Record Store Day used to be a really big deal to me. I still look forward to each new occurrence, but I no longer camp outside overnight like I used to. For one memorable installment, my brother-in-law was there with me. To pass the time, I brought a portable DVD player and he brought the movie. It was 1980’s Nightmare City, an Italian zombie movie I had not seen before. I still crack up thinking about all the times those around us would be jarred awake by the sounds of screaming from the tiny speakers and go, “what are you watching?”
Unfortunately, the battery died on the player before the film was half over. I wasn’t in any real rush to see it again, but it seemed inevitable I would eventually own the blu-ray of it. And so it came to pass I grabbed it at random recently and I prepared to laugh at the insanity.
Much of the ironic enjoyment I found in the film in my first partial viewing had to been largely due to sleep deprivation. Watching it on a screen roughly five by three inches also probably helped. I remembered how fun it was to see one actor after another, each looking vaguely like a different celebrity, and then try to be first one to shout out who they resembled. Now having watched it on a bigger screen, the only person I would mistake for anybody is the one military guy who looks like Tommy Lee Jones in the odd frame. And there’s Mel Ferrer, who is actually Mel Ferrer but probably wishes he could be mistaken for somebody else.
This is a movie that manages to have a great amount of action on the screen while still being rather dull. There are also many moments of gore that are completely unrealistic looking, but still nauseating just because of what they’re supposed to be.
The film has a glimmer of promise in the very beginning, when a military plane without markings on it lands at an airport. Nobody could raise the pilot on the radio as it was touching down and there do not appear to be flight personnel visible through the windows of the plane once it is on the ground. It brought to mind The Night Flyer, a film I really wish I had watched instead of this one.
Armed military personnel surround the aircraft, but their guns are no use against the zombie horde that pours of the plane. One thing that distinguishes this film from its ilk is the undead here are significantly more capable than I have ever seen them before. They can cut people down with machetes or strangle them with chains. I would say they can fire guns with great accuracy, except every firearm here seems to be an uzi, so all anybody needs to do is just hold the trigger down and spray everybody in the immediate vicinity. Eventually, they’re cutting phone lines and manually lowering an elevator full of stuck passengers to the ground floor, essentially delivering a tinned lunch.
Having the zombies be this intelligent is a huge miscalculation. Since the menace is so well-functioning that they can do everything but talk, why are they the undead to begin with? There is something so simple and effective about these monsters of the kind introduced by Romero that having them be largely indistinguishable from living (albeit psychotic) people makes the zombie element unnecessary, if not downright laughable.
The nature of the main threat here is far (very, very far) from the only ridiculous element here. One scene that is hard to forgot starts out with too much time spent in a TV studio shoot of a horrible, choreographed routine some spandex-clad dancers are performing to the sounds of the worst kind of generic European disco. Then the zombies kill the dancers but, alas, they do not kill disco as a fad. A particular gruesome moment has one of the dancers getting her breast sliced off. Note: sliced off–by a zombie.
If a film is going to be this gory, at least the effects should be well-executed. Instead, you have somebody’s head exploding like they were that guy in Scanners, only for that head to be intact when it hits the floor. One moment that left me slack-jawed involved a character freaking out when she realizes the priest we see in profile is a zombie. Problem is, the half of his face that is disfigured was away from us, but facing her, making it deeply weird for her to not be freaked out when she sees he’s a zombie, but is terrified when her turns to show her the normal side of his face. Even the copious blood everywhere at all times is preposterous fake: watery and bright red as Hawaiian Punch, Mountain Dew Code Red, or any number of things a sane person would drink blood instead of consuming.
This is a film that doesn’t pull its punches as to which characters it will sacrifice. It would probably help if most of the leads had a lick of sense. One woman seems especially determined to get killed. In the only other moment I found unnerving, a running but unmanned lawnmower creeps across her lawn and she opens to the door and steps outside for a closer look. At least she has enough sense to get back inside and lock the door. But then she sees a bloody knife driven into the face of the clay bust she was working on and she does…nothing. There is weirdly no payoff to this scene, despite there obviously being a zombie in the house. It also bothered me the knife had fresh blood on it, which seems unlikely, given she seems to live deep in the countryside and by herself.
The nature of this world this movie takes place in suggests this isn’t just a different country but a parallel dimension. It is a place where surgeons all know how to expertly throw scalpels, presumably as part of their internships. Similarly, journalists must learn axe-throwing as part of their college education. It is also a world where TV monitors explode in flame if thrown at somebody.
I realize there are many people who find much to love in Nightmare City, and I’m glad it is preserved on blu-ray for them. As for myself, I watched with continually waning interest until it ended. Alas, even the conclusion is irritating and an insult to the audience. It pulls the lowest kind of trick of a twist ending and then follows that with the second-dumbest trick in the book.
Dir: Umberto Lenzi
Starring…no…just no
Watched on Raro Video blu-ray