Ah ah, ciao amici, qui é Burl! Yes, I’m here to review one
of those pictures commonly referred to as a “Pastaland Chunkblower!” Of course
Lucio Fulci was the master of these pictures, or one of the reigning masters
anyway, and his movie City of the Living
Dead was one of the grosser examples of that notoriously gross genre!
Ha ha, I first saw this picture years ago under the title Gates of Hell! I always thought of it as
one of the lesser lights in the
Italian-zombie-movies-released-on-video-by-Paragon group of films, but now I’m
having to reconsider! (I guess I ought to see Dr. Butcher M.D. again before I fully commit to this opinion!) But I
remember thinking there weren’t that many zombies in Gates of Hell/City of the Living Dead, and that the gore, which is
what I was looking for in the movie, had kind of been replaced by the people
vomiting up their intestinal tracts, which for me was not so much gore as just really
grotesque and unsavory!
It certainly is those things, of course! But in re-watching
the movie recently, I found it pretty gory in a conventional sense after all!
The zombies’ favourite method of murder is to just grab you by the back of the
head and rip your brain out! Ha ha, yuck! And of course there’s the famous
drill press scene, which I guess is this movie’s version of the splinter
through the eye from Zombie! How did
they do it? I still can’t figure it out!
The story has more going on than the usual Italian zombie
picture, too! It’s almost like a cross between the down-n’-dirty Zombie and my secret favourite of the
bunch, the weird and great Zeder! (If
you haven’t seen that one, you certainly should!) It’s as though, instead of taking the
whole of Dawn of the Dead as
inspiration, they took just the spooky scene where Peter tells of his
grandfather’s playful motto: “When there’s no more room in Hell, ha ha, the
dead will walk the earth!”
In a nutshell, the story is this: A priest hangs himself in
the graveyard of Dunwich, New England! Who knows why, but in doing so he
manages to open the gates of hell! Next thing you know, barflies are being
terrorized and an unholy ruckus spreads across town! The priest can appear and
disappear wherever he likes! A harmless oddball is drill-pressed! And a psychic
who almost got buried alive (a great sequence!) joins forces with Christopher
George (famed from his role in Mortuary!)
to investigate the happenings in Dunwich! And then what happens?
Well, many brains will be ripped out, that’s all I can tell
you! And the zombies are actually kind of scary, which usually isn’t the case
in these films! On the other hand, none of it makes much sense (which usually is the case in these films, ha ha!), and
while it’s all attractively photographed in that low-budget Italian manner, it
seems to end prematurely, before the concept has had time to mature and flower
to its true potential!
I remain impressed by the movie’s commitment to
disgustingness! Even in the small scenes that have nothing to do with anything,
this tendency displays itself! I enjoyed it when a cop discovers a lump of
putrid, unidentifiable stuff on the floor and says “Inspector! What the dickens
is this?” Ha ha, what the dickens indeed? On the basis of this and other such vignettes, I
give City of the Living Dead two and
a half near misses with the pickaxe!
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