City of the Living Dead

**½ / *****

I approached City of the Living Dead (Gates of Hell, a memorable title when on VHS) looking at it from a different perspective. Look, I think the plot (if that’s what we can call it) is the absolute shits. This could be looked at as an accumulation of (gore) ideas and set-pieces, with some truly memorable images and creepy zombies, photographically impressive.

The plot offers a lot of nonsensical mess regarding the gates of hell unleashing nightmares on mankind thanks to a Dunwich priest lynching himself (the rope crossing a tree branch has the sound effect of a bull whip striking an object!) in a cemetery. Catriona MacColl is in a séance conducted in New York, sees the priest in a self-inflicted hanging, a corpse rising from its grave, and seems to have a seizure after delivering a primal scream. She’s buried, right? She’s dead, right? Nope, she emerges from her grave alive actually much to the surprise of Christopher George (sort of a third wheel in this film).

Well one among the séance looks at the screen while talking with a police investigator (and this is Fulci’s way of telling us, as to excuse his wild flurry of bizarre to come) and says that in Dunwich horrendous things are happening that will shatter the imagination.

Giovanni Lombardo Radice then shows up walking within a dust-wind abandoned property with a building he immediately inhabits containing a blow up doll (?!?!). The make-up for Radice makes him look like a disturbed individual. It doesn’t help that he looks like a bum. He looks over to see a rotted body (looked like a baby to me) on the floor. I guess the point was to further establish the signs of something very bad building.

Sadly I think most will associate Christopher George with the intense, bitchy, wise-ass characters in the 80s when he was such a likable hero in Grizzly and a fantastic, charismatic heavy in the John Wayne western, El Dorado. Films like Graduation Day, Mortuary, Enter the Ninja, and Pieces seem to indicate this. He's somewhat tolerable in this film, however. He's out to get a story; he's a reporter, and he will ultimately join forces with MacColl as their journey to discover the truth about needing to stop the gates of hell from ejecting its murderous dead upon us.

The weird shit continues. In a lounge, there’s a crack in the wall and a cloud emerging from it. The client of a therapist is scratched on the hand by a cat. A couple (including future Italian director of The Church, The Sect, & Delamorte Delamore, Michele Soavi) are making out in their jeep, seeing the hanging priest in the distance and then vanishing only to reappear in front of their vehicle to stare them down. The girl has this stare down with the priest as if he has taken her attention--a trance she is unable to break and this locking of eyes leads to her bleeding from said eyes and puking out her guts! Then poor Soavi, trying to get out of the jeep, has this hand ripping out the brains from his skull with one strong jerk!

The whole idea that our world is out of balance—an imbalance that seems to have opened a darkness unleashed on mankind—allows Fulci to throw caution to the wind and hurl at us all the gore set pieces and unorthodox plot developments he desires. He even gets to utilize momentarily Poe’s Premature Burial when MacColl is buried alive and George almost leaves her before listening to what his heart was telling him was in fact a noise from the coffin she’s currently inhabiting. The near pick axe stab to her face is definitely inspired as are shots of her horror within the claustrophobic confines of that coffin. And leave it to Fulci to even tap into the haunted house cliché of walls bleeding when shattered glass from a window stab into the wall of a painter’s basement.

The appearing/disappearing zombies left me constantly eye-rolling the first and second time I watched this, but Fulci’s make-ups on them are quite creepy and ghoulish. The priest especially often shows up as hanging the day he committed suicide and as a menace killing human victims.

I have no idea why Radice was cast in the film other than for a few shots of him in atmospheric dust storms and fog, in makeup that seems to indicate he’s a little odd or off, and to be shoved into a spinning drill when he crashes in the car of the wrong guy’s garage and gets caught talking to his teenage hottie daughter. The drill kill is just plain awesome, with effects that excel at portraying this unfortunate guy in the wrong place at the wrong time. That said, this whole sequence seems to exist just to shock the audience.

If all of this isn’t enough, Fulci has the film’s heroes hit with a window swinging open and maggots flying right into their faces. Yep, maggots shooting at them as if spat from a geyser.  

Poor George doesn’t wind up much better off than Radice. He is roaming about in the catacombs with MacColl and Carol De Mejo, gets his brains jerked from the back of his head by painter Janet Agren (the irony being she had not long before this received the same treatment from another zombie), and falls to the ground, with his open wound easy pickings for the rats.

The showstopper for me is MacColl and De Mejo in the cob-webbed, skeleton-infested catacombs. There’s this really freaky scene where skeletal remains hang in bunches from above the heroes as they must bend to walk under them that’s really cool if you are into such macabre, Gothic trappings. And the rotted hand emerging from the webbed earth signaling the beginnings of the eventual total uprising of the dead is a special highlight (takes us back to the early moment after the priest hangs himself and a corpse’s head emerges from its grave).

As expected, the zombies do eat human flesh. But Fulci has zombies capable of dropping “dead” through impalement. The priest (…and “leader of the undead”) takes a good jab to the stomach by De Mejo and just goes up in flames which, for some reason, leads to the undead in the catacombs burning alive as well. Visually this is all a spectacle and the location is certainly atmospheric, but incoherency reigns throughout this whole film. It’s flat nuts. The laughable ending has a kid (brother of De Mejo’s girlfriend who perished after Zombie Priest stuffed her face with worms and mud), who looks perfectly normal, running excitedly towards De Mejo and MacColl as they leave the catacombs, with them looking mortified as the screen “cracks” into the final credits as if saying something horrible was about to happen.

Fulci will always be considered a filmmaker with a resume littered with movies that defy logic and comprehension. He’s a set piece filmmaker who loves indulging his fans with plenty of wacky and grotesque. City of the Living Dead was another example of this.

 

 

 

 

 

This was a cynical, rather snide review I wrote back in 2006. To say I was unimpressed would be an understatement.

Moronic gory exercise about a priest who hangs himself in a Dunwich graveyard resulting in the opening of gateway(s)to Hell. How this comes to happen is anyone's guess. I'm guessing it's the significance in the location. In folklore, Dunwich was built over the ruins of Salem..the witch's playground. Now, how hanging yourself in a graveyard in a town once housing witches is one thing, but how a priest's suicide unlocks the gates of hell is another. If Fulci would just take the time to explain the reasons why a priest's suicide could do such a thing, I might be a little closer to accepting this poor excuse to throw up gore scenes and supernatural hocus pocus. The zombies are incredibly photographed, but understanding how they come to be and why the priest brings them back to life confuses me. Okay, this priest hangs himself, comes back as some sort of ghoul who finds victims, scaring them to death. Once they are dead, the victims come back as zombies pulling brains out of poor people's skulls while their backs are turned. Some actually come from thin air, I'm guessing because they represent some sort of fear, but trying to come up with answers to all this foolishness was tiresome. Some perv named Bob gets a drill all the way through his skull thanks to a vengeful father whose daughter was almost molested by him. The film has a woman psychic who actually dies during a séance where she sees the priest kill himself..how she awakens and why are a mystery. Anyhow, she gets a reporter to take her to Dunwich to find the remains of the priest before "ALL SAINTS DAY" because if he arises, the dead will walk amongst the world to feed on flesh..they do already, but that is beside the point. You know, thanks to a psychiatrist who lost his girlfriend to the priest's fear(..and comes back as a zombie), the three find the burial tomb of the priest, but it is too late since ALL SAINTS DAY had begun. Oh well, Fulci just abandons that whole line letting the priest die anyway when he gets a cross thrust through his stomach as his torso burns to ash(..and so are his relatives who rise momentarily to moan a bit). The film is so incomprehensible and badly conceived, one should simply watch for all the bloody effects like one of the priest's victims who vomits up her intestines. Have a nice day.