Meadhall of the Comitatus

Can you believe I haven’t reviewed an Italian zombie flick since 2007?  I know I can’t.  I’m going to blame Zombie 5 for this, since that movie still angers me to this day.  But I couldn’t stay off the horse forever, so I bring you Lucio Fulci’s “City of the Living Dead.”

AGHHH!!! It's like she's staring into my Italian zombie-inundated soul!

Premise: 3/5

Well, to be fair, despite its title, this movie’s not really got too much to do with zombies.  It starts off with a priest hanging himself in a small-town cemetery.  The name of this small town is Dunwich, so you know this can’t be good.  It’s so not good, in fact, that a psychic in New York city somewhere goes completely spastic, apparently dying from the horror of her vision only to wake up screaming in a coffin a couple days later (never mind that whole “embalming” thing which she seems to have skipped).  Good thing the slack-ass gravediggers were too busy reading porno mags to actually finish the job of burying her, because that makes it easier for a terrible reporter who was just hanging around the graveyard to hear her screaming and bust her out of the coffin.  Apparently the reporter, Peter Bell, hasn’t got anything better to do with his week, because Mary Woodhouse, the previously comatose psychic, spins him a yarn about how the gate of hell is opening in Dunwich and they need to get there in the next seventy-two hours to close them before it becomes All Saints’ Day and the gate is stuck open and the world of the living is doomed forever.  Or something like that.

Ordinarily I'd cheer and point out the irony. Only the gates of hell are opening, and that's kind of a downer.

Since it’s going to take our protagonists a while to get to Dunwich (on account of it “not being on any map,” which does beg the question of where Mary and Peter are even driving to in the first place), let’s check in on the citizens of Dunwich, now that hell’s coming out to play.  Well, it’s not too bad at first . . . a lot of fog blows around and creepy background music plays while we take a tour of this unfortunately-named town.  Some people are starting to hear weird noises, and mirrors have taken to breaking of their own volition, and some people occasionally see the ghostly apparition of the recently-hung priest, but hey, who’s counting?  Eventually things start getting rough, as the local retarded guy who lives in a busted-up old shack has his date with a blow-up doll (yeah) interrupted before he can seal the deal.  He’s cock-blocked by suddenly discovering there’s a very rotten corpse (complete with writhing maggots and worms) of what appears to be a toddler lying on the floor next to his bed—and I can allegedly say from alleged personal experience that this is indeed a mood-killer.  Allegedly.

If this ISN'T a boner-ender for you, seek help immediately.

But that’s just the opening salvo of “things so terrible they will shatter your imagination!” that we were warned of at the beginning of the movie.  A typically randy teenage couple are off groping and fondling near an abandoned ramshackle house somewhere, when the dead priest shows up and puts some seriously grisly, seriously awesome voodoo on the girl.  She freaks out when he appears, hanging by a noose, right outside the car they were having sexy-time in but can’t take her eyes off him.  This turns out to be unfortunate since her eyes then begin bleeding quite a bit, and she eventually ends up vomiting out her internal organs in a long, sick, AWESOME scene.  The guy in the car gets off “easy” when his recently dead-by-entrail-puking girlfriend pulls the back of his head off and yanks out his brain—which you will be seeing a lot more of in the scenes to come, since it seems to be the zombies’ modus operandi here.   But before we get to more zombie action, our favorite dead priest has a few more shenanigans to pull, such as slathering some maggoty mud on a girl’s face who came to visit the aforementioned retard with the sex-doll fetish.  This kills her somehow, but more than that, it also makes everyone in town sure that Bob the retard is also a murderer (even though the medical examiner says it was obvious that the girl wasn’t strangled or abused in any way, and that she appears to have died from cardiac arrest brought on by massive fright), and starts a bit of a witch hunt.  This witch hunt ends at the home of a concerned father, whose daughter was apparently the only other person in town who actually liked Bob.  Once pops catches Bob in the garage with his daughter, he loses it and slams the simpleton on the table of his power drill, which leads to a lengthy and squirmy scene where pops pushes Bob’s head closer and closer to the spinning drill, eventually leading to another extremely nasty yet awesome scene of the drill penetrating into Bob’s skull and out the other side.  It’s just a shame that Bob really was innocent, because soon enough the recently-dead are rising from their coffins and murdering everyone after creeping them the hell out for a long time.

Finally we get back to Mary and Peter, who, after several stops for lunch are finally able to find out how to get to Dunwich.  Apparently, the reason it’s not on any map is because, and I shit thee not, the town was “built on the ruins of Salem.”  Yeah, the famous Salem, you know the one.  Apparently the townies are also supposed to be the descendants of all the old “Salem witch-burners.”  Which is also odd.  Not only is Dunwich built on the ruins of a town that was never ruined in the first place, but their ancestors burnt witches, even though no witches were ever actually burned in Salem.  Thanks Italy!

Look, I'm sorry the description's taking so long, but gimme a break here! I'm almost done so you can quit staring at me now!

But I digress—now that Mary and Peter have had lunch and made it to Salem, err, Dunwich, and now that everything’s really started going south for all parties concerned, they manage to find another couple (Gerry, the local psychiatrist—and no, I don’t know how a town “not on any map” would get a practicing psychiatrist in it—and Sandra, Gerry’s girlfriend and, apparently, patient—yikes!) who are also interested in getting to the bottom of this whole mess.  What they’re going to need to do is find the tomb of Father Thomas and kill him all over again in order to close the gate to hell.  Before they do that, though, they have to weather an actual maggot-storm (sick and awesome again!) and then make a detour to pick up local boy John-John who called up Gerry terrified and in tears, on account of his recently dead sister (the girl smothered with wormy maggot mud) coming back home and ripping his parents to shreds.  So, by the time they get through all the crazy and awful things plaguing the town and get back to the cemetery, it’s already All Saints’ Day and the jig might be up.  Still, there’s nothing for it but to give closing the gate to hell the old college try, so our two couples (they left John-John with the cops) bust into the Thomas family crypt and see if they can finish the job—which beats getting their brains ripped out by zombies, even though that happens to a couple of our heroes anyway.  The last two standing face off with Father Thomas, impale him with a wooden cross and then boogey back to the surface, just in time to get really freaked out by John-John running towards them, happy and smiling, to give them a hug for saving the town and probably the world as we know it.  I’ve no idea why they were scared of John-John, since he seemed completely un-zombified and everything looked like it was on the up-and-up, but the movie’s not inclined to tell me, since the last frame of smiling happy John-John goes into freeze-frame as we hear Mary scream.  Then the credits roll.

So, why rate this movie’s premise high at all, if it didn’t make much sense on the whole?  Because even though the plot is crazy and illogical, what this movie excels in is building up an atmosphere of mounting weirdness and mounting dread.  There’s a mythology to it (even though it’s twisted and completely nuts) that helped me to enjoy the out-there wigginess of the movie and separates—at times even elevates—it from the shambling and typically predictable pack of most other zombie flicks I’ve seen.  It’s often so original, in fact, that I find it difficult to even classify “City of the Living Dead” as a zombie flick at all.  It feels closer in spirit at times to something like “Inferno” or “The Church,” only with the living dead instead of witchcraft and Satanism.  I don’t know what else to say, I just dig it.

Also, I think it's safe to say this counts as one of the weirdest epitaphs on a gravestone yet.

Cast: 1.5/5

Here’s something that doesn’t surprise me about “City of the Living Dead,” though.  The acting is pretty universally horrible.  Top of the list of people I did not care for is Carlo de Mejo, who plays Gerry.  I never really thought that I’d see an “actor” with even less ability to emote than Nicholas Cage, and yet here one is.  Everything he says is in a very soft monotone, and he just stares at stuff absolutely blankly.  I can’t say that I hated de Mejo, but I can’t see why anyone would make this wooden plank one of the main characters of their movie.  Christopher George is okay as Peter Bell, I suppose, and it might just be the script he was given that keeps him from being too interesting.  I gave the .5 extra just for Catriona MacColl, who plays Mary Woodhouse, but it’s not because she’s all that good (again, could just be the script), I’m just playing a sucker for a pretty face.  Everyone’s basically okay for an Italian zombie flick, but that’s like saying that having one arm and no legs is basically better than having no arms and no legs.

*HURK, BLARGH, KKKKGH* Sorry, I guess it's just something I ate . . .

Technical: 3/5

This category probably has more to do with me liking “City of the Living Dead” than anything in the plot or writing.  There’s some absolutely phenomenal gore and nastiness in the movie—all the brain-ripping, insides-barfing, head-drilling, maggot-storming ick factors would probably merit a look by themselves.  Couple that with a very cool soundtrack that easily balances on the line between interesting-without-overpowering and super-creepy and you’ve got something that I’m bound to like anyway.  Then, on top of THAT you add the sense of atmosphere Fulci builds with his sets and his eye for framing shots in a remarkably cool way and you have a great little package all around.

If I have any complaints in this category, it’s that in the first half of the movie Fulci sometimes lets a scene go on for too long with nothing really happening.  The scene where Peter rescues Mary from the coffin at the beginning feels like it goes on for 10 minutes or more.  I don’t know if it actually was that long, but the scene kept shifting from Mary in the coffin pounding at the lid and screaming to Peter standing outside not sure he actually heard anything and thinking of walking away.  If this scene was cut down to half or even a third of its apparent length, it would have been two to three times as effective—instead of being an intense scene, it just wore my patience down and irritated me.  I couldn’t stop thinking of the “is he really dead?” scene in ThePumaman that MST3k riffed on for the sheer length and “OK, really?  C’mon!” factor.  Fulci also obsesses over eye close-ups in the first half of the movie, which are so common and so comical (though not, I’m sure, on purpose) that I was inclined to turn it into a drinking game.

But for those slip-ups and the absolutely inscrutable and, frankly, kind of gay ending of the movie, I can’t complain.  The way the fog blows in when something really ugly’s about to happen, the sound-effects that people start hearing before dying in horrible ways, the cemetery, and the underground showdown to close the gate to hell are all done deftly.  The spontaneous combustion and disintegration of the undead in the Thomas tomb is also great, once Father Thomas is killed it looks like the malevolent spirits causing the dead to rise just completely leave, so the bodies fall down almost as if someone tipped over a coat rack.  All in all, there’s a lot of very memorable, very cool scenes and effects that bring this movie up over the top and might just reward the curious.

MAGGOTSTORM!

Popcorn Factor: 3/5

Well, there’s undoubtedly some corniness in “City of the Living Dead,” but it’s actually quite a good deal better than I was expecting.  I liked Zombie, but I had also seen Zombi3, so I had no idea what to expect from this one.  What “City of the Living Dead” provides is a creepy hellgate story that doesn’t go right in for the jugular vein—it wants to get under your skin, and THEN go for the jugular.  There’s some impressive (and impressively weird) stuff in this movie, but it might not be for everyone.  At times it’s almost artsy, while at other times it’s outrageously vicious and gory, and at all times it’s defiantly Italian with its “to hell with logic!” sensibility (although, spoiler alert: no one’s eyes are ever ripped out, stabbed, or impaled—for once!  But does bleeding out of the eyes count?).  Weird, gory, with a bizarre plot and a rather shitty ending: if this sounds interesting to you, then definitely check this movie out.  I enjoyed it, but, well, you know the kind of movies I tend to review.