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 A TV reporter sees an "unmarked plane" land at an airport and out comes a bunch
of "bloodthirsty zombies infected by a radiation leak". They kill everyone and
and "need fresh human blood". This epidemic spreads throughout the city. Can
the TV reporter and the military stop them? 1980, 88 minutes, Widescreen, DVD
We should probably get this out of the way first of all: this is a horrible
movie.
When you've got guys running around with axes and automatic weapons looking
like they had their heads under some cow's ass right before it decided to
let go, you know you're not exactly about to watch a Fellini movie or even a
Fulci movie for that matter. Nope, the Italian in charge of this
early-eighties entry in the whole "guy with abominable beard fends off poorly
made-up zombies" is none other than Umberto Lenzi. Umberto is more famous for
his really cruddy cannibal movies as compared to his really cruddy zombie
movies. Of course, it should be noted that Umberto himself stated in an
interview on the recent DVD release of Black Demons (one of his zombie movies) that Nightmare City was not a zombie movie at all, but was all about how a bunch of dudes got
contaminated and ran amok. See, they ran like contaminated guys are want to do. We all know that zombies merely shamble. Before you spit out your ice cream sandwich in fits of crazed laughter, you
should know that he is actually required by his attorneys to say that so that
he won't get sued by George Romero for ripping off Dawn Of The Dead. I know that all these Italian zombie flicks were "inspired" by that
overrated and bloated work, but this one actually lifts scenes that I
recognized immediately even though I hadn't been bored enough to watch Dawn in
the last couple of years.  First of all, you've got the very beginning of the movie where some goofball is
on TV interrupting Days Of Our Lives to babble about some accident that was really no problemo at this nuclear
power plant. Our hero, the very English, but very hairy and therefore very
Italian
looking Dean Miller is a hothead reporter at the local TV station who has to go
out to cover the arrival of this scientist from the nuclear power plant at the
local airport. Apparently, whenever there is an accident at an Italian nuclear
facility, the guy in charge immediately flies away so that he can appear on the Today show to assure all the zombies, I mean contaminated folks, that just because
they all look like they just rubbed their face in a really chunky cow pie that
everything is AOK. That's what we in showbiz call "getting out in front of a
story" and is precisely why during the Iraqi war that funny looking dude from
the Information Ministry kept giving press conferences explaining that Uncle
Sam had his arse kicked out of Baghdad while ignoring all this stuff blowing up
behind him and Special Forces guys running out of palaces with everything they
could carry. Heck, when I turned on Fox News (fair and balanced coverage of
how America is the BEST!) and saw them running roughshod over those palaces I
thought Rodney King had gone and gotten himself acquitted again or something.
Anyway, at the airport this military transport plane without any identifiers
comes in and lands. It's full up of zombies, dang it, I mean with contaminated
guys, and I sat there thinking that it must have really funny to watch these
contaminated freaks paint over all the markings on the plane before it took
off. I also thought it
was funny that an accident at a nuclear plant somehow led to the purchase of a
military transport plane, but this is the Italian military we're talking about,
so who knows, right?  Dean and his cameraman watch the antics of these guys as they hack up all the
airport cops they can get their grubby paws on and decide that the interview
with the guy from the nuclear plant can probably be rescheduled when it's more
convenient for all parties and head back to the TV station. We all remember
those TV station scenes on Dawn Of The Dead, correct? Well, Umberto actually goes George one better because he has the TV
station showing some disco dancing show with ugly Italian chicks in even uglier
purple leotards. Dean tries to interrupt the show with a special report about
the massacre at the airport, but is overruled by his boss and gets put on
suspension! Doesn't this TV manager have any decency? Here he had the chance
to spare millions of Italians from being reminded of how ugly their chicks are
by preempting that awful dance show and he just looked the other way! Sensing
the egregious lack of civic responsibility of his boss, Dean quits and storms
off. Even though Dean was unable to save the viewing public from the disco
show, the zombies (I'm calling them that and if Umberto has a problem with
that, he can come right down to my trailer court and do something about it)
roll into the TV studio and cancel the show they only way they know how to: by
biting, hacking and stabbing everyone involved! I don't think I've been more
grateful to see a zombie attack happen than I was when that disco music stopped
so that zombie music could play. There were two other scenes that come
immediately to mind when thinking about the Dawn Of The Dead comparisons.
There was the scene where a guy was in a helicopter and looking over a field
full of zombies. But this was way different because these zombies were running
around spastically like it was recess at the Special Olympics or something.
There was also the big "getting gas scene". Whenever someone needs to get gas
it involves a really tense situation where the zombies are trying to give the
heroes full service when they'd be satisfied with self service. Once it
again, it was different in this movie because the heroes managed to not only
stop the zombies but also blow up their own getaway ambulance. Bravo! That
play
was right out of the living dead handbook!  Now that I've made the case for this being a horrible movie, let me pull a
doublecross on you by saying that while it is indeed a regrettable skid mark on
the screen of my poor TV, it wasn't nearly the intolerable spew I remembered
from my past two and a half viewings of it (I guess I could be numb or simply
brain damaged by now). I saw it once in the mid eighties, once in the mid
nineties and half of it about two years ago and all I remember is how grungy
and
cut rate everything looked as well as the fact that this movie has an unnatural
fascination with the mutilation of women's boobs (come on, let's see some of
those Italian man boobs!). Well, the movie had all of these attributes, but in
all the confusion of past viewings (like being drunker than a toad) I forgot
all about the big amusement park scene! That's something that Romero never
thought of. He may have used a shopping mall as an amusement park by proxy
(and you
just thought it was symbolic of our mindless consumer culture, you dummy!), but
Umberto says, "screw it" and rented out an honest to gosh real amusement park
for the last part of
the movie. This sequence saw Dean and his wife (she had a really nasty pimple
on her face throughout so I kept getting tricked into thinking that she was
infected by the contamination goop) running around the park while these zombies
chased them and even worse, jumped the lines! Luckily the park was closed
(maybe it was one of those "group zombie days" or something) so we were spared
lots of sweaty angry Italian coaster enthusiasts giving these thugs the Italian
handshake, if you catch my meaning. I was never quite sure what Dean's plan
was, but for some reason he decided to make his escape by running up the side
of the roller coaster. What he was going to do once he was up there, I have no
clue, but luckily a helicopter appears and drops a rope down to him and his
lady. I was also wondering where the devil Dean got those grenades he kept
chucking at the zombie, but he woke up next to his lady and realized it was all
a dream. Unfortunately, his lady's abysmal skin condition was not. The end of this movie is one of those legendary affairs where even if you
haven't seen the movie, you've probably heard your cool friends laughing about
it. See, Dean goes off to work to interview this guy from the nuclear plant
down at the airport and events start to repeat themselves and the screen
displays the message "the nightmare becomes reality" at the end of things,
leaving you biting your lip and imagining how Umberto's loved ones had to act
like
it wasn't the stupidest thing he'd ever done in his life up until that point
(remember - this was before Black Demons). I'd put this in the middle of the pack as far as these Italian gore deals
go, but thus far this would have to be considered Umberto's masterpiece. Well,
it's a master piece of something at least. The good thing about his un-zombies
is that they aren't the slow dopes we're accustomed to, so if you're easily
lulled to sleep by regular zombies and their mummy-paced terror, it keeps you
on your toes to see these guys jumping around, shooting people, whacking them
upside the head and gouging their eyes out. I was going to complain that the
story didn't make any sense, but I wouldn't want to give any of you out there
the
idea that there was a story in this one. And really, I'm not even going to
hold it against Umberto this time. After all, this was just a dream that the
overworked and stressed out (you try laying down next to a broad with all them
zits and see how you sleep!) Dean had, so it didn't really have to make sense.
I'm sure that the dream seemed real to him, even if like most other people's
dreams it was only interesting to the guy having it. Hey Dean - I think you
have a lot of anger issues to work out, especially regarding your lady's facial
disfigurement. You also have an unhealthy obsession with cutting up boobs.
That ain't right. Even for an Italian guy with the worst beard I've seen since
C. Everett Koop was wagging his finger at me not to get my kids started on
chewing tobaccy until they were in their teens or something (mind your own
bizness! You ain't my Surgeon General!).
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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