Writer(s): Elisa Briganti (and an uncredited Dardano Sacchetti, who asked for his name to be removed following the death of his father shortly before the film's release)
Starring: Tisa Farrow, Ian McCullough, Richard Johnson, Al Cliver, and Auretta Gay
I am usually of the mindset that a movie cannot truly be considered “good” unless it excels in several different technical categories. I mean, really that’s just common sense; a movie with great cinematography but poor everything else should not be rated highly, nor should a movie with a solid soundtrack and little else to offer. The truly great works of art, at least in the film world, are ones where everything comes together to deliver a mesmerizing all-around experience, one that can delight your audio/visual senses in equal measures.
But Lucio Fulci’s Zombie is one of the few films I’ve seen that shatters that whole ideal; come to think of it, it is the kind of film that shatters the whole idea of “critique” altogether. It is an ugly film in many ways, with visuals that revel in drab colors and a storyline that focuses on a poverty-stricken island where the villagers are being killed off by a mysterious plague…one that also happens to bring the dead back to life. It gets much use out of an old, grungy church-turned-hospital, which is slowly filling up with dying and diseased villagers, the only sounds that of dozens of flies hovering around the victims. Just seeing the setting enough is almost nauseating, the griminess of the locales adding a sense of scope and urgency, while also working as a direct contradiction to the (mostly) clean, (apparently) sterile hospitals that we often take for granted in the United States.
It doesn’t do much right, at least not in the way of what we would normally think of as “technical standards”: the acting, which is kind of hard to take at face value thanks to the dubbing, seems mediocre at generous best; the cinematography is straightforward but rarely anything more than average; the story gives the illusion that it was thrown together solely as a shaky foundation for which to throw in as much gore and bloodshed as possible, which probably isn’t just an illusion.
And that discardable plot starts off with an abandoned boat surfacing in New York. When the Coast Guard goes to investigate, they find more than they bargained for: a zombie, who attacks and kills one of the men, before getting shot off the ship by the other. A newspaper catches wind of this, and assigns a reporter, Peter West (played by Ian McCullough), to start following this story. The reporter catches a young woman, Anne Bowles (Tisa Farrow, sister of Mia, who retired from acting in the ‘80s to be a nurse in Vermont), as she is being interrogated by police; it would seem that the boat belonged to her father, whom she hadn’t seen or heard from in months.
So Peter and Anne team up to find out what happened to her father, who last she heard, was going to a small Caribbean island called Matul. They happen to catch two American tourists, Brian Hull (Al Cliver) and Susan Barrett (Auretta Gay), just before they depart on a two-month tour of the islands (based on a tip from a taxi driver, who apparently knows everything that is happening in his city at any given moment), and talk them into allowing them to tag along.
As is standard in these films, it turns out the island is so small that it doesn’t appear on any maps, but they manage to find it anyway. Also standard is that Susan and Brian just plan on dropping off Peter and Amy, then continuing on their own way, but are forced to join them when the boat is damaged. Couldn’t see that one coming! It is around this time that we are treated to one of the film’s most (in)famous scenes, in which an underwater zombie squares off against a bloodthirsty shark. It’s poorly edited and comes off as rather clumsy, but it still works, simply because there hasn’t been anything like it in the annals of cinema (so noteworthy is this scene that Microsoft used it in a television advertisement for one of their tablets).
They meet up with Dr. Menard (Richard Johnson, who was an actor, along with Ian McCulloch, at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the early ‘60s, where the two first met), a doctor who is trying to figure out what is causing the dead on the island to rise. It turns out that the doctor had worked with Anne’s father, who eventually passed away from the island’s disease. There we go…the whole main mystery of the movie is solved, which now allows the film to focus entirely on zombie grue and gore!
And the gore is exactly what Zombie gets very, very right, which shouldn’t be too unexpected given the fact those have always been a Fulci standard. But what elevates them into another stratosphere is just how amazing a vast majority of the effects look even today: the infamous “eye scene” is agonizing in its gradual build-up, but just when we think it’s going to cut away, it does the unthinkable, by getting in even closer to show us every little graphic detail. It was a stomach-churning sequence in 1979, and it’s a stomach-churning sequence now; that it has lost none of its power to shock is a huge compliment almost forty years later.
Ditto that for the slow-motion jugular bite, in which blood flows in slow motion after a woman has her neck bit by a zombie. As usual, Fulci sets the camera in tight, even as the zombie is tearing the flesh away, like he’s daring us to find fault in the effect, and while a second shot a second later does reveal a mass of slightly-miscolored skin (which is clearly the added fake flesh used to pull off the effect), the initial bite is painfully realistic.
Credit for these shots goes to Giannetto de Rossi, who was an effects artist for predominantly Italian films in the ‘60s and ‘70s, with a filmography that alternates between exploitation fare (Emanuelle in America), Westerns (Once Upon a Time in America), and even work with a cinema great (on Fellini’s Casanova, as makeup artist to Donald Sutherland). Eventually, he had a relatively brief career in Hollywood, working with fellow Italian Carlo Rambaldi (who would go on to design the alien heads in Ridley Scott’s Alien) on David Lynch’s Dune, covering the makeup effects for Dragonheart, partnering with Sylvester Stallone for Rambo III and Daylight, and designing the mask for The Man in the Iron Mask.
De Rossi actually pulled double-duty here, as he was also the makeup effects artist—again, this is another area where Zombie shines. The zombies featured here are, quite simply put, some of the greatest ever committed to film. What makes them even more memorable is the amazing attention-to-detail paid to the length of decomposition, something that we would expect would mainly fall on the shoulders of de Rossi himself. The film features both a mysterious disease wiping out members of a village and causing them to return from the dead almost immediately, as well as long-dead Spanish Conquistadors rising from their centuries-long slumber. Realistically, the freshly-dead mainly utilize the actors’ real skin, with some gruesome blood or skin effects to show us that they are zombies; the Conquistadors, on the other hand, are completely made up to look like walking, mummified skeletons. Would it have really made a difference if de Rossi used similar templates for both kinds of zombies? Absolutely not. Nevertheless, it’s an inspired decision that allows de Rossi to show off the breadth of his ridiculous skills as makeup artist.
I would be doing the film a great disservice to not mention the famous score by Fabio Frizzi and Giorgio Casco. Even though the brunt of it can be reduced to just three main cues (the “theme”, a Caribbean-style number, and one utilizing tribal drums), it still somehow manages to be versatile. For example, the main theme is used (for the thousandth time) during the characters’ final showdown at the end, with some of the action timed to the music; when paired with the images, the music actually sounds heroic, and becomes the perfect background accompaniment to their “last stand”. It is also used when the Spanish Conquistadors slowly rise out of their graves, also to strong effect. It became so popular, that Frizzi clearly used it as an inspiration for his own theme to City of the Living Dead, also directed by Fulci.
Zombie is a film that doesn’t really have much to offer its viewer, besides a great soundtrack and excellent special effects, which would normally relegate it to the sea of mediocrity. Yet under Fulci’s direction, the effects are handled with such care and conviction that they don’t just become the focus of the movie, they become the movie itself; everything else takes a backseat to the mayhem. And when those effects not only hold up today, but also manage to put our modern overreliance on obviously-fake computer-generated trickery to shame, then you have that rare gore film that functions both as a throwback to film’s glory days, as well as a shining example of a forty-year-old film that still holds the power to shock and disgust.
RATING: 7/10
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