ZOMBIE 2 (1979)

Aka “Zombie”
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

MASTERS OF HORROR: DREAMS IN THE WITCH-HOUSE (2005)

Director: Stuart Gordon

Synopsis: A grad student in physics moves into a creepy old apartment house to finish his thesis. Soon after, he starts having weird and vivid nightmares about witches and talking rats that progressively get worse until he is sleepwalking and trying to kill his neighbor’s baby.

My take: Nothing too special here. Starts off with all the generic haunted house type scares, but once things get crazier, its absurd that the guy stays in the house. Any normal person would have left to find a crappy room to rent elsewhere. The rat with a human face is really, really stupid (see screenshot). This one was adapted from an HP Lovecraft story, and it definitely has that kind of feel to it. Most of director Gordon’s filmography consists of Lovecraft adaptations, but I can’t say that any of them are really that great. Still, this is a little bit of a different style tale than most of the MoH series and was mildly interesting.
Most shocking moment: I’ve never seen a movie where they show someone stab a baby in the neck.

Body count: 4

1 out of 4 Zombie Faces

ONE MISSED CALL (2003)

Director: Takashi Miike

Synopsis: Yumi’s friends start dying mysterious deaths after receiving phone calls from themselves in the future at the moment of their death. Yumi partners up with Yamashita, the brother of one of these victims, to get to the bottom of things, until Yumi herself receives the call…


My take: What a big, steaming pile of poo. I realized beforehand that this was a very cliché, mainstream effort from director Miike, but I held out hope that he would have put a little of his characteristic style into it, but this is not the case. The story, the deaths, the spooky moments, they were all pretty unoriginal and boring. The ending turns out to be all muddled up – the corpse that was calling everyone before their deaths turns out not to be the killer and tries to help save Yumi from the real killer who eventually possesses Yumi and tries to kill Yamashita but doesn’t succeed and then isn’t mentioned again? WTF? The characters act in ridiculous ways – instead of trying to save themselves, they put themselves right into danger. And the ending – after stabbing Yamashita and sending him to the hospital, Yumi visits him there with a knife hidden behind her back as a joke and they both have a good laugh? I bet the American re-make of this is a real gem.

Most ridiculous moment: Being attacked by a corpse whose skin is falling off in big chunks, Yumi doesn’t fight back, doesn’t try to get away, doesn’t scream – she just looks straight ahead, apparently unfazed.

1 out of 4 Zombie Faces

TALES FROM THE CRYPT (1972)

Director: Freddie Francis

Synopsis: Five people wander into a crypt and the stories of their demise are shown in the style of Twilight Zone episodes with ironic twists at the end. The stories are based on old 1950’s horror comics.

My take: This is the epitome of cheesy 70’s horror. The stories themselves are so-so at the best, but the acting is some of the worst I’ve ever seen and the special effects are awful – I don’t know what was worse: the pinkish-red paint used for blood, or the clearly sausages for entrails. The crypt keeper here (an old monk) is so tame in comparison to the crypt keeper everyone is used to from the later HBO series. And the ending, with the bad people falling into a blue screen pit of hell and the crypt keeper wondering “who’s next…could it be YOU?”, that was just terrible. I suppose it could be considered entertaining because of how bad it is by modern standards, but I could never sit through it again.


Best story: The twist at the end of the “Monkey’s Paw” style tale was a bit unsettling, but I don’t understand – the guy didn’t do anything to deserve his punishment like the other four.

Worst story: While the woman being murdered by the escaped mental patient dressed as Santa Claus was pretty bad, I think the final story where the residents of a Home for the Blind go to elaborate lengths to construct a torture chamber to punish their cruel superintendent takes the cake here.

1 out of 4 Zombie Faces