City of the Living Dead

Year of Release:  1980
Director:  Lucio Fulci
Screenplay:  Lucio Fulci and Dardano Sacchetti
Starring:  Christopher George, Catriona MacColl, Carlo De Mejo, Antonella Interlenghi, Giovanni Lombardo, Radice, Daniela Doria, Fabrizio Jovine, Janet Algren
Running Time:  93 minutes
Genre:  Horror

New York City:  A young medium, Mary Woodhouse (MacColl), goes into a catatonic sate when she experiences a traumatic vision of a priest (Jovine) hanging himself in the town of Dunwich.  When she has recovered, she explains to journalist Peter Bell (George)  that the hanging of the priest has opened the gate to Hell and that, unless it is closed, in a few days time the living dead will overwhelm and consume the living.  Meanwhile in Dunwich the population find themselves subjected to a series of horrific events, as they come under attack from flesh-eating zombies.

Prolific Italian director Lucio Fulci worked in comedy, adventure, science-fiction, erotica and spaghetti Westerns, but is most well known for his horror films, which were notorious for their high level of gore, which earned him the nickname "The Godfather of Gore".  This is the first of Fulci's "Gates of Hell" trilogy, the others being:  The Beyond (1981) and The House by the Cemetery (1981), both of which also starred English actress Catriona MacColl (billed here as "Katherine MacColl"), although in different roles in each film.  At times this feels like what you might get if a twelve year old were to come up with a horror film, because the plot (such as it is) feels like an excuse to string together the most gruesome things Fulci can think of:  people bleed out of their eyes, zombies chow down messily on slippery flesh, heads are drilled, other unfortunates are covered with rats and flesh-eating maggots and, in the film's most notorious sequence, a woman vomits up her own intestines.  Even for hardened horror fans it's pretty nauseating.  Although it's so over the top it becomes quite funny.  The acting is at best serviceable, which may be partly due to the fact that, as was standard with Italian films, the dialogue was dubbed in in post-production.  The bizarre and sudden ending was necessitated because, while they were editing the film, someone spilled coffee on the original ending print, forcing Fulci to cobble something together with whatever he had available.

Daniela Doria in City of the Living Dead


          

The Beyond

Year: 1981
Director: Lucio Fulci
Screenplay: Giorgio Mariuzzo, Lucio Fulci and Dardano Sacchetti, from a story by Dardano Sacchetti
Starring: Catriona McColl, David Warbeck, Cinzia Monreale, Antoine Saint-John, Veronica Lazar
Running Time: 89 minutes
Genre: Horror, supernatural, zombie

Summary: Louisiana 1927: A lynch mob break into the Seven Doors Hotel and brutally murder a painter, Schweik (Saint-John), who is living there.
In 1981, New Yorker Liza Merril (McColl) inherits the run-down hotel from her uncle. The renovations are plagued by a series of increasingly severe and bizarre "accidents". A blind psychic girl, Emily (Monreale), informs Liza that the hotel was built above one of the seven gateways to Hell. Along with local doctor John McCabe (Warbeck), Liza finds herself pitted against nightmarish supernatural forces as the dead begin to rise and attack the living.

Opinions: This gruesome Italian horror film is often cited as the masterpiece of it's director Lucio Fulci who made his name with films such as Zombie (1979) and City of the Living Dead (1980). Certainly the film doesn't stint on gore and is full of blood and flesh tearing special effects.
The film doesn't really make a lot of sense, especially towards the end, but that isn't really important as the film works in a kind of dreamlike sense and is purely nightmarish. Aside from the zombies and flesh eating tarantulas, the film is full of dream like images, some of which are very powerful.
The special effects are effective and should provide plenty of moments to startle even jaded gore hounds. The dialogue is very obviously dubbed but that was common practice in Italian films and in any way it helps to make the film even more bizarrely surreal.
The symbol which appears prominently at various points of the film was taken from a tattoo which Fulci's fourteen year old daughter got.
Horror films and connoiseurs of cult cinema won't want to miss this one.
Incidentally, in some prints of the film which are currently available, the opening sequence is in black-and-white, when it was originally intended to be in sepia.



Catriona McColl and David Warbeck in The Beyond