City of the Living Dead
is part of a high point in Lucio Fulci’s career
that would make him synonymous with gore, zombies, and splatter and also cause
him to be more generally regarded as a horror director, despite having worked in
numerous other film genres. Being the first film in what has become known as
The Gates of Hell trilogy, which also includes The Beyond (1981) and House
by the Cemetery (1981), City
feels a little rough around the edges, a step down from the previous Zombi 2 (1979) but at the same time a
stepping stone or prototype to The
Beyond, a film that masterfully embodies a dreadful but surreal atmospheric
ascetic that I like to call nightmarish horror, which abandons logic to create
a sense that anything can happen, usually something bad involving the eyes.
While
there is an interesting Lovecraftian story (co-written by Fulci and Dardano Sacchetti)
and plenty of dialogue and characters to fill it, City feels a bit like a compendium of gore scenes and set pieces,
most of which exemplify Fulci in top
form. It has its flaws and issues, yet it’s one of those films where you can
talk just as much about what’s wrong with it as you can about what’s right with
it, and what’s right is pleasing enough to supersede what’s wrong.
Despite
having a dodgy narrative, a few silly moments, and somewhat shallow characters, who
have grown on me with time, such as Bob (Giovanni
Lombardo Radice), the film is quite a macabre experience that has become known for its top-notch
ambiance and gore FX (by Gino De Rossi),
as well as succeeding as a horror film overall. It’s like a product of low
quality that nonetheless continually hits the sweet spot throughout its runtime
so that you just can’t help loving it. It’s almost the masterpiece The Beyond is.
If you haven’t noticed, female vampires in movies have
been a long-running theme I’ve enjoyed exploring with this blog. It’s an
appealing aspect of fiction to me, and I just can’t get away from the
archetypical idea of the vampiress: her gothic image, seductive power, hidden
feral side, and deadly sexuality. Some time ago, around the time I reviewed The Blood Spattered Bride, I finally
gave Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla a read and wasn’t too surprised
at realizing how much Carmilla’s influence is felt in a large number of cult
female vampire films. Although, there seems to have been a bit of a debate as
to whether or not the perceived erotic subtext in Le Fanu’s novella has been misinterpreted by non-Victorian readers,
yet many filmmakers have nonetheless taken the subtext at face value, taking
whatever supposed eroticism is there in the writing of the book out of
the implicit and into the explicit; and, for its time, Jess Franco’s Female Vampire
(a.k.a. La comtesse noire, Bare Breasted Countess, Erotikill, and
many more) has to be the most erotic lady vampire piece, even more
so for the XXX version Lüsterne Vampire Im
Spermarausch. (On the opposite end of the spectrum is perhaps, and also
recommended, Let’s Scare Jessica to
Death — a Carmilla influenced
movie that hardly features any eroticism).
