by: Shaun Anderson
Posted on 11.20.09 in All Horror Films > Zombie
Release Date: 1979

A lot of extraneous baggage has attached itself to this low budget Italian horror production. So much so that it has become difficult to view it purely on its own merits. Its production and release in Italy in 1979 was marred by legal controversy due to producers Fabrizio De Angelis and Ugo Tucci marketing the film as a sequel to George A. Romero’s hugely successful Dawn of the Dead (released under the title Zombi in Italy ). Meanwhile a few years later in the United Kingdom under the title Zombie Flesh Eaters it would be held up and castigated by an increasingly right wing and conservative press as a ‘Video Nasty’ and subsequently censored and banned. These issues have helped to create a culture around the film that has often led to its dismissal. However, taken on its own merits and independent of outside forces, Zombi 2 emerges as a tight, tautly paced, and grisly horror film that supersedes Romero’s ponderous and flabby effort. Instead of the rather juvenile and pompous allegorising of Romero’s film, replete with equally juvenile symbolism, Zombi 2 is instead a rip-roaring horror film that is economically plotted and devoid of the type of social pretensions that make Romero’s Dead Series seem increasingly po-faced.

The fact that veteran filmmaker Lucio Fulci was hired to direct the film is indication enough that the producers wanted a no nonsense and traditional horror movie. One that steeped itself in the traditions and history of Zombie folklore, rather than be totally dismissive of it as in Romero’s series. The film also manages to distil many of the various sub-genres or currents in Italian popular cinema at the time. Therefore it has a dash of the exotic travelogue about it, combined with cannibalism, zombies and the imperious and scientific gaze of the mondo movie. Fulci was a director of great generic utility, and its surprising to discover this was his first attempt at a horror film. The result is a director willing to experiment and have fun. One only need to look to the astonishing underwater battle between zombie and shark to see the bizarre touches of the surreal invested in the film.

The opening sequence is a prime example of guerrilla film-making Fulci style. Illegally shot around Staten Island, Fulci uses a handheld camera to create a sense of nausea which is then fully realised by a monstrously overweight zombie who is clearly still hungry. Much of the atmospheric resonance is created through a plodding synthesised score by frequent Fulci collaborator Fabio Frizzi. The deep electronic notes of the main theme capture both a sense of the primordial and of the slow shuffling march of the undead. However, the real marvel of this film is the incredible make-up effects which were achieved on a tenth of the budget of Dawn of the Dead (itself a low budget film). The sickly blue and grey faces of Romero’s zombies gives way here to cadaverous skeletal corpses, replete with maggot ridden eye sockets and rotten broken limbs. In the films most successful moment we even get a subjective shot from a zombie as it clambers out of the earth. The gory effects set a new precedent for the horror genre, and in the films most notorious moment are literally eye popping. Fulci would use this film to kick start his career for a second time, as he went on to direct a series of increasingly surreal, challenging, and unique horror films in the early 1980’s. Here, the director shows what he could do with a straightforward and linear narrative, and the result represents a high watermark in popular Italian cinema.

• ★★★★★

  Acting:

• ★★★★★

  Blood:

• ★★★★★

  Violence:

• ★★★★★

  Partying:

• ★★★★★

  Language:

• ★★★★★

  Humor:

• ★★★★★

  Predictable:

• ★★★★★

  Girls:

• ★★★★★

  Gore:

• ★★★★★

  Sexuality:

• ★★★★★

  Torture:

• ★★★★★

  Overall: