Review of City of the Living Dead (1980) by Todd J — 03 Sep 2007

City of the Living Dead: There's a large part of me that instinctively rebels against the popular notion of Fulci as some hack who made flicks that are famous because of their gore. I think to say that is a very silly and dismissive criticism.

But what I will say is that through watching some Fulci, I've discovered that the attention his gore receives is spot-on because I have yet to see a movie by him that concerns itself on anything but.

Unlike a guy like Bava who supplies the bloodshed but usually crafts pretty oppressive flicks, the Fulci flicks I've seen (which are his latters, not his giallo) don't bother with things like coherent plots or even heavy atmospherics.

What they depend on is horror convention. Throughout City of the Living Dead, you'll be hard pressed to find anything original (except for the gore) or anything well done in even the most rudimentary sense.

The narrative is campy and at times interesting, but it never reaches that level that Hammer films do where they take the familiar and make it interesting again. Here, Fulci takes the zombie concept and, well, kinda sits with it for an hour and 15 minutes.

The famous scenes here are famous for good cause because they single-handedly propel the narrative. The intestine vomiting scene is very unsettling, and the drill scene later on is also very frightening (mostly because, unlike Zombie, the extreme sadism and cruelty is human to human).

But are these scenes enough to carry the film? I'd personally say no. The only scene in the narrative that I found genuinely effective before the end was the buried alive sequence, which works at all of its levels.

But the best part of the film, for me, were the last 10-15 minutes when the crypt is reached. Here, stylings really come to a head, and although the scene doesn't make a lot of narrative sense, it's very unique and comes out better than the conventional plotted stuff does.

Fulci's great at emphasizing the icky parts of nature and our own flesh that we don't really deal with, and when he's not concerned with furthering the narrative, he actually does better than when he half-heartedly tries to justify a narrative that really has no sense.

That scene in the crypt works because Fulci tries to make it work. The set design and lighting set a mood that the brain squishing throughout the narrative can't and doesn't. The strange ending kind of encapsulates the film's appeal and its chief detriment at the same time: it makes absolutely little to no sense (perhaps I'm missing something here?) but works in a simple, camp horror staple way.

** out've *****.