CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD Review
A hanged priest. Eyes that stream blood. Brains pulled out of skulls. Bad dubbing. Yup, it’s a Lucio Fulci film and this time- oh wait, this one also involves the undead coming back from the depths of Hell? Ah, well, like I said it’s another Lucio Fulci film but this time it’s called CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD (which I’m sure sounds much cooler in its native Italian tongue)!
In this round of supernatural Italio-American hijinks, the suicide by hanging of a local priest in the cemetery of small-town Dunwich sets off a chain of violent events that threatens to unleash the legions of the decaying dead onto the world. Naturally, this unholy situation brings the likes of a smartass New York City journalist (Christopher George), a recently dead but now not-dead woman (Catriona MacColl) and Dunwich’s perpetually chill therapist (Carlo De Mejo) together as they become the final defense against the ghostly priest and his legion of the dead that are now rising from their graves and attacking the residents of Dunwich.
Story wise, that’s about all you need to worry about (which Fulci and co-writer Dardano Sacchetti also seem to admit through their script) as CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD is much more focused on delivering an all frills gory splatterfest rather than a sensible story. Not that that’s a bad thing as Fulci finds comfort in on-screen carnage, gleefully staging violent, borderline psychedelic visuals of priests hanging from trees in a fog-drenched cemeteries or victims literally throwing up their guts as their eyes bleed. From its ethereal use of all kinds of colors and lighting that evokes the “other side” to an overall production and set design that is both classical and modern (at least for the 80’s) in its mixing of shadowed and foggy small towns intermixed with over-the-top gore, CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD elevates its miniscule story and characters through a vibrant, blood-soaked style that tears right into your senses. It’s all very fun and Fulci definitely has this weird energy where he can transform a cheesy scene filled with clunky dialogue and terrible dubbing into something otherworldly and violently visceral.
Sadly, a movie isn’t just its visuals and awesome undead carnage; there’s other parts to it as well and in the case of CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD those other parts are about as lively as the undead legions within the film. The acting, if you could call it that, is pretty bad as the dubbing fails to deliver any ounce of character to dialogue that is 50% exposition, 49% screams, and 1% lame jokes, all of which feel circumstantial to the much more lively carnage happening around it. While the dubbing performers’ incompetence wrings more unintentional laughs than emotional heft, their efforts would have been stymied anyway by a story filled with one-note characters and a plot that exists as an excuse to keep bringing the living and the undead together in gut-strewn matrimony. Indeed, by the time the film finishes up its violent chaos in disappointingly tidy fashion, the film seems to throw in a random twist ending that one could easily miss, mainly because you don’t know what the hell the movie is trying to tell you.
As with any foreign made film hastily shipped overseas to the US&A, that sense of disorganization nevertheless adds to the movie’s charm. In that strange way, CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD is a flawed film that feels and operates as chaotically as its story, usually entertainingly so. For every badly read line, one notices the grotesque monster design impeccably displayed. For every uncooked story beat, one notices the hairs on the back of their neck standing up thanks to the wickedly imposing score of Fabio Frizzi. Whatever the case, for any flaw noticed in the CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD, one can just as easily notice the strange beauty and craft to be found within its blood-soaked visuals.
3.5/5
