City of the Living Dead (1980)

Quentin Tarantino paid homage to this film in Kill Bill 2. The scene where a buried alive Uma Thurman wakes up inside her coffin is based on a scene in this film. Of course Quentin Tarantino is actually famous for liking films in all shapes and sizes and not just good ones, so the fact that he liked this one enough to quote from it, does not automatically make it a classic. Although there is plenty to see, both in terms of atmosphere and in terms of grossness, this film is more of an oddity than a classic.

I recently spent an afternoon in the presence of a director who insists that we should make a distinction between “Film” and “Cinema”. If such a distinction indeed exists and applies, this should be considered cinema, I guess. There is a lot of atmosphere, a well used colour-palette, good lighting, some fairly decent imagery and a reasonable amount of cinematographic virtuosity. Unfortunately this strong point is also the movie’s weakness. There is no story, just a series of good-looking set pieces; nightmarish dream-sequences set in a specific order. Well made, sure, but I’m kind of a purist: the story I’m watching can be silly or illogical for all I care, but it does actually have to exist. Particularly since writer/director Lucio Fulci and co-writer Dardano Sacchetti claim to have based their script on the work of H.P. Lovecraft. If that is really true they should have done better. A lot better even. A bunch of pretty scenes all in a row just does not cut it. Without a story that’s only half a movie made.

For those of you who like it nice and gross there is enough to see, even if the horror is relatively few and far between. There are flesh- and brain-eating corpses in various stages of decay, a woman literally puking her guts out (here’s hoping she was paid well), worms, maggots, and the unfortunate encounter between a man’s head and a drill (in close-up). Even considering the fact that the special effects look rather doltish to the modern eye, it’s still unpleasant enough to please fans of the genre.

However, without a storyline, and sporting a cast of actors whose faces or performances have not outlasted the 1980’s (and for good reason as far as I’m concerned), the average viewer is better off fast-forwarding to the good bits, rather than sitting through this movie as a whole. Seen through current day eyes, the film is too boring and dated to be a fulfilling movie-experience.

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