Revenge of the Revenant Review 4: The one where the zombies have guns

 

Title: City of the Walking Dead aka Nightmare City

What Year?: 1980 (copyright)/ 1983 (US release date)

Classification: Irreproducible Oddity

Rating: What The Hell??? (2/4)

 

For anyone who’s been following this blog, it will be clear that I’m a very generous reviewer. I checked my posts for Space 1979, and confirmed there were about twice as many movies the highest rating as I had the lowest. When I set up this feature, I expected the worst of the worst to be off the list at the start. Still, there were a very few especially notorious movies I was considering that I knew were going to push the limits. With this review, I’m getting to the most infamous early on, possibly the most maligned zombie movie since Plan 9 From OuterSpace. I present City of the Walking Dead, per The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia “the veritable Waterloo of zombie cinema”.

Out story begins with a reporter on his way to the airport for an interview. While he is waiting, a mysterious plane arrives and suddenly disgorges dozens of disfigured figures that seem immune to the guns of soldiers sent to detain them. They prove agile and evidently intelligent, to the point of using guns picked up from the fallen, though they seem to prefer edged weapons. The attackers quickly fan out through the city, soon adding to their ranks as their victims return to life. The reporter makes his way to the hospital to rescue his (doctor) wife, while the studio where he works is overrun. We get extra scenes of a general, the wife or mistress of his subordinate, and a couple that I think are his daughter and son-in-law as they try either to hunker down in the city or escape to the countryside. The arcs come together after a fashion as the reporter and his wife make their way to an amusement park at the city limits, where the general’s helicopter arrives in the midst of a final onslaught. Just as the dramatic finale unfolds, the reporter awakes in his own bed, only to be sent out on the same assignment.

City of the Walking Dead was one of the most infamous of a wave of “spaghetti zombie” movies set off by Dawn of the Dead and its unauthorized sequel Zombie (also known for complicated reasons as Zombi 2). It was directed by Umberto Lenzi, a prolific low-budget/ exploitation filmmaker and screenwriter who would go to a great deal of trouble to defend the film. The cast was led by Mexican actor Hugo Stiglitz, known for Night of 1000 Cats, as the reporter, with Laura Trotter as the lady doctor. The film was shot in Rome and Madrid, Spain, with a significant number of Spanish actors in supporting roles. Its US release was delayed until 1983, when it was released with an English dub and some of the gore removed. It was sometimes known as Zombie 3, but it had no relation to Dawn of the Dead, Zombie or several other films to be released under that name.

For my personal experiences, I have to start by talking about Italian movies. The Italians were the lowest common denominator in horror and sci-fi fantasy from at least the 1960s onward, and I’ve seen and reviewed all kinds of their creations.  The most persistent feeling I have had is that even when I like Italian movies (notably the works of Luigi Cozzi), I still don’t quite “get” them. Then the overarching problem on that vein is that I find it nearly impossible to judge when the Italians are trying to be funny, and that is going to be a recurring theme here. The question I find myself asking again and again is if this is meant to be a joke, and if so whether the people who made it know how to tell a joke or even understand the concept of a joke.

Backing up, I finally got to this movie just a few years back, and didn’t watch it again until I bought a digital copy for this review. Returning to the theme of comedy, what it makes me think of is Mars Attacks, the cards even more than the movie, with zombies instead of aliens. In those terms, the movie certainly had potential. Usually, the unded are a step ahead of any of the human cast (shades of Return of the Living Dead???), who for once aren’t especially stupid themselves. Curiously, they prefer drinking blood to eating anyone, making them a cross between zombies and vampires. At times, they seem to amuse themselves toying with their victims, and occasionally take a break for something else entirely, like the zombified wife/ mistress who resumes work on a sculpture or a member of a pack at a gas station who drinks from a liquor bottle. This leads to some certainly comical moments, notably a surgeon who is merely indignant when he first hears the zombies banging on the operating theater doors. The comedic element could further account for some of the more extreme gore, but the frequently lingering shots of violence against women in particular are much harder to excuse.

What keeps the movie’s intent elusive is that there are plenty of moments and scenes that are genuinely unnerving. The undead are easily among the most sinister on record, and the scenes of their onslaught convincingly show an effective and seemingly planned offensive, proceeding from the airport to the TV studio, the hospital, a powerplant and finally a military air base. The minimal makeup also at times makes it difficult to tell who has joined their ranks, most surreally a priest who stares at a Bible and a pair who arrive by car. Most effective of all are moments of desperation and despair from the survivors, particularly the lady doctor. At first, she seems optimistic, believing that the undead are demons that can be repelled by the icons of religion. As she discover them already waiting in the countryside and especially the church, she begins to melt down, until it becomes unclear if she still has the strength or desire to escape.

Then there is my pick for the “one scene”, the arrival of the zombies. In a quite lengthy buildup, the control tower staff report an incoming aircraft that will not respond to hails. Visual sightings reveal it is a military transport, but it lacks the identifying marks of any force or nation. The plane coasts in like the Mary Celeste for a landing in a cleared space, where an elite group of commandos quickly gathers. As the troops approach, the camera gives glimpses of the cockpit, without revealing any clear sign if it is occupied or not. It’s a bizarre and nonsensical scene that can’t really be reconciled with any of several pseudoscientific “explanations” offered for the undead and their origins later. But it’s a tense and dramatic scene right up to the moment the airplane doors open, and for all the director’s pontificating, it is here that the movie most chillingly anticipates much later events.

After all this, what you readers and bystanders may be asking is, why haven’t I given this one the lowest rating? Or, more ominously, what kind of movie would I give a 1? I absolutely believe there are plenty of reasons this movie deserves it, but my whole approach to reviews is to balance the good against the bad. In that light, there’s more than enough that’s creative and even innovative enough to rank it just a little better. In addition, it’s never quite as jumbled and random as the movies that most actively annoy me. It would already get at least a 2 of 5 in my original Space 1979 ratings system. In the context of the adjusted ratings scale meant to account for originality and importance in the zombie genre, it earns itself a place at the middle of the pack, albeit mostly unintentionally. Finally, I must say that are certainly worse movies, in and outside the sphere of zombie movies, and dear Logos, I’m still going to review some of them. And with that, I’m calling it a night.