City of the Living Dead (1980)
[Contains spoilers]
I remember back in the early 1980s when this movie played the local drive-in under the title of The Gates of Hell for something like three straight months. I always wondered why week after week whenever I opened up the local newspaper why the same gaudy ad featuring a rotting skull stared at me screaming that it had been "Held Over! Fifth Gigantic Week!" when they could have been cycling in some different Italian gore movies. (They probably didn't want to ditch the killer ad artwork.)
After watching this one though, I think it's fair to say that this is about as good a drive-in flick as you could expect back in those days when the drive-ins were just beginning to disappear. Moderately fast paced with more than enough gore to keep guys interested while their girlfriends were scared into their arms. Add in the somewhat murky night locales, pulsing music, and maggots and you've got the perfect picture to slouch down in the back seat of your daddy's Monte Carlo with a townie probably named Amber or Crystal or something.
Of course now, you can watch it on your high-falootin' DVD player uncut and widescreen, complete with trailers, radio spots, and a bio of the late Lucio Fulci. The circumstances of your viewing may have changed, but I still found this to be an enjoyable ride with the added bonus that's it's pretty much the same flick as Fulci's The Beyond!
Before we actually get to the City of the Living Dead though, we first have to watch a séance being conducted in the City that Never Sleeps. There, a psychic named Mary starts to have some visions. The visions involve a tombstone which has nobody's name on it or anything, but does some ominous warning about letting priests commit suicide in the local graveyard. Then we see an ashen-faced priest named Father Thomas sling a noose over the old hanging tree in the graveyard and the next thing you know he's swinging away and Mary, the psychic, starts to have one of those fits that psychics in these movies always seem to have whenever they see some major plot development.
Everyone else is trying to maintain the circle so that Mary can survive, but with foam coming out of her mouth, I think it's understandable that everyone kind of got grossed out by the whole affair, let go, and just watched her die. The police are called in and their investigation consisted of ridiculing the surviving participants of the séance by rattling off their entire criminal history to them. Since this is a death involving a psychic and a priest that has hanged himself, you've got to expect a little supernatural hijinks at the crime scene. We get that when these balls of fire shoot up in the air near the dead woman. Try putting that in your report, Officer Jerkface!
Outside the apartment building the requisite nosy reporter shows up and starts nosing around. The reporter, Peter, is played by Christopher George. George is perhaps best remembered for croaking while filming Mortuary. Geeze, and I thought I had it rough when I almost croaked while watching it.
George is best described as a poor man's George Segal, squinting a lot, making smart comments, and generally being a doubting Thomas all the while going along with everything that happens. He doesn't get any information at the crime scene, so he checks out the cemetery where Mary is buried. After exchanging some witty banter with the no-account gravediggers he hangs around until he hears what sounds like screaming. Screaming that sounds like it's coming from Mary's grave!
As should be done with all psychics, Mary has been buried alive! I'm not really sure how that's possible, because I was always under the impression that once you checked out, some sicko at the funeral parlor like the Tall Man in Phantasm, drains all your fluids, steals your fillings, and fondles you before they dump your dead ass in the ground.
Peter grabs a pick ax kept on the cemetery grounds for just such emergencies and busts her out of her casket in a fairly suspenseful sequence. Fulci puts us inside the coffin, underground, and shows us how close the ax comes to chopping Mary on several occasions in rapid succession. Once Peter manages to pry away a portion of the casket, we can see into it and Mary is covered in wood chips and screaming.
Meanwhile over in the little town of Dunwich, strange things are happening. A mirror in a bar cracks and then the walls crack and fog starts to seep out of the opening, sending the customers hastily back to their own trailers and leaving the bar owner to bemoan the lack of craftsmanship in modern day construction.
The little town of Dunwich also apparently has some type of psychologist because the next thing I know, I'm the office of some dude and he's listening to some broad whine about incest or marrying her father or something. Is this Dunwich place in Arkansas? The shrink's name is Gerry and he's one of those Italian actors they always employed in these 80s movies. You know the kind - they're all a little sensitive and they have these really ugly beards that kind of look like the beards the models on those Just For Men hair dye commercials sport.
In fact, the dude who played Gerry was also in Fulci's House By The Cemetery, though the star of House By The Cemetery was a different sensitive Italian guy with grody looking beard. You may note though, that the chick who plays the psychic in this movie was the female lead in House By The Cemetery. I guess once Lucio found a screamer he liked, he stuck with 'em.
Gerry has a lady friend named Emily and she interrupts his session with this woman to let Gerry know that she's going to check on Bob to see how he's doing. Bob is the local retard/pervert that plays with inflatable dolls and lives with nudie pin ups in his nasty pad. He also is reviled by the townspeople because he took some girl out into the woods to play cowboys and injuns with her, if you know what I mean.
Also, it seems that people have been disappearing from Dunwich. Oh and by the by, just between you and me? Dunwich was built on the ruins of the original Salem, home of the witch trials that Arthur Miller dramatized in The Crucible. I don't get why he never wrote a play about a priest that commits suicide in the graveyard of the city where Salem once stood and thus opened up the gates of Hell unless they are somehow closed before All Saints Day. I guess he just didn't have the talent.
Back in the Big Apple, Mary tells Peter that she had a vision of this priest killing himself and that by doing so he's opened up the gates of Hell, themselves! If they don't get to Dunwich in three days and close the gates, real bad stuff is going to happen and if you want to know what it is, then just rent any of George Romero's films which Fulci seemed predisposed to, how do I put this delicately, rip off, I mean pay homage to. It's all there, the zombies, the music, the nightmarish endings. Of course Romero never resorted to such convoluted reasons to re-animate his dead. Just a good old fashioned meteor shower (or was it tri-oxin?). In any event, it's one of these "dead shall rise and walk the earth again" gimmicks that I've always been a mark for.
Peter immediately recognizes this story as complete and utter hogwash. So he immediately agrees to drive Mary around in his really ugly, beat up, blue station wagon and help her try to find Dunwich. The only problem is that neither one of them has any idea where Dunwich is, because it isn't on any map! I found this a little hard to believe because we would learn later in the movie that Dunwich is located in Dunwich County of all places, it has a police force, a radio station, a bar, a mental health counselor, a funeral home, and of course a graveyard. Plus it's built on an infamous site that most people in the area would be familiar with - Salem!
Luckily though, Peter and Mary drive around long enough and dope out enough info on the priest that hanged himself that they eventually locate it. And none too soon, because while they've been taking their Sunday drive, things have really gone to pot in Dunwich. See this dead priest has been appearing and reappearing at irregular intervals. Whenever he does this, "accidents" happen.
Accidents like what happened to that nice couple necking in the car. The girl starts crying blood and vomits up all her intestines and vital organs for what seems like five minutes and the guy gets the back of his head ripped off by the priest so that chunks of brains are visible. And then you have Gerry's girl who gets some mud with worms shoved in her face. At least I was hoping it was mud. She dies of fright, but later she comes back to life and kills her parents. Meanwhile the incest-obsessed patient from the beginning of the movie starts to see dead people laying around her house. It's against this backdrop of gorehound shenanigans that Peter and Mary roll into to town to save the world.
Mary and Peter meet up with Gerry and his incest patient and they all exchange information on the end of the world and the Gates of Hell and head to the graveyard to close the gates before any more undead get out. To me it seems like it's already too late. I mean you got dead folks running around killing people, so I'm not sure how things are going to get worse, so I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to prevent at this point.
After a freak maggot storm that the Weather Channel failed to warn them about, they head to the cemetery. Once there they open up the tomb where the dead priest is supposed to be. He's gone so they all go down underground to have a look around. This is kind of like the living dead's locker room because all these corpses start shambling about and the priest is there and the next thing you know Christopher George has gotten his head ripped open and he's screaming and dying and the incest girl gets killed too!
Gerry takes a wooden stake and rams it straight through Father Thomas and all the bad guys burst into flame. Gerry and Mary climb out of the tomb and they get this look of fright on their faces that leads you to believe maybe the screen door to the gates of Hell hasn't gotten shut all the way. Lucio goes to a freeze frame, then animates the screen cracking up and the credits roll! Mission accomplished! I mean mission not accomplished, the world's screwed!
In this film you have what basically amount to a series of set pieces that display his gore scenes from the extended maggot storm scene to the completely unnecessary scene where Bob, the local pervert, gets his head impaled on a drill by a disgruntled father. There aren't any quick cut-aways here folks. When the girl upchucks every yard of her intestines, you get to see it all unfurl from her mouth! (Can you imagine her breath?)
The only problem I have with any of this is that you get the impression Lucio had some ideas about how to kill some people off and some good scenes in his head, then Frankensteined together the barest outline of a story to hang these scenes off of. The story really makes no sense at all, from a psychic having a vision that the Gates of Hell would open upon the death of the priest, to them not knowing where Dunwich was, to finding it anyway, to not having any idea how to close the Gates of Hell once they got there, to supposedly closing them by impaling the priest, to the ending that implies that it was too late anyway.
I think though, that you would do well to let logic slide in this case and sit back and enjoy what is basically an amusement park ride more than a movie. In this case, Lucio reveals that he is a master of creating the movie-as-funhouse, substituting guts and fast-paced action for story. I'll bet there weren't too many kids who complained after seeing this one at the drive-in. Besides, since Lucio was Italian, you could go home and tell your parents that you took your date to a foreign film.