Incubo sulla città contaminata [Nightmare City aka City of the Walking Dead] (1980)

(In French, On TV, September 2020) I have no perceptible affection for circa-1980 Italian horror films (whether they’re about zombies of cannibals—same difference) but there were a few times in Nightmare City when I caught myself thinking, “Hey, this is almost interesting.” Not often, and never for too long, but still—I suppose I’m reacting more favourably to the idea of a city-wide zombie emergency, to the promising opening sequence (in which a cargo plane disgorges a group of zombies, effectively beginning the apocalypse), and to an audaciously dumb double-jot-nightmare ending. Alas, it doesn’t amount to much because director Umberto Lenzi doesn’t have the budget nor the wits to keep this interesting on a moment-to-moment basis. The makeup effects are not good, and the film’s cheap production values keep undermining whatever it wanted to do: gore in a well-made film can be tolerable, but it just looks laughable and pretentious in a cheap film like Nightmare City. Whatever promise it has is frequently wiped out, and, in the end, only confirmed my prejudices against that horror film subgenre.