Paura nella città dei morti viventi [City of the Living Dead] (1980)

(In French, On Cable TV, October 2022) There was probably a narrative somewhere in the writing of City of the Living Dead, but whatever remains is not immediately obvious to viewers. Playing like an anthology of horror sequences strung together, this is a film that often feels like an incoherent dress rehearsal for director Lucio Fulci’s more successful follow-up The Beyond. The plot, as thin as it is, has a priest opening up the gates of hell and a couple teaming up to close it back again. Unsurprisingly, the effect of having these gates open it to make people behave in violent ways, that provides justification for a series of disconnected gory vignettes. Gory enough that most human anatomy is ignored along the way: I’m pretty sure guts don’t come out of the back of the head—but then again, I’ve lived a thankfully sheltered life. Also, I’m reasonably certain you can’t literally vomit your entire digestive system, but this film is determined otherwise. The vignettes don’t have to make sense, so they frequently don’t: hence an episode with a father drilling through his daughter’s boyfriend’s head, then the film moving on as if, hey, we’ve got other sick stuff to show. It’s all patently ridiculous, but not really funny—Fulci intends this to be disturbing (gusts of maggots blown onto the actors, whee!), but he could have done wonderfully better in an Evil Dead kind of horror/comedy. Alas, the deathly serious City of the Living Dead is not it. I’m not sure any other film ever threw in lazier Lovecraftian references while not being interested at all in anything close to cosmic horror. I’ll say one thing: the result is lively, and not quite as mean-spirited enough to be truly revolting. As such, I don’t feel as if I have to be as harsh on this film as I was on most of the cannibal horror subgenre—I don’t like it, but I don’t completely loathe it either and that’s a significant step up from most circal-1980 Italian horror cinema.