Zombie**

[3/27] For a period of time Fulci’s Zombie (1979) wasn’t consi

dered by me to be in the conversation with the greatest zombie films of all time. But I think so now. I watched it late Friday night and now even consider it an “event” film similar to “Night of the Living Dead” or “Dawn of the Dead”. It isn’t just a bad B-movie with blood and guts to me. I couldn’t say that in 2003 but I feel that way now. In fact I have never quite viewed that ending with the undead moving towards New York quite as eerie as I do now. The “disease” of the Dominican Republic island of Matool that sickened and killed locals (and eventually visitors) had made its way to New York. I just wish things weren’t what they are and that thought of what has overwhelmed the globe wasn’t on my mind as a substitute for Fulci’s zombies. But even when I wasn’t all that wild and crazy for “Zombie” 17 years ago, that ending and the music that accompanied it has some serious potency. But tonight’s viewing was very similar to the last one in that I realize just how important a zombie film it is. Once we officially visit the island and practically remain there after Fulci spends his time in NYC (and on the water close to the Statue of Liberty), voodoo is on the lips in topic plenty of times to indicate that those drums and enough of the chatter/scuttlebutt might be a reason for why the dead rise again to rip into throats and eat human foodstuffs. But Fulci gives you plenty of the hallmarks of the zombie film, that’s for sure. The headshots, blood spatter, spurting blood from gaping wounds while victims cry out in horror, rotted and decaying faces, the dead rising from makeshift graves (or in this film’s case the “Rise of the Undead Conquistadors”), the remaining survivors holed up in a building trying to stay alive (this time a church not particularly reinforced or stable enough to hold off the zombie horde), and smashed heads with brain soup oozing out onto the ground/floor. Then the memorable Fulci extremes / off kilter zombie additions that are totally director touches such as a zombie going after a shark and the wife of Richard Jordan’s failing doc being pulled eye-first into a protruding door’s broken wood splinter. And then there are the inspired Fulci stylistic choices such as the boat approaching NY harbor with the chubby zombie on it, as the camera catches a disheveled upper deck with bottles rolling about, extreme close-ups of rotted zombies, night vision zombie faces, and the undead ambling about in a desert village overcome by dust and depleted of villagers due to the voodoo plague (unless that is just an offered reason, despite Johnson and others pooh-poohing that). While some still believe “The Beyond” is his masterpiece, I prefer “Zombie”. Funnily enough, I caught this on Flix (a “classics” for movie lovers channel part of the Showtime channels package), a channel I never could have imagined would feature a Fulci film. 4/5.