RETROSPECTIVE: CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD (1980)
A film review by Mike Watson Copyright 1997 Mike Watson
RATING: 1 out of 5
I once heard someone describe the films of Italian schlock horror director Lucio Fulci as "dim-witted". And by golly, just about all other words fail me when confronted with a dog like CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD.
Although the late Fulci managed some rather good thrillers in his career, this is not one of them. Two points in the movie's favour - the impressive camerawork of Sergio Salvati and occasionally evocative score by Fabio Frizzi - keep things from falling totally into the abyss, but by and large CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD is a failure. And like most cinematic failures, it comes down to bad writing, dumb performances and lousy direction.
The story starts in New York when, during a seance, a medium (Katherine McColl) sees a vision of a priest hanging himself in the town of Dunwich, Massachusetts. For reasons we won't go into here, this opens the gates of Hell which must be closed by All Saints Day or the dead will rise and walk the earth. The medium apparently dies of fright during the seance, but awakens in her coffin in the graveyard the next day and is rescued by a crusty old journalist (Christopher George). That scene in itself is a howler: why would you bust open a coffin with a large pick axe when you know someone is alive inside? And don't cadavers have various things stuffed in them and drained out of them before they're buried? Anyway, off the two of them go to Dunwich to save the world, where various grisly goings-on are already happening as All Saints Day approaches.
Fulci's graphic gore is in evidence once again, but here it only serves to further highlight the film's flimsy script and plodding direction. The dialogue, in all manner of speaking, is unspeakable. Not bad in the quotable sense, like an Ed Wood film, but bad in its sheer dullness or blatantly obvious "lets explain the plot" type approach. McColl doesn't have a clue who her character is: deadly serious one minute, frivolous the next, she at times is genuinely hard to watch. And the geezer (the actor's name escapes me) who plays the town psychiatrist becomes even harder to stomach than McColl as the film progresses. Christopher George's performance is salvageable, but he gets his brains ripped out in the end by a zombie and we don't care. In fact we don't care for anyone in CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD, though in other Fulci films that hasn't mattered so much when he was on form as a stylist and an ideas man, as he was in THE BEYOND.
As a director, some of Fulci' idiosyncrasies are incredibly silly and annoying here. He constantly uses extreme close-ups of people's eyes, a ridiculous technique which suggests an attempt to convey the emotion that his dialogue and actors aren't capable of. And despite some gruesome violence, he barely manages a single scare in the entire film. Long-time collaborator Fabio Frizzi, talented but always erratic, offers a patchy soundtrack that veers between eerie, gothic death marches and woefully inappropriate electro-pop that's quite frankly embarrassing.
Fulci's other films of this period may be flawed - HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY, THE BEYOND, THE BLACK CAT - but they are nonetheless films with more inspiration, atmosphere and better dialogue than this turkey. For completists only.
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