City of the Living Dead (1980)
Another day, another Lucio Fulci zombie movie. I watch them because I enjoy them, but watching a lot of a director’s output over a relatively short space of time really shows up their strengths and weaknesses with startling clarity. City of the Living Dead is the second in Fulci’s popular quartet of zombie movies, following Zombie Flesh Eaters and preceding The Beyond. Seen in this context, City seems like almost a dry-run for The Beyond, setting up a lot of the latter film’s concerns and featuring Catriona McColl in a very similar role to the one she subsequently played. McColl is probably Fulci’s greatest asset in these films; although not an A-list performer, she’s incredibly well suited to this kind of movie, bringing a zippy lightness of touch without ever camping it up or being too knowing. She’s an engaging, naturalistic presence who carries much of the audience interest with her. Read more
Dawn of the Dead (1978)
Where do you even start with a film like Dawn of the Dead? Having already looked at Romero’s work in general, as well as casting a glance at some of the films he has inspired, it is all too easy to let his achievements speak for themselves and correspondingly difficult to confine any discussion of one of his offerings to the merits of that particular piece. This is especially so when you’re considering the second film in a series of four, all of which have their own messages but which are inextricably linked. It’s rather like trying to pull a vertebra from someone’s back (a metaphor which I trust will be deemed appropriate in a discussion of any movie involving Tom Savini); however well intentioned it’s really all going to go wrong. Try we must though. Read more
Dawn of the Dead (2004)
Generally speaking, I’m not a movie purist when it comes to remakes - to my mind, there’s no reason why a good director can’t pull something fresh and interesting out of a familiar story. Even though the original is still held in high esteem, George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, in which four survivors attempt to ride out a plague of zombies in a deserted shopping mall, is particularly ripe for retelling. When the original first opened in 1978, shopping malls were a relatively new proposition - hulking, vacuum-formed consumer paradises that seemed to embody the the retail culture of the future. Fast forward to 2004 and the situation’s just as Romero predicted, only much much larger - there’s a mall in every city, and a generation of babies who can recognise the McDonalds logo before they can say “mummy”. You’d think there’s a fascinating survival story to be told there, and there probably is, but director Zack Snyder’s none too interested in telling it; his Dawn of the Dead pays lip service to the original (title, mall, original cast cameos) but is essentially a slick but soulless major-studio action movie of the kind that Hollywood knocks out by the bucketload. It ticks all the requisite boxes for a summer blockbuster, but ultimately fails to live up to its potential. Read more
Day of the Dead (1985)
For two decades, Day of the Dead was considered the final installment of George A Romero’s seminal zombie series, and talk of the film has always carried with it the faintest sense of anticlimax. As has been well documented over the years, it’s not exactly the film Romero set out to make - his planned epic featuring, amongst other things, a war between several zombie factions, had to be drastically scaled back for budgetary reasons - but he’s since labelled it his favourite of the original trilogy, and twenty years later there’s a strong case to be made for Day as the best in the series. Read more
Diary of the Dead (2008)
Pub quiz stalwarts will be familiar with the perennial question of which is the only band to have had a number one hit in every decade since the 1960s (answers on a postcard). Zombie film stalwarts are unlikely to need much prodding to point to George A. Romero as having (almost, if you skip the ‘90s) achieved a similar feat. Opinions on whether he has achieved a hit with the fifth entry into his rightly historic Dead series vary from review to review. Whilst the mainstream press is generally enthusiastic, genre commentators are divided and have, rarely for Romero, often been the source of vocal criticism. Read more
Junk (1999)
The rise of the J-horror industry earlier this century was a natural reaction to the stagnation of progressive stagnation of Western horror over the course of the 1990s. But an unavoidable consequence of the rush to ransack Asia’s cinematic riches is the lionisation of films that simply don’t deserve the scrutiny. Atsushi Muroga’s 1999 effort, Junk, is one of the most widely available Japanese zombie movies in Britain; but those searching for something more taxing than the Resident Evil movies will be disappointed by not only how bad it is, but also by how little it has in common with its fellow countrymen. Read more
Land of the Dead (2005)
Matt says…
With expectations almost unreasonably high for George Romero’s return to the genre he helped forge, it was perhaps inevitable that Land of the Dead would divide opinion. But although the film doesn’t really look or feel much like the previous installments of the Dead saga, it’s largely an elegant and worthwhile return to the director’s trademark themes, advancing the ongoing story in a consistent yet intriguing way. Read more
Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (1974)
Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, aka The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue, aka any other number of titles you care to throw at it (including, perhaps strangest of all, Don’t Go Near the Window) definitely belongs to the upper tier of the many, many zombie movies made on the cheap following the success of Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. It tells the story of George, a Londoner, who travels north to the Lake District to meet a business associate. Following an accident on his bike, he accepts a lift from Edna, who is heading the same way to help admit her heroin-addicted sister to a clinic. Things go awry when Edna is attacked by a man who supposedly died the previous week, and when a string of other grizzly deaths take place, the local police are quick to point the finger of blame at George. Are the dead really coming to life, and can it have anything to do with the experimental crop treatments being carried out nearby? Read more
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Okay, so it’s taken us an unreasonably long time to get round to one of the genre’s defining classics, but is there really all that much to say about Night of the Living Dead? Probably not, and I’m certainly not going advance the art of film criticism by announcing that it’s both a historical and an artistic milestone for cinema. What is interesting is viewing it in the context of the three Dead films that followed it. I rewatched Night for the first time in about 18 months, hot on the heels of revisiting both Dawn and Day and seeing Land and the superlative Martin for the first time, and found it fascinating how Romero managed to bring so many new ideas to the table whilst simultaneously learning his craft both as a film-maker and as a storyteller. Read more
Re-Animator (1985)
Given that 1985 saw the release of both Re-Animator and Dan O’Bannon’s The Return Of The Living Dead, it’s a shame to reflect that the splatter horror has never really enjoyed a sustained level of output. Periodic stops and starts have whetted the appetite but have usually been followed by a series of sequels of decreasing quality and all too infrequent original output. I think this is a real shame, as splatter horror as a sub-genre naturally lends itself to a cross between the niche and general viewer. As well as being great for horror output in itself, this realisation of a duel market is also why splatter horrors, when done properly, can be among the most original, inventive and damned well enjoyable films going. Read more
Return of the Evil Dead (1973)
Confusingly, Return of the Evil Dead has nothing to do with Sam Raimi’s trilogy of horror movies. Instead, it’s the rather odd english title given to Spanish director Amando De Ossorio’s follow up to his blind-zombies-on-horseback magnum opus Tombs of the Blind Dead. Made two years later, it’s a rather less original effort than its predecessor; nevertheless, it ups the pace of Tombs and is actually a lot of fun. Read more
Revolt of the Zombies (1936)
It is astonishing that the people behind one of the best films I’ve ever seen could also be responsible for one of the worst. After discovering the gem that is White Zombie I had high expectations of the Halerpin brothers’ follow-on, Revolt of the Zombies. Everything about it feels wrong, from the plot and pacing right through to the editing and casting. Though it was made four years after White Zombie it feels the more anachronistic of the two, and the Halperins seem to have forgotten everything that made their earlier offering the enduring classic that it is today. Read more
Shaun of the Dead (2004)
I was expecting good things from a movie which no less a critic than George A. Romero unashamedly promotes at any opportunity as one of the finest zombie films he’s ever seen, but even I wasn’t prepared for the quality of Shaun of the Dead. My eyes tend to glaze over when I am confronted with a piece of recent British film-making, which is a real arse as some of my favourite films hail from these very shores (I have only to mention The Wicker Man as proof). I blame it on too much box office success for Richard Curtis and his insidious ‘rom-coms’, which have somehow distracted the cinema going public’s attention from the fact that Hugh Grant a) cannot act and; b) is a tosser. I thus made every effort to avoid Shaun of the Dead at the time of its release in light of reviews describing it as ‘the first romantic zombie comedy’ – no thank you. With several friends recommending it though I finally bit the bullet (having first been assured that Grant was nowhere to be seen) and can only apologies for every shrug of indifference I affected when being told to go and watch it at the cinema. Read more
Shock Waves (1976)
You learn something new every day. According to a quote on the DVD cover, Shock Waves is “the best of the Nazi zombie movies”, a sub-genre that I didn’t even know existed until this movie crossed my radar. I have to say that I was drawn to this mid-70s chiller, in which the aforementioned Nazi zombies rise out of the sea to menace a shipwrecked group of holidaymakers, because of its lurid premise, and the hilariously contorted logic that says Nazi zombies are going to be somehow more evil than ‘ordinary’ zombies (as pointed out by my girlfriend). Matters weren’t helped by the histrionic trailer here that makes the movie look like a rather tedious runaround, with the breathless voiceover guy trying his best to whip up some excitement. Read more
The Beyond (1981)
Following the success of Zombie Flesh Eaters Italian director Lucio Fulci clearly didn’t believe in rocking the boat too much. The Beyond is another zombie splatter film, which again features innocent bystanders stumbling on an ancient and mysterious curse that causes the dead to come to life - this time in an old Louisiana hotel, neatly merging zombie carnage with rather more atmospheric haunted house overtones. Cue lots of breathless running around, gore and rather unconvincing dubbing. Read more
The Evil Dead Trilogy (1981-1993)
The Evil Dead trilogy confounds expectations in all sorts of ways. At the most basic level, it’s not really much of a trilogy: an original film, a remake of that film and a third instalment that wilfully contradicts the first two. But it’s worth considering all Evil Dead, Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn and Army of Darkness for two important reasons: firstly, all three represent important milestones in Sam Raimi’s bizarre journey from video nasty director to Hollywood maven, and secondly, I watched all three in one sitting, so I’ll damn well write them up in one. Read more
They Came Back (2004)
Okay, so it’s another film about the dead returning to life but I’ll wager that They Came Back is unlike any other zombie film you’re likely to have seen. When you think of the number of movies that are turned out on this subject you have to give credit to anyone who injects their story with a measure of originality; Romero and Fulci manage it, and Shaun of the Dead is a more recent Black Lagoon favourite. They Came Back offers us a stunningly simply plot twist, namely what would happen if the dead came back to life and DIDN’T try and kill the living? Considering the simplicity of the premise it’s surprising that it has never (to my knowledge) been tried before. When done well – as it is here – the results are infinitely more unsettling than dealing with the consequences of legions of the undead hunting down the living. Read more
Tombs of the Blind Dead (1971)
Director Amando De Ossorio’s much-admired Tombs of the Blind Dead is often considered one of the finest Spanish horror movies ever made - not an incredible feat considering Spain’s less than stellar contribution to the genre. Thirty-five years later the film has dated somewhat, and the impact of the once shocking gore has been tamed by the excesses that were to follow throughout the 1970s, but it’s still an important and impressive piece of work by any standards. Read more
Undead (2003)
The debut feature from Australia’s Spierig brothers, Undead has secured a cult reputation (mainly through DVD) over the last couple of years, but could probably achieve a degree of mainstream success if given the distribution. Although it’s a low-budget, independent horror, it aims unashamedly high, taking on the epic scale of a blockbuster without ever once feeling like a cookie-cutter studio picture. Essentially a very gory action movie, its piercingly witty script and outrageously choreographed action make it a relentlessly enjoyable but never mindless ride, even if it offers nothing substantial to think about. Read more
White Zombie (1932)
White Zombie has to be one of the most unappreciated horror films of all time. It came worryingly close to never being finished, the Halperin brothers (Victor and Edward – producer and director) rarely feature in histories of the genre and it hardly ever resurfaces on TV or reissue. This is a tragedy as White Zombie is a film of stunning merit; as well as being one of the first to feature reanimated corpses it is noteworthy as one of the few successful talkies of the era to perfectly capture the atmospherics of the silent films which were on the demise at the time. Read more
Zombi: Dawn of the Dead (1978)
George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead is both a career high for the director and one of the most influential horror films ever made. It’s often forgotten, however, that it more or less owes its existence to another genre luminary, the Italian giallo director Dario Argento. Argento had made a name for himself throughout the 70s as both a producer and a director, through stylish slashers such as Profondo Rosso and Suspiria. Argento agreed to finance a sequel to Romero’s seminal Night of the Living Dead, inviting him to his house in Rome to write the script - and in return, Argento would be allowed to produce his own cut of the movie for release in Europe. Under the title Zombi: Dawn of the Dead (or simply “Zombies” in the UK), the film was a massive success in Europe and kick-started the Italian zombie cycle that led to a slew of unofficial sequels cashing in on the ‘Zombi’ title - most notably Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2. Whilst its influence was immediate, Argento’s version was superceded internationally by Romero’s US cut, and has only recently been exhumed (in the US) on DVD. Read more
Zombie Flesh Eaters (aka Zombi 2) (1980)
Zombie Flesh Eaters is probably the most celebrated film from a period between the late 70s and mid 80s where Italian horror movies seemed to be competing with each other to produce the most disgusting and horrific images. Directed by Lucio Fulci (who, bizarrely, had directed kids’ movie White Fang only seven years earlier) was presented as a semi-sequel to Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, hence the film’s European title of Zombi 2 (where Dawn had been released as Zombi). This makes it sound like a bit of a cash-in, and by and large Fulci’s movie has got none of social resonance of Romero’s movies; but even though Fulci is concerned with just telling his own story, it’s still a great little self-contained horror flick. Read more
Zombie Flesh Eaters 2 (aka Zombi 3) (1988)
The boom in low budget Italian horror that occurred during the 70s and 80s didn’t exactly produce a vast number of classics, but at least in Lucio Fulci it yielded a director of considerable originality and visual flair. Fulci made his horror debut with the 1979 classic Zombie Flesh Eaters, inauspiciously released in Europe under the title Zombi 2 and posited as an unofficial sequel to Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (European title: Zombi). On paper this may scream “cash-in”, but in practice, although bearing little or no relation to Romero’s film, Flesh Eaters is a pacey and stylish film, paying homage to the ‘voodoo zombie’ films of the 1930s whilst adding buckets of beautifully framed gore and dismemberment. Fulci subsequently directed another three zombie movies, developing his own rather baffling mythology around the undead. The stories verged on the incomprehensible, but Fulci’s inventive direction means they have at least some worth. Read more
Podcast
