Zombie

Zombie AKA "Zombi 2"
1979 - Italy
Directed by Lucio Fulci



SYNOPSIS

A seemingly abandoned sailboat drifts into the harbor of New York City. The Coast Guard boards to investigate when a zombie attacks kills one of them. The daughter of the boat owner (Tisa Farrow) and a journalist (Ian McCulloch) head to the remote island her father had visited to find him. There, they find a doctor (Richard Johnson) who is working on a cure for a local plague that's causing residents to waste away and die... only to return from the dead!



MY THOUGHTS

Zombies on the prowl usually make for a fun film, and this one is no different.

Unlike many Italian horror films, like those by Dario Argento, Zombie doesn't aim for anything remotely artsy. The plot is bare-bones simple and the flat characterizations make the film seem much like an old horror comic book or pulp story. That's not necessarily always a good thing on the big screen, but it works here.

The film was designed as a sort-of sequel to George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, yet pales in comparison to that 1978 classic. Dead was released in Italy as "Zombi," this film as "Zombi 2."

Like most great zombie films this is not for the squeamish. There's plenty of flesh feasting, blood oozing, maggots, and other gore. A woman gets her eye impaled on a splintered piece of wood too.

One of the most inventive sequences involves one of the female characters going for a swim (topless, naturally) to take pictures of a reef. A great white shark approaches. She ducks into a part of the reef where the shark can't get her and is attacked by a zombie (being dead, it doesn't need to breathe.) She gets away and that sets up an epic battle, zombie vs. shark.

Most of the rest of the film is much like any other zombie film. Hands come up through the cemetery grounds, people run from the slow moving undead, and all the other staples.

The big thing the film lacks is a sense of humor, which leaves the film dry (except all the blood.)
The dubbing from Italian into English is bad, but not Godzilla bad. Some of the lines seemed to be literal translations and not something someone would actually say.

Overall, it's a fun film, but not one of the most essential zombie films out there.