Then there's the end. Oh, boy does it ever end.
Or does it?
Actually, any of Lenzi's missteps here would be forgiven if there was a sense of personal investment in the film, or even a hint of actual filmmaking ability. But despite a couple of relatively tense setpieces (which, not coincidentally, do not feature the infected hordes), there's nothing here to grasp onto. There is not any Romero-esque satire. There isn't any of Fulci's personality. There's actually none of Bruno Mattei's Ed Wood-level bad-filmmaking charm. It's just there, and no matter how fast the masses run, there's no momentum, no energy...there's no THERE there. Lenzi does, almost as an afterthought, add some heavy-handed anti-nuclear sloganeering, and thinks about discussing the failure of the military in the face of this crisis (but that only lasts for about 3 seconds), seemingly in order to give his film a sense of relevance, but it's to no avail. And it's possible to make a decent flick about fast-moving, tool-using hordes of "infected" people -- there's Jean Rollin's GRAPES OF DEATH and Danny Boyle's 28 DAYS LATER..., both of which share a similar plotting to this film, and both of which completely outdo it.
If you've already seen every other apocalyptic Italian zombie flick on the market, and haven't gotten 'round to this one yet, you might as well see it. I'm sure there's worse you could do. If you haven't, by all means, don't start here.
After the release of George Romero's DAWN OF THE DEAD (and its successful Italian release as ZOMBI), Lucio Fulci immediately followed up with ZOMBI 2, a successful cash-in which also stood on its own quite well, displaying his typically misanthropic outlook in a new avenue. Not one to let a potential trend go, the prolific Lenzi knew well enough to go in a slightly different direction. Instead of traditional zombies, we face rampaging bands of radiation victims who have somehow become insanely homicidal. Instead of the shambling army depicted by Romero and Fulci, these guys are FAST. They run, use tools, drive cars, fly planes, shoot guns. But what they make up for in novelty, they lose in effectiveness. What makes the traditional zombie frightening is its sense of "otherness." They were once us, but in death they have become something else completely. Despite a few laughable attempts at makeup, there's nothing really different about the "zombies" of NIGHTMARE CITY. When they're organized and coherent enough to signal each other to move forward, the only thing separating them from a bunch of bullying jerks taken to the nth level is the ability to speak.
But that's not the least of Lenzi's problems. There's a great deal of simply shoddy filmmaking going on here. There's poor set design, as evidenced by the news room set (a blue screen, a desk and a large fern). There's the script, with its inability to make up its mind whether these things are just infected people or zombies (they're not undead, but they can only be stopped by a shot to the head?). There's the ridiculous "zombie" makeup (in which grossly deformed faces only extend to around the seemingly unaffected neck area, and in which you can see holes between eyes and noses). And there's the attacks, in which we rarely see any traditional gore effects -- which would be about the only thing this movie would have going for it, if they were there. We see about 2 or 3 scenes of things actually happening to people. For the most part, what we see are obvious cheats -- knives sliding along the surfaces of people's throats, leaving thin lines of blood; stabbing effects in which we see knives just touch the surface of someone's clothing; the infected leaning in to apparantly lick the wounds of their victims (since we never see any real tearing of flesh), etc. Near the end, we do see some exploding gun-shot heads (though they all look remarkably similar), an eye-gouging (Fulci had nothing to worry about), and a small piece of skin cut from a woman's breast (which never looks any more real than an Andy Milligan flick's effects), but it's too little (MUCH too little) too late.
Then there's the end. Oh, boy does it ever end.
Or does it?
Actually, any of Lenzi's missteps here would be forgiven if there was a sense of personal investment in the film, or even a hint of actual filmmaking ability. But despite a couple of relatively tense setpieces (which, not coincidentally, do not feature the infected hordes), there's nothing here to grasp onto. There is not any Romero-esque satire. There isn't any of Fulci's personality. There's actually none of Bruno Mattei's Ed Wood-level bad-filmmaking charm. It's just there, and no matter how fast the masses run, there's no momentum, no energy...there's no THERE there. Lenzi does, almost as an afterthought, add some heavy-handed anti-nuclear sloganeering, and thinks about discussing the failure of the military in the face of this crisis (but that only lasts for about 3 seconds), seemingly in order to give his film a sense of relevance, but it's to no avail. And it's possible to make a decent flick about fast-moving, tool-using hordes of "infected" people -- there's Jean Rollin's GRAPES OF DEATH and Danny Boyle's 28 DAYS LATER..., both of which share a similar plotting to this film, and both of which completely outdo it.
If you've already seen every other apocalyptic Italian zombie flick on the market, and haven't gotten 'round to this one yet, you might as well see it. I'm sure there's worse you could do. If you haven't, by all means, don't start here.
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