Zombie

Directed by Lucio Fulci

Did’ja ever eat Italian food? I’m not talking Spaghetti Factory here, but real Italian food – the kind that tastes like the cook’s moustache sweat? A different experience, that’s for sure…a combination of the worst possible thing EVER mixed in with a cinnamon oil backrub (including the happy ending).

Welcome to the films of Lucio Fulci. These films are so schizophrenic – simultaneously brilliant and craptacular, they seem like they are from a completely different boot-shaped planet…and the most awful/wonderful of them all is ZOMBIE.

Produced as a sort-of sequel *COUGH ripoff COUGH* to the film DAWN OF THE DEAD (released in Europe as ZOMBI), ZOMBIE rises above its roots as a simple rip-off of an American film and soars into the stratosphere of shitty acting, astoundingly simplistic but grotesque special effects and relatives of Mia Farrow going scuba diving with their funbags wagging about.

A synopsis misses the point entirely…this film is very much a mood piece in the tradition of Jacques Tourneur – if Jacques were in the habit of making movies after huffing Goof Off. I was never one to turn away from futility, however, so Let’s Roll! ™.

To whit -

A deserted boat drifts into New York harbor carrying the FATTEST ZOMBIE EVER, who, judging by his girth, ate the boats entire passenger list, some of them twice. The Undead Porkbeast attacks New York’s finest when they get on the boat to investigate and then tumbles overboard. Through the magic of Italian filmmaking, this leads to an expedition being mounted to an island where a Doctor (sans hunchback) has been trying to get down to the bottom of a recent rash of dead-rising-from-their-graves type activity. The crew of our fearless ship manages to find time to go nude scuba diving and watch a zombie eat a shark in a sort of Swan Lake but with sharks and zombies.

They go to the island, etc. etc. etc. (as much as I love Italian horror films, I don’t think that it would be exagerrating to say that they are DELIBERATELY paced). The obvious follows – lots of wormy dead guys eating people, dialogue that sounds like something from Duplex Planet and what has to be the single most MESSED UP incident of eye violence in cinema history. Between the ocular nastiness and one of the best howler endings of all time, this movie gets a big recommendation from Yours Truly.

For Maximum Pastaness, see this with Fulci’s other zombie masterpiece THE GATES OF HELL. Your brainpan will thank you.