Doc of the Dead

As an introduction to the zombie film this documentary is a disappointment. There are two major reasons for this.

First, while the inaugural zombie film, White Zombie (1932) is referenced, the history presented is very much from Night of the Living Dead (1968) onwards. Certainly, George A. Romero’s film inaugurated a paradigm shift in the nature of the zombie, from labourer-producer to flesh eater consumer, but this point could have been made clearer by referencing, for example, Plague of the Zombies (1966) as a point of contrast.

Second, all the films mentioned – others include Return of the Living Dead (1985), Shaun of the Dead (2003), and 28 Days Later (2002) – are Anglo-American. The contributions of continental European film-makers are entirely absent. This is a problem when you remember that Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) was a co-production with Dario Argento and that the film’s success at the Italian box-office led to several tribute productions. Two of particular note here are Lucio Fulci’s Zombie (1979), for its fusion of old school voodoo zombie and new school flesh-eater, and Umberto Lenzi’s Nightmare City (1980), for featuring running zombies more than 20 years before 28 Days Later or the remake of Dawn of the Dead (2004).

With the film running only 82 minutes and feeling padded out even these these omissions are all the more striking.

And, finally, if you are going to feature Joanna Angel talking about her zombie-porn crossover shouldn’t you also mention that Joe D’Amato, was there first?

Zombie mini-season

Yes, it's yet another mini-season idea. As before, the idea is to showcase some of the less well known films out there...

The Zombie
Mention the zombie film to most people and they’re likely to think of George A Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and its ever-increasing list of sequels, remakes, re-interpretations and so on. While Romero’s impact on the zombie film is hard to overestimate, there were zombie films before him and since which have taken a different approach. In this mini-season we showcase something of the history and diversity of the movie zombie, with films from the US, UK, Italy, Spain and France ranging from the 1930s to the 1990s.

White Zombie
Victor Halperin | USA | 1932 | 69 minutes
The earliest zombie film foregrounds the voodoo aspect of the zombie legend, blending German Expressionist inspired visuals and design with a Haitian setting. Bela Lugosi stars as the evocatively named Murder Legendre.

The Plague of the Zombies
John Gilling | UK | 1966 | 91 minutes
Two years before Romero’s epochal The Night of the Living Dead, Britain’s Hammer films presented their take on the traditional Haitian zombie legend, as a Cornish Squire uses voodoo to murder villagers in order to reanimate their corpses as labourers for his tin time. Colonialism, exploitation, the return of the repressed – this one has subtexts galore.

The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue
Jorge Grau | Italy / Spain | 1974 | 95 minutes
One of the first and best films to show the influence of Night of the Living Dead, this Spanish-Italian co-production, set in the Lake District, is felt by some to actually surpass its model in imagination, direction and gore.

The Grapes of Death
Jean Rollin | France | 1978 | 85 minutes
Jean Rollin made two zombie films around the time of Dawn of the Dead. While there is little good that can be said about the Nazi zombie themed Zombie Lake, The Grapes of Death sees the French horror auteur combine personal and commercial concerns to good effect. Horror/porn crossover legend Brigitte Lahaie stars.

Zombie
Lucio Fulci | Italy | 1979 | 91 minutes
Dawn of the Dead inspired numerous imitations in Italy. The most famous of these - although the exact degree to which it is a rip-off has long been debated - is probably Lucio Fulci’s Zombie. Coming across as simultaneously a quasi-prequel to Dawn of the Dead and a return to the voodoo zombie, Zombie features two of the most iconic set piece moments in horror history in a shark vs zombie underwater duel and an enucleation by wooden splinter that was enough to see it banned in the UK as a “video nasty”.

Return of the Living Dead III
Brian Yuzna | US | 1993 | 97 minutes
The 1980s saw the emergence of the Living Dead franchise alongside Romero’s Dead films. Their theme of fully conscious zombies who find some relief from their pain by eating brains reached a point of surprising sophistication in this early 1990s crossover with the teen romance genre from Brian Yuzna: After the girl gets unwittingly turned into one of the living dead she finds that body piercing and self-mutilation provides a way to stave off the cravings for the boy’s brains. No, really.

Other contenders: The People Who Own the Dark, Shock Waves, Bio-Zombie, City of the Living Dead.

Dawn and Day of the Dead

For anyone in Edinburgh or nearby:

Dawn and Day of the Dead, with Ken Foree and Joe Pilato Q&A's

http://www.picturehouses.co.uk/news_item.aspx?venueId=edbg&id=1932

Oltre la morte / After Death

Having been surprised by Claudio Fragasso’s mafia thriller Naples-Milan One Way earlier in the week, the chance of watching After Death AKA Zombie 3 or 4 (depending upon who's counting and from where) was too good to pass up.

Was he a hack who had struck lucky on one occasion, or someone whose work I had unfairly dismissed in the past?

On this evidence here, he’s more the former than the latter. There are however occasional hints of something better trying to escape the confines of the low budget and short shooting schedule.

Fragasso’s camera is fluid, with some nice Evil Dead style tracking shots through the jungle – albeit with the difference between the two film-makers thereby further confirmed through the way Raimi invented his own camera on a plank of wood technique which Fragasso’s more conventional eye-level shots don’t imitate.

The areas where the film is lacking are those around character and plot development, although when you consider that he was apparently shooting without a script and with a cast who couldn’t speak one another’s languages, this is less surprising.

Then there’s the fact that rather than having Giancarlo Giannini as his leading man Fragasso’s here got gay porn woodsman Jeff Stryker, whilst in lieu of Pino Donoggio to score the film he has Al Festa of Fatal Frames infamy. Leading lady Candice Daly, meanwhile, apparently took the part on the prompting of her then boyfriend.

An extended 20 minute prologue sets the scene, via a patchwork of allusions to The Beyond, Zombie, The Evil Dead, Dawn of the Dead and Demons, amongst others:

A group of scientists establish a medical research station on a remote tropical island to study various life-threatening diseases. In failing to save his daughter from cancer, they incur the wrath of the local voodoo priest. He opens the third door to hell, causing the dead to return to life.

The only survivor of the resultant zombie massacre is a young girl, Jenny. Exactly how she escaped is not clear, but this at least is in accord with much of what follows – including her subsequent return to the island with a quartet of mercenaries after the boat they are sharing mysteriously veers towards the island. They decide to head inland, in the hope of finding assistance. One of the mercenaries, Tommy, spies a zombie, chases [sic] after him, and gets bitten…

Meanwhile – again, this is a film with a lot of meanwhile, where things just tend to happen without rhyme or reason – a trio of investigators trying to discover what happened to the research team find the voodoo temple and, within it, The Book of the Dead which, true to idiot plot form – there is also lot of this, including the re-opening of the door of hell and – then gets read out aloud:

“If you want to open the door to hell today these four words you must say”
“Well, why are you stopping at that point?”
[Takes book] “Anatanou! Zombies! Maraco! Zombies!”

At least by around this time the survivors have managed to find a cache of M-16s to even the odds somewhat…

Like many films within the genre After Death plays upon the distinction between black magic and white science. The bulk of the monsters are non-white, native-types, the majority of the victims, with whose plights and in some cases zombie transformations we are supposed to sympathise.

This latter aspect, that the more fundamental distinction is between the living and the undead mitigates against the notion that the film might have been intended as a paranoid, racist fantasy, as does the presence of an African-American mercenary amongst the otherwise all-white group.

Admittedly, much like the none-too sensitively named “Chocolate” in the Fragasso scripted Rats, this is probably unlikely to appease the more politically correct viewer.

But, then again, the more politically correct viewer is unlikely to be the target audience for After Death anyways.

The real question is thus how far the film will appeal to the gore-hounds. The answer here depends somewhat on how you like your red stuff: While there are plenty of throat and face rippings and shots to the head, there is less that is particularly imaginative, convincing or extreme along the lines of, say, Zombie’s splinter in the eye or Hell of the Living Dead’s hand in the mouth and fingers up through the eyeballs gag.

One of the stars of the film, Nick Nicholson, has a blog where he discusses some of the amusing behind the scenes goings on in the film and in his career in Philippenes film-making. Check it out at http://nicknicholson.blogspot.com/

Io zombo, tu zombi, lei zomba

In some ways this little seen zom-com proves something of a missing link between various other better known films.

For if Fulci’s Zombie took what critic Kim Newman has described as a “straight-faced” approach to the post-Romero zombie, Io zombo, tu zombi, lei zomba – i.e. I’m a zombie, you’re a zombie, she's a zombie – draws instead on the “splatstick” aspects of Dawn of the Dead.

We begin with a animated credits sequence that sees a head modelled on a combination of Dawn of the Dead’s poster / airstrip and Hare Krisha zombies, open up to display the credits, accompanied by the strains of a jungle call theme clearly modelled on Goblin’s caccia cue.


The credits

Following this, we’re then introduced to the four main characters: two drivers, a cyclist and a gravedigger. The first three are involved in a road accident, which leaves them dead and in the care of the gravedigger.

He foolishly reads a passage from a book on voodoo out loud, thus reanimating the others. On seeing them, the shock causes him to have a fatal seizure. The others, finding his body and the book, then unwittingly recite the same passage, bringing the gravedigger back and leaving them all in the same predicament.

Reading the book for guidance on what to do, namely look for human flesh to devour, they then relocate from the cemetery to a nearby hotel, conveniently all but deserted – the aunt of one of the men is there but soon dies of natural causes, with the family connection enough to mean that she is not placed on the dinner table – where they masquerade as the staff in the hope of luring in some more appropriate victims.


Zombies on the march

Some guests soon arrive, including a family with a noxious child who knows all about zombies from having read Oltretomba and tries to convince his parents that they all in danger of being eaten, and a gangster type with his mistress and, unbeknownst to the zombies, her recently murdered husband in the car...


The horror kid


They make a point of asking for a matrimoniale rather than two single rooms

Eventually, after various comic living dead hijinks, the action relocates to a shopping centre / mall as the military go in pursuit of the zombies…


We are going to eat you!


But in a properly civilised manner...

The main innovation on the Romero zombie, prefiguring Nightmare City, Cannibal Apocalypse and the Return of the Living Dead series, is that these zombies are conscious of their situation, even if they also have grey-painted skin and, in sharp contrast to their speedy Nightmare City counterparts, still do a slow Romero shuffle.

Elsewhere there's also another foretaste of Cannibal Apocalypse in the way the zombie group, by now expanded to include the mistress/wife, finds itself pursued by the authorities.

The major strength of the film is that it is actually funny. While I wouldn't claim to have gotten much of the verbal humour, of which there seems to be a lot, the sight gags and the actors' zombie routines work regardless of your knowledge of Italian, with the actors making some priceless expressions and gestures.

If the writing seems a little weak, what with all the nightmarish coincidences and contrivances as things go on, there's also a very good reason (beyond it being inherent in this kind of comedy) for this, with it worth recalling here that co-writer Roberto Gianviti had also contributed to several of Fulci and others' gialli, including Lizard in a Woman's Skin and Seven Notes in Black.


Another Romero moment, at the supermercato / mall

While director Nello Rossati doesn't quite come across as one of the forgotten auteurs of the Italian B-cinema on the basis of his showing here or in the other film of his that I've seen, the Ursula Andress sexy comedy The Sensuous Nurse, both films do have a self-referential aspect - there a youth reads i libri gialli, from which he starts to get wind of the murder conspiracy within his own extended family - ex-military figures, and an agreeable general no-nonsense approach.

In the latter regard, Nadia Cassini is here on hand to provide some glamour as the gangster's moll, and while remaining scantily clad does perform what could, at a pinch, be seen as the cinema's first zombie stripper routine.

Cassini also helps explicate the formula of the film's title, having appeared the previous year in the comedy anthology Io tigro, tu tigri, egli tigra.

In sum, a pleasant way to spend 90 minutes and an intriguing intertext for the zombie film scholar.

[As can be seen, I watched the film through an AVI produced by one Doctor Divx, though there is now a Nocturno DVD out]

L' Isola dei morti viventi / Island of the Living Dead

Whatever you may think of his oeuvre, there can be no questioning of the Bruno Mattei / Vincent Dawn's commitment to low-budget popular filmmaking.

How many other directors in their 70s would have been willing to go to the Philippines for work and adapt to using digital video? Jess Franco certainly meets the second condition, but hasn't ventured outside more familiar territories of late as far as I'm aware.






The shit is burning show


Vincent Dawn of the Dead

But far from being a case of too little, too late from someone who many may feel should never have made the transition from editor to director in the first place, Island of the Living Dead is a pleasing return to the give them what they want school of gore. It also manages, by way of filone expert Antonio Tentori's script, to throw in some allusions to the likes of Zombie, Erotic Nights of the Living Dead and the Blind Dead films whilst apparently taking on board more modern influences in the unlikely seeming form of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise given the name of the production company, La Perla nera - i.e. the black pearl.

We begin with a prologue set during the colonial era, in which a group of Zombie-referencing Conquistadores are overwhelmed by voodoo-using native, slave and pirate forces.


1600 / 1980 / 2006

Following this we cut to the present day as a mixed group of treasure hunters, led by one Captain Kirk, find their vessel developing engine trouble. As (mis)fortune would have it, an uncharted island is nearby, allowing them to limp into shallow waters and apparent safety.

Whilst the engineer - thankfully not named Scott, but Max - stays on board to carry out repairs, Kirk and the other five crew disembark and, splitting up into two groups, go to explore the island. Needless to say they soon encounter the zombies along with their mysterious supernatural masters...

If the use of digital technology benefits Island of the Living Dead in terms of scale, the computer game-ish quality it imparts to some of the effects perhaps doesn't sit too well with the physical abjection so important to the zombie idea, with the more traditional exploding heads and ripped entrails working better in this regard.


An old school make a mask and blast it with a shotgun type exploding head effect

Otherwise the main departures from the old school likes of Hell of the Living Dead are the absence of Ed Wood-esque use of stock footage (thank $deity) and a more progressive seeming mixture of characters. The females not being reduced to tits and a scream figures, instead kicking as much ass as the males, while the ethnically diverse nature of the crew - like related to the film's production and future markets - helps preclude the reduction of the non-whites to comic relief and / or outright racist ignominies.

Indeed, if there's anyone one feels particularly sorry for here it's the actors who formed part of Mattei's stock company in the last years of his life and career. In particular Ydalia Suarez and Yvette Yzon are the kind of 'exotic' beauties who could well have enjoyed Laura Gemser type careers had they just been around 30 years earlier, Yzon also tellingly appearing in Mattei's late WIP film, Anima Persa.

[Twitch Film discussion of Mattei's late films: http://twitchfilm.net/archives/008021.html]

Zombi Holocaust / Zombie Holocaust / Zombies unter kannibalen / Dr Butcher MD / La Regina dei cannibali

This is a film which offers a challenge to auteurism, an approach which I often take in attempting to bring out the stylistic and thematic continuities in the work of Italian filone directors generally recognised, if at all, as mere metteurs en scene.

For the driving force behind Zombie Holocaust is plainly producer and co-writer Fabrizio de Angelis who, having bankrolled Zombie a few months earlier, clearly hoped that lightning would strike twice with this rehash / remake that uses some of the same cast, crew, locations and even, on occasion, footage.


The idea being to make as much money as possible out of the zombie and cannibal filone before public interest waned

This wouldn't in itself necessarily be an issue but for the fact that de Angelis's motivations are clearly 100% financial, of the 'leave messages to Western Union' type, and that in selecting Frank Martin / Marino Girolami as director he has a journeyman helmsman concerned with nothing more than giving the audience what they want, in the form of Alexandra Delli Colli's frequent gratuitous nudity and plenty of crude, unconvincing gore, whilst getting the film in the can as quicky and efficiently as possible.




The first victim is disovered


A somewhat obviously latex human torso, curiously devoid of a ribcage

Put differently, it's filone cinema at worst, where hybridisation of ideas, most particularly from the post-Romero zombie and indigenous cannibal sub genres in particular, results less in progress than patchwork / pastiche / failed bricolage; the last term tying in with the film's dubious anthropological elements.


A pointless establishing shot of a car driving off

We opens in New York city, that frequent mecca for Italian filmmakers seeking to take advantage of US locations at the time, with what first appears as a series of unexplained corpse mutilations at a city hospital.


Another victim...


and a nurse's understandable reaction shot

Doctors Dreylock (Walter Patriarca, who also served as production designer) and Ridgeway (Alexandra Delli Colli) lay a trap for the perpetrator, catching an orderly as he is about to take a bite out of a freshly removed heart. Rather than be taken alive, the orderly then leaps out a window, leading to another one of those plummeting dummy moments we all so know and love, complete in this case with an arm flying off only to be reattached when we cut back to the actor lying in a pool of stage blood.

Dr Ridgeway notices a distinctive tattoo on the man's chest, which she recognises thanks to not only holding another degree in anthropology but also having spent her early years on the same islands, the Moloccas, as the man came from!


A static tableaux shot of Delli Colli undressing; the filmmakers don't bother making use of the mirrored surfaces in the room to add a bit of visual interest

The tattoo is the symbol if Kito, the name of a Moluccan island and its deity, whose cannibal cult was thought long extinct; even more coincidentally Ridgeway also has a sacrificial knife with the same symbol in her apartment, that is stolen soon thereafter by a burglar who suspiciously takes nothing else.






Note the detaching / reattaching limb and the mark of Kito on the man's chest

The two doctors learn that theirs was no isolated incident, with similar incidents at other hospitals. In each case the perpetrator was from the Moloccas and bore the mark of Kito.

In light of these discoveries Dr Chandler (Ian McCulloch) plans an expedition to the islands and invites Ridgeway along on the basis that her knowledge of the islanders and their culture will prove useful. Also accompanying them are Chandler's colleague George Harper and – in yet another contrivance – his girlfriend, Susan Kelly (Sherry Buchanan), a scoop-hungry newshound who has already gotten on Ridgeway's wrong side with her invasive approach.


A familiar image from Zombie

The plan, Chandler explains, is to first go to see Dr Obrero (Donald O'Brien), an old acquaintance who has spent the past five years in the islands with his medical mission. If anyone knows what is going on it will be Obrero, who should also then be able to provide the expedition with a boat and a guide to take them to the island of Kito itself.

On arrival in the archipelago they are treated courteously by Dr Obrero, though the placing of a severed human head in Ridgeway's bed serves as a reminder that this is hardly safe territory for the white (wo)man.

Obrero's servant Molotto (Dakar, who had performed a similar role in Zombie) is charged with guiding the expedition's boat to Kito.

Engine trouble forces a landing on a nearby island for the night with the plan being to continue on towards Kito come morning. An attack by the cannibalist natives and the discovery of Kito's mark soon indicate, however, that this island is Kito, suggesting that Molotto is either less than competent or has been instructed to try to lead the expedition astray.




More signs of Kito

A series of encounters with the cannibals then thin out the party's numbers faster than Ian McCulloch's hair, before the survivors are saved thanks to a timely intervention by the zombies – creatures created by a certain mad scientist who is also behind the natives' return to their old ways...

Zombi(e) Holocaust is one of those films that was released under an at times bewildering array of titles, including Zombies unter Kannibalen in German speaking territories; the alternate Italian AKA of La Regina dei cannibali; and, of course, the US Dr Butcher MD edit, which cannibalised some footage from yet another film, the aborted horror anthology Tales That'll Tear Your Heart Out. What's most significant here is the way in which these titles emphasise different aspects of the film, presumably to increase its appeal to audiences less interested in zombies than cannibals or mad scientists depending on what happened to be in vogue at any one point in circa 1980-82.








Some of the crude gore and zombie makeup effects

As further evidence of the film's derivativeness we also get the Mountain of the Cannibal God and Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals deus ex machina of the white / non-native woman as primitive goddess motif, allowing for yet more gratuitous nudity from Delli Colli, and composer Nico Fidenco actually reusing some cues from his Black Emanuelle scores.

Despite the title Zombie Holocaust is one of the less apocalyptic example of the filone, with the survivors apparently able to return home pretty much unscathed all things considered and the 'natural' order of things restored. As such the implicit message comes across as a less revolutionary, more reactionary one than most of its ilk, namely that some degree of western exploitation of the primitive is justified by our superiority, but that mad scientist type experiments in creating zombie labourers are going a little bit too far...


Delli Colli appears in the same pose in The New York Ripper

It's also worth noting here that 'obrero' means worker in Spanish. Were the good doctor's enterprising experiments thus a misguided attempt to pull himself into the ranks of the bourgeoisie, to establish himself as master rather than slave? Could there be a longer paper / essay on the Italian zombie film as proletarian revenge fantasy and / or expression of Nietzschean ressentiment or somesuch in this?

[The screengrabs here come from the UK Stonehaven DVD release]

Zombi 2 / Zombie / Zombie Flesh Eaters / Gli Ultimi zombi / Island of the Flesh-Eaters / Island of the Living Dead / Woodoo

I can hazard a guess at what you might be thinking: another discussion of Zombie? Is there really a need? Well, perhaps not if truth be told, but here goes anyways...

The main issue, I think, is trying to see the film with fresh eyes and thereby recapture something of what it must have been like to have watched it as a first-time viewer back in 1979.

Would we have really expected to see an underwater zombie, never mind a fight between it and a shark?

Would we have anticipated the extremity of the spike in the eye sequence?

Asking these questions and answering them – a 'no' in both instances, except perhaps for those few individuals who had followed Fulci's career to that point and knew what he was capable of – helps emphasise the way in which Zombie works best, as a waking nightmare in which the worst can and will happen in Fulci's worst of all possible anti-Panglossian worlds, whereby the various plot contrivances, inconsistencies and illogicalities thus come to possess a perverse internal logic of their own.






We have come to eat you, travelling east to west and left to right

We open with a boat drifting into New York harbour, an arrival that brings death and disease in its wake like some modern-day version of Nosferatu. (It's always useful to be able to pair up a critically disreputably Italian horror film with a classic of art cinema, isn't it.)

Having nearly collided with the Staten Island Ferry a harbour patrol vessel boards the boat, an early indication of the Fulcean worldview comes across from the fact that two patrolmen are more interested in the potential bonus should the boat indeed be devoid of life than of what fate might have befallen its former occupants; yes, Elisa Briganti scripted the film, but the fact that Enzo Castellari passed on directing it and suggested Fuli as the man for the job is telling.




Where do the centipedes come from?

One of the patrolmen goes down below and is attacked by a monstrous figure who tears out his throat before moving up on deck.

The other patrolman empties his revolver into the creature, causing it to fall off the boat and sink beneath the water.




Note the way Fulci hangs on the image of the New York skyline for a moment after the zombie has been blasted into the bay

As news of the incident spreads reporter Peter West is assigned to cover the story by his paper, while Anne Bowles is questioned by the police, the boat having belonged to her father.

The two investigators soon meet and agree to work together.

A letter from Anne's father mentions a mysterious disease sweeping the Caribbean island of Matool, leading the two to fly out to the Domican Republic and to go in search of a boat they can character. As (bad) luck would have it another two Americans, Brian Hart and Susan Martell, are about to depart on a two-month cruise and agree to take Peter and Anne to the island.

This proves easier said than done, however, until a chance encounter with a shark – and, as already mentioned, another zombie – leaves the boat damaged, compelling the group to cast anchor off the nearest island.


Giving them what they want: breasts...


... shark ...


... zombie ...


... and zombie vs shark

Sure enough, it is Matool and, as a parallel narrative establishing Dr Menard's futile attempts to understand and control the spread of the mysterious plague rapidly spreading across the island has made clear, things are about to get a whole lot worse for all concerned...




Sometimes the zombies seem more interested in watching than flesh eating

As I've said before, Fulci was a better and more subtle director than he is often given credit for, with more to his films than their notorious splatter set pieces.

As evidence of this we can begin by noting the whip pans on the boat as Anne is interrogated by a pair of detectives, as an approach that demonstrates a willingness to experiment compared to the usual establishing shot and shot / reverse shot decoupage, and which also convey Anne's confused state and the detective's inability to summon up much in the way of sympathy for her.

More generally, Fulci again makes effective use of in-camera editing through pulling focus or moving his camera around the action rather than cutting, and displays a strong grasp of the mechanics of generating suspense and shock, using atmospheric build ups interrupted and concluded with dramatic zooms and / or cuts at the right moment.

On the downside some of the more expository scenes suffer from a lack of visual imagination, such as the classical shot-reverse shot pattern of the negotiations over the boat between Brian and Peter. Again, however, a case could also be made for even this scene, that Fulci is visually conveying the conflict between the two men over their conflicting goals – West's need to go to Matool against Brian's desire to preserve his holiday – followed by the formation of a single group of the two that had existed at the start of the scene through the subsequent reframing in the four shot.

Limited resources and retakes are also evident in the way in which the underwater zombie seems to lose, regrow and lose his arm in the course of the fight with the shark and the tendency of the molotov cocktails thrown by the survivors in the final showdown to produce a blast of flame that lasts but an instant – specifically until the next is thrown – and to never set anything except zombies ablaze.

Above all, however, it's about the gore effects and the set-pieces, as the things which really matter to the typical viewer and as the ones where Fulci and his collaborators really deliver the goods.

Who cares if the plotting is full of coincidences and contrivances or the direction seemingly plodding – though I could go in in attempting to justify the construction of many other scenes, I won't, in the hope that the point has been made – so long as there are throat-rippings, flesh chompings and head traumas aplenty and those jaw-dropping I-can't-believe-I-just-saw-that set pieces.








The defining moment of Fulci's career?

Here Fulci, make up and FX man Gino De Rossi and production designer Walter Patriarca also succeed in conveying the physicality of the zombies and the island in a way unparalleled in any other previous zombie film I can think of, with the stenches of flesh, blood, decay, alcohol, earth, sweat and medical chemicals and the feel of the heat and dust almost palpable.

Though there some exceptions to this cinesthesia – a portmanteau term coined by Vivien Sobchack to emphasise the way in which filmmakers can convey all the senses through the audio-visual channels available to them – most notably the way in which the discovery of Mrs Menard's fate and of the two non-feasting zombies in the scene are signalled by sight in another effective shot-reaction shot combination, these can also be taken as a further expression of Fulci's preference for cinematic over narrative logic and as a precursor of the absurdist approach that would become prominent in City of the Living Dead and The Beyond, where the (un)dead can and do appear and disappear at will.

Sound and music are also important, with the voodoo drums and droning zombie synth making a vital contribution to the film's overall effect, with another intertextual indication of this being the way in which many of Fabio Frizzi and Giorgio Tucci's cues would be recalled in City of the Living Dead.

Surprisingly, however, the film perhaps isn't as gory as it could have been, with a certain restraint showing in the way the dead patients have their heads covered and are not always shown receiving a bullet in the head, with the camera being equally prone to focus on Menard. Though budgetary constraints may have again contributed here, these images also tell us something about the doctor, that is he is fundamentally well-meaning and decent, as has not yet become so inured to the act of shooting his former patients that it has become in any way easier.


Menard and Lucas represent different approaches to the living dead

As with Romero's films, the filmmakers leave the zombie plague unexplained, along with their precise relationship with the unseen but near omnipresent voodoo-drumming natives. One thing that is clear, however, is that western science is unable to make sense of the zombies or to provide any answers. “Nothing fits,” as Menard despairingly remarks. More than this, his hubristic insistence on finding an explanation if anything more a hinderance than a help in the circumstances, especially when compared with some of the natives' more pragmatic if reluctant acceptance of the seemingly impossible:

Dr Menard: “Do you know what has caused all this? Is it voodoo?”

Lucas, the native assistant: “Lucas not know nothing. The father of my father always say – the dead, they will come back to suck the blood of the living.”

“That's nonsense! That's just a stupid superstition!”

“Yes, you are right doctor. You know many more things than Lucas.”

“I don't believe that voodoo can bring the dead back to life.”

“And Lucas not believe that the dead be dead.”

Had Menard and Bowles recognised their limits and left the island at the first sign of trouble, it's possible that nothing would have really happened – though then, of course, we wouldn't have had much of a film!

There's also a sense that voodoo may be being used by some of the islanders against the white man, that from a syncretic combination of African beliefs and Catholicism that could be useful to the slave master – as one who no longer really believed in magic but was quite happy to use the additional power it could grant him – it has now transformed into something with a more 'revolutionary' third worldist potential. (The famous “we are going to eat you” tagline, is suggestive in this regard in terms of the implied subject positions of third-world zombie and western world.)








Various members of the Dell'Aqua family as feature zombies

Following on from this, one of the film's weak points is often taken to be its ending. The delivery in the English dub here is somewhat ridiculous and the image of zombies shuffling across the bridge with the traffic below them flowing as normal despite the broadcaster's panicked final broadcast – they're everywhere! they're at the door! they're coming in! aaarrgggh! – not much better. However, the Italian dub is less hyperbolic and makes the more reasonable suggestion that the situation is deteriorating rapidly but not yet lost. Both also giving a neat symmetry to the film in terms of opening and closing words, which are heard over the radio, and images, of boats and New York-ness.

Perhaps the final indication of Zombie's accomplishment is that it is sufficiently rich that we can come back to the film again and, as I have hopefully indicated here, find something new we never really noticed or particularly thought about before.