Zombie (1979) It's hard to fault a
movie that starts by having a dude wrapped in a bed sheet getting shot in the
head. And because director Lucio Fulci knows his audience you get see that and
much, much more throughout this film. If you've been feasting on a steady diet
of Fulci flicks from the late eighties (The House Of Clocks, The Sweet House Of Horrors, Demonia) then this movie is like a tasty bit of filet mignon (or at least a chunk of
really good pig innards) because you get healthy doses of action, gore,
violence, and even some nice tropical scenery. There's no fuzzy camera work, no
chintzy movie set in a single deserted villa while ugly no name Italians
stumble their way through one of Lucio's curiously dull scripts, and no little
brats causing the audience brain damage with their squeaky voices.
Sure, things were never really explained in any depth and Tisa Farrow shows us
that as far as being an actress goes, she's a really great sister, but watching
all these Italian zombie movies, I never understood how difficult it could be
to make one of these things. All you've got to do is have some icky-looking
guys running around taking bites out of people, while periodically getting
their heads blown off. It's a pretty basic plot, right up there with boy meets
girl and puppets that kill, but over and over, people (and when I say "people",
I am of course referring to Italians) keep botching it up with efforts like Burial Ground, Black Demons and Zombie Flesh Eaters 2 (which Fulci was a part of). Widely regarded as a cheap cash-in on Dawn Of The Dead's success, I would submit that most of the zombie movies that followed these
two actually ripped off Zombie more than they did Dawn Of The Dead. Voodoo, tropical islands, doctors experimenting with stuff, and jeeps getting
wrecked in the jungle were all Lucio, baby! After the brief prologue that opens the movie where some guy takes a header
while wrapped up in his bedding (I cringed as I thought how much that would
have cost to replace if they had been wrapped up in my mega-sweet and
ultra-soft 100% Portuguese cotton sheets), we head north to the Big Apple and
this movie starts strutting its stuff in earnest with a ghost ship! How can a
movie that features a ghost ship not be a classic? Well, except for 2002's Ghost Ship, but other than that? Well, I guess there was also Luigi Cozzi's Contamination, but this is just proving the point that Zombie is the one getting ripped off, not Dawn Of The Dead.  I'm wracking my brain trying to remember all the movies that had scenes of
people being trapped in a mall (yawn). Uh, wasn't Jennifer Connelly trapped in
a mall in the comedy Career Opportunities? Or was that just a Target store? A
mall? You went and got yourself locked inside a mall when the bowels of hell
have opened up and starting spitting out the dead? That's kind of like being
trapped in your high school or something. When there is no room in hell and the
dead walk the earth, I'll be the guy running over corpses in my stolen jeep
down in Guadalajara while en route to some secret government lab.
So you've got this derelict boat floating into the harbor and the cops try to
get some response from it, but you and I both know that they ain't getting any
response from it until they board it and the zombie crew gets a whiff of their
warm, stinky flesh. Once these two cops get on board, one of them gets all bit
up by a zombie and the zombie takes several bullets from the other cop before
finally doing a cannonball into the drink and swimming off. The boat is put
under guard and we all wait around until Lucio can shove our two main
characters on board in the middle of the night in search of some much needed
clues. One nosy reporter coming right up! His name is Peter West and you saw him the next year in a little movie called Zombie Holocaust, thus making actor Ian McCulloch the only guy to appear in two movies with the
word "Zombie" in two consecutive years. Can you imagine this guy back then? He
must have thought he was going to be the next John Carradine or something. I'll
bet he even bought himself a Trapper Keeper so that he could keep all his
acting gigs organized. Next year he appeared in Contamination and well, sometimes the big man upstairs has other plans for us and for Ian
that big man decided that he'd seen enough of him in gooey Italian flicks and
that was that. Sure there was that guest starring appearance in the hit TV
series Poirot back in 1989, but he couldn't even get Lucio to hire him for any of his rotten
Italian TV movies. Co-star Tisa fares little better. I notice that the back of this Anchor Bay
release says that Tisa was in the Woody Allen movie Manhattan. A quick check of Manhattan's credits shows us that she played the memorable and no doubt pivotal role of
"Party Guest." She must have been important because among the three people who
played "Party Guest" she was the second one listed! And, as I'm sure her agent
(probably "former agent" by now) would tell you, she was listed in the credits
above future Raiders Of The Lost Ark star Karen Allen and future Sledgehammer star David Rasche.  Tisa plays Anne Bowles and she is the daughter of a doctor that was working
down on an island cursed by voodoo and this ghost ship is actually his. The
cops question her, but she doesn't know anything so it's up to Peter West to
bust out his superduper clue which is a note from her dad that he found and it
says that he is down on some island being eaten by zombies. Peter's editor at
the local zombie gossip rag immediately agrees to fund his little excursion
down to the Caribbean so that he can look into the case of the missing doctor.
Do you ever notice how no one ever finds a clue that would lead them to some
place like North Platte or Sioux City?
Down in the Caribbean he and Anne hook up with a guy and a girl who are heading
out on their boat for a two month long vacation, but they don't mind dropping
Peter and Anne off at the island that all the locals shun because it is
supposedly cursed. Lucio takes this opportunity to provide us with a safety
lesson on the dangers of topless scuba diving when he has the chick on the boat
swimming around half naked under water and ends up almost getting felt up by a
shark. She also manages to see a zombie swimming around down there! Did you
ever see that in Dawn Of The Dead? Nope, but there was that really exciting moment when they were pushing each
other around in a wheel barrow at the mall, right? The chick makes it back to the boat, but then the shark and the zombie bump
into each other and suddenly you've got a bizarre amalgamation of Jaws and Night Of The Living Dead as these two killing machines duke it out underwater! It's truly a great
moment in cinema and actually photographed very well, especially when you
consider how murky some of these movies and their underwater shots are. Now, I
wasn't sure what this zombie was doing swimming around in the middle of the
ocean. And I had no idea why the zombie would have been interested in throwing
down with the shark since I thought they only craved human flesh. But it was
one of those moments when you throw aside all logic and just watch genius
unfold as the zombie tries to bite the shark on its belly and ends up getting
his arm bit off for his trouble. We have to give the win to the shark in this
instance, but I'd like to see how well it would do against the zombie on land.
Home court advantage is everything in these flesh-eating zombie/killer shark
encounters.  Once we make it to the island, we meet up with a doctor who is hanging around
trying to figure out a cure for all these zombies running around and we get as
much of an explanation as we ever get in these things. It goes kind of like
this: some guy's wife died and two days later she was back running around the
village. That was three months ago and ever since, there's been a problem with
stinky, rotted people eating locals.The rest of the movie features lots of
zombies running amok and lots of gore. You've got your infamous eye gouging
scene which Lucio films in loving detail and thus sets the stage for all his
gory set pieces to come in his future movies like City Of The Living Dead. There's some questionable decision making going on when Peter and Anne decide
to stop running from the zombies long enough to lay down in a graveyard and
start making out, but they barely get to lock lips when decaying hands start
reaching up from the ground in an effort to curb their public display of
affection.
This one motors along at a solid clip and Lucio seems to have a handle on
spacing out his action and gore so that the audience doesn't get restless. It
also features surprisingly good photography and isn't weighted down by all his
annoying tricks like excessive use of fog machines, zoom lens, or the dreaded
steadicam. Obviously, this was the one that made his reputation as a horror
director, but wasn't made when he thought of himself as a horror director. In
his later movies, you almost wondered if he wasn't just doing certain things
because they were expected in a Fulci film, but here everything seems fresh and
not done merely because the conventions of the genre demanded it. The liner
notes included in the DVD's packaging are correct when they say that this is
unfairly knocked as a rip off of its more well thought of predecessor. I think
you'll actually have a better time watching this one than Romero's
sluggishly-paced opus. If you're tired of wading through the dreck that the
Italians churned out for an entire decade after Zombie, check it out again to remind yourself why they kept trying to replicate its
success.
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