Director: Lucio Fulci
Synopsis: A young woman, accompanied by a reporter, travels to the tropical island of Matul to try to find out what happened to her scientist dad, who was there researching zombies. Predictably, the zombie epidemic there has gotten out of control and our group of heroes must fight their way off the island.
My take: Since this was made at the same time as Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, it is hard not to compare the two, and DotD wins without question. While Romero’s DotD features some redeeming level of social commentary, Fulci’s Zombie is just low-budget trashiness with little thought behind it, seemingly focused only on bursts of gratuitous gore and nudity in between long, boring stretches of nothing happening.
Zombie is very flawed and full of missed opportunities – there is no exploration of the voodoo cause vs. infection cause for the epidemic, this could have been interesting. The zombie behavior is very inconsistent, the continuity is terrible, the gore effects are pretty bad (most of the zombies look like the actors were just smeared with oatmeal and fake blood). For these reasons, Zombie has not stood the test of time as well as Dawn of the Dead. However, there is a nice twist at the end and some fun bits along the way (although I’m not sure they were intended to be quite so amusing – for example, I enjoy when the heroes try using fire to stop the zombies but end up being chased by flaming zombies instead).
Best Scene: Zombie vs. Shark. Very well done and original. Runner up: Eye vs. Sharp Piece of Wood.
Nominee for Worst DVD Extra: The “Food for the Worms” feature, consisting solely of an extensive interview with actor Captain Haggerty who played “Fat Zombie on Boat”. This lard-ass who had maybe 30 seconds of screen time rambles on and on about his former career as a dog trainer, why he chose ‘Captain’ as his acting name, and how he doesn’t recall much about the filming of the movie. Great stuff.
1 out of 4 Zombie Faces
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