REVIEW: CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD
REVIEW: PAURA NELLA CITTA DEI MORTI VIVENTI
REVIEW: FEAR IN THE CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD
PRODUCTION: LUCIO FULCI [ 1980 ] 93'
PRODUCTION: DANIA FILM
CAST: CATRIONA MACCOLL, CHRISTOPHER GEORGE
CAST: CARLO DE MEJO, GIOVANNI LOMBARDO RADICE
PERSONAL RATING:
CRITICAL RATING:

There's a definite creative progression of ideas and motifs that takes place between Lucio Fulci's directorial work in 1979 and 1981 - so much so that it's become nearly impossible for me to even think about his film CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD, which is widely regarded as one of his most inconsistent and incoherent, and the two films the preceded (ZOMBI 2 [1979]) and followed (THE BEYOND) it. As with both of those, the film at hand is equally regarded as a gore masterpiece by some and a bonified waste of celluloid by others - my opinions on it tend to change from day to day but generally reside somewhere between those two extremes.

Plot is more or less absent all together from the events of CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD, and those events that could be construed as plot tend to be superfluous in comparison to the visuals on display. The loose premise of the film follows Mary Woodhouse (Catriona MacColl), a medium presumed dead and buried alive early in the film, and Peter Bell (Christopher George), the nosy reporter who saves her by nearly killing her with a pick-axe. It seems that during a seance Mary had a vision of a priest killing himself and, thusly, opening one of the gateways to hell. The good book of Enoch (not entirely fictional, being one of a number of books attributed in some circles to the great-grandfather of Noah, with the surviving texts dating back to around 160 BC. There are a number of other-wordly properties given to the book in the early part of the film, none of which are based in the least bit in reality) lets them know that the gateway must be shut before All Saints' Day, otherwise the dead will walk the Earth forever!

Meanwhile in Dunwich, the lucky town and gateway to hell where the good priest hung himself, things aren't going so well. The local pub is having trouble with mirrors spontaneously shattering and walls inexplicably cracking open, the zombified priest is making people's eyes bleed, forcing them to hack up their own entrails, and otherwise proving pesky, children are going missing, and local simpleton and sexual degenerate Bob (Giovanni Lombardo Radice) is being blamed for the lot of it. To top it all off, psychiatric patient Sandra (Janet Agren) is having some serious daddy issues (not to mention finding corpses of old ladies in her kitchen). Psychiatrist Gerry is compelled to find the reason for all these crazy goings ons and begins an investigation of his own - luckily for him, Peter and Mary (where's Paul?) have just gotten into town with all the wacky answers Gerry's been searching for.

Once the group is all together things really start go get out of hand - for starters, there's the infamous swarm-o-maggots that quite rudely interrupts a perfectly civil conversation. After the maggots have subsided it is learned that little John-John's sister, zombified herself by the zombie priest, has just eaten her parents. Bob, trying to get some shut-eye in a guy's garage, is caught by said guy and meets an untimely end at the hand of a table drill. To top it all off, monkeys are screeching all around town and zombies are teleporting about all over the place. Peter, Mary, and the rest of the gang all make their way to the Thomas family tomb - where the zombified priest is supposed to be buried - in hopes that they can close the gateway to hell. Will they make it in time, or will we be forced into thinking so only to be thusly amazed by an ending so absurd that it will leave even the most jaded of film analysts scratching their little heads?

I'll leave you to ponder the answer.

Released in the United States in 1983 under the title THE GATES OF HELL and advertised in posters and on the radio with such inane and inapplicable slogans as "From the mists of infinity, they come. . . When the moon turns red the dead shall rise and walk the Earth," the film became legendary among gore aficionados for a handful of utterly repulsive set pieces that pop up throughout the film. The most notable of these involves Daniela Doria somehow vomiting up her internal organs in reverse order after catching sight of the zombified priest - the other features Giovanni Lombardo Radice meeting yet another grisly fate (he dies in too many films to count, but is probably most famous for being castrated and scalped in CANNIBAL FEROX [1981]), this time with his head being drilled clean through. Aside from that are the handful of scenes in which zombies latch onto the backs of people's heads and squish out their brains and a multitude of squeaky worms and maggots. Makeup artist Gianetto De Rossi is missing in action for this Fulci effort and the inconsistent effects work (the zombies are less than convincing at times) attributable to the lesser known Franco Rufini, who would go on to perform similar duties on Fulci's ultra-violent sword-and-sandal epic CONQUEST in 1983.

Lucio Fulci and long-time collaborator Dardano Sacchetti are responsible for the story, or lack there of, this go around. Sacchetti and his wife contributed scripts for Fulci's previous (and most successful, in my opinion) gore epic ZOMBI 2 - their uneven portfolio would go on to include the likes of the Dario Argento produced THE CHURCH [1989] and the final Miles O'Keeffe Ator film, IRON WARRIOR [1984]. The story is, as has already been mentioned, minimal and contains a number of carry overs from ZOMBI 2 - the main protagonists are a young woman and a reporter (the reporter this go around is even still named Peter) and the story centers once again around the occult and people who don't believe in it (like the Voodoo infested island of ZOMBI 2, the H.P. Lovecraft inspired Dunwich is supposedly built on the site where the Salem witch burnings took place - in reality no one was ever burned as a result of the witch trials, only hung, and old Salem still exists on its own today).

Carry overs from Fulci's earlier work in the giallo genre (see DON'T TORTURE A DUCKLING [1972]) are also to be found here. There is, of course, the requisite police investigation into the bizarre goings ons - as in the case of many giallos, this police investigation goes nowhere and it's up to everyday people (in this case a young woman and a reporter, much like in DON'T TORTURE A DUCKLING) to figure things out. Also present is an innocent whipping boy to take the blame for the mysterious happenings. In the case of DON'T TORTURE A DUCKLING it was a local witch; in the case of CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD its the lovably perverted town simpleton, Bob (later, Fulci's THE BEYONG would include similar scapegoats in the characters of Martha and Arther - the hotel keepers - while HOUSE BY THE CEMETARY would pin suspicions on the nanny and husband). It's difficult to understand why such a plot point is included in CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD - it doesn't build suspense and you never know Bob well enough to care about him - and it ends up just being strangely out of place amidst the already bizarre proceedings.

Possibly more bizarre is the fact that in CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD, as in DON'T TORTURE A DUCKLING, the villain at hand is a priest. Given the grisly ends that both meet by the end of their respective films (with DUCKLING's careening down a jagged cliff face and CITY's being stabbed through the stomach and bursting into flame), it's relatively safe to say that the Catholic-raised Fulci (and, quite possibly, his fellow screenwriters) had more than a few personal problems with the church.

CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD is an important moment in Fulci film evolution by being the first case in which there is a marked detachment from tangible reality - CITY comes complete with zombies that blink in and out of existence and a storyline full of logical inconsistencies. Why, for instance, was Mary not embalmed and why does she show no ill effects from being dead, presumably for several days, and buried? In what world do gravediggers stop work halfway (leaving Mary's coffin exposed to the elements) and why are they seemingly burying her on top of someone else? And would you stop for a coke and a burger if you had less than 24 hours to find a city that's not on the map, kill an undead priest, and somehow close the gateway to hell? Other examples are rampant but, I feel, best discovered on their own. Though more coherent from a narrative standpoint, Fulci's THE BEYOND would take this detachment from reality to its illogical extreme by including such things as the doorway to hell being opened by a plumber named Joe and a doctor who regularly parks on the sidewalk beside his hospital.

From a critical standpoint this film certainly marks a low point in Fulci's zombie cycle (though not nearly so low as 1981's HOUSE BY THE CEMETARY, in my opinion), due mostly to its utter lack of forward momentum. Those put off by the languid pace of ZOMBI 2 will be positively stupefied by the lack of progressive action this go around as nothing really happens, story-wise, until the final few reels. Fulci still presents his viewers with a compelling, if utterly nonsensical, universe full of greedy morticians, sexual deviants (Bob's session with a blow-up doll is interrupted here by the sudden appearance of a very wormy corpse), crazy locals, and those pesky undead. I find it a perfectly perfect bit of nonsense to show my friends on All Hallows Eve - the body of the film takes place on Halloween, after all, in spite of no one in the film saying so. But given its many shortcomings, this one is hard to recommend to anyone but gore fanatics and fans of the generally insane.