City of the Living Dead (1980)

Posted on Oct 24, 2007 under Horror |

aka The Gates of Hell

Directed by Lucio Fulci
Written by Lucio Fulci and Dardano Sacchetti
Starring
- Christopher George
- Katriona MacColl
- Carlo de Mejo
- Antonella Interlenghi
- “John Morghen” (Giovanni Lombardo Radice)
Produced by Lucio Fulci and Giovanni Masini

I first saw this movie at an officially unofficial class party in ninth grade. We were all at KerriLee’s house, filling the basement rec room with chips and soda and junior-highish noise, and I don’t know who was in charge of entertainment, but when the curtain went up on the movie, it was this one (though under its videotape title of The Gates of Hell).

Now, I was not born the hardened horror-movie maven that I am today; at the time, I think the only other modern horror film I had seen was Children of the Corn (1984). So to say that I was not prepared for Italian schlock auteur Lucio Fulci is an understatement. This movie absolutely blindsided me with its sheer exploitative gore, but even at that age I was also stunned by the lack of connection from scene to scene, randomness of what was supposed to constitute a narrative, and the really unconvincing dubbing.

By about two-thirds of the way through, I realized two things:

1) While I was not actually nauseated, I felt there was a good possibility, given the extremes of violence dwelt on so far, that I might get that there quick if future displays of gory depravity continued to escalate.

2) At least half of the girls had left the room and were hanging out in the kitchen, including the one that I was sweet on.

Young Nathan may have been a horror movie neophyte, but young Nathan was no fool. I missed the end of the movie, but I spent that time among charming company. And looking back now, I can tell you that I really didn’t miss a thing.

Lucio Fulci is, in a sense, the dark side of Dario Argento. Both directors were clearly concerned with imagery and visceral impact over narrative (a trait not confined to them, and commonly ascribed to the full cadre of European horror moviemakers around that same time), but while Argento generally meant to enchant the viewer with his visual cadences and occasional attempts at subtlety, Fulci instead tried to bludgeon the audience with outrageous violence, lovingly shot and lingered over. Neither director gets a bye from me for ignoring the important of narrative functions in a dramatic art form (things like plot, dialogue, characterization, etc.), but Fulci gets the added demerit for plying his art fairly artlessly, especially when there was a gross-out to be had.

The germ of the story, such as it is, was echoed soon after in his 1981 film The Beyond: A gate to hell which, when open, produces zombies. In this case, the gate is opened by a priest (Fabrizio Jovine) who hangs himself in the graveyard of the secluded town of Dunwich. (For those keeping score at home, the pronunciation in this movie is about evenly split between “Dun-witch” and “Dunnich.”) This fact is discovered during a seance by a bunch of mystical types in New York; the Mary the medium (Katriona MacColl) sees these horrific events, although it’s spooky-ass Theresa (Adelaide Aste) who explains the significance of it all, including the whole “gates of hell need to be closed by All Saint’s Day or else they’ll be open forever” ticking clock. She has to explain this to the cops, because Mary has died of fright.

This kind of case attracts the attention of Peter (Christopher George), a fast-talking cigar-chomping reporter. Rebuffed by the police, he nonetheless traces Mary’s body to the cemetery, and thus happens to be there when — surprise! — she starts calling out from the coffin. Now, quick: If you heard shrieks coming from a coffin (in daylight), would you immediately grab a pickaxe and start chopping down into the coffin, almost killing the person you were trying to rescue? If you said “Yes,” you have the makings of a crack reporter. On the other hand, if you said, “Of course not, that’s asinine,” you may have a future ahead of you as a movie reviewer.

Mary seems none the worse for wear afterward, showing no signs of trauma (or even any ill effects of the embalming that she certainly underwent before interment — right, Lucio? Right?). Which means that not only does the whole sequence of events make no sense, it also has little point, as far as the story is concerned. Except to bring us closer to All Saint’s Day, which is only 48 hours away. To close the gates of hell, they need to find the grave of the priest and expose him to sunlight or something; it’s never exactly clear what they need to do to the priest to close the gates, just like it’s never explained why the priest committed suicide in the first place. Peter jumps gamely along for the story, committing to a road trip with Mary to find Dunwich — a town that isn’t on any map.

Now, while all of this has been going on, we’ve also been monitoring the strange goings-on in Dunwich itself. Usually, when you hear about mysterious towns no longer listed on any map, you think of something right out of Lovecraft (”Dunwich” was one of his fictitious towns, after all): Antiquarian houses fallen into ruin, inbred populations foregoing modern conveniences while they peer suspiciously at strangers and practice unwholesome rites. This Dunwich, though, looks like an innocuous slice of modern America (at least as filtered through the eyes of an Italian director): They’ve got mechanics shops, bars with neon beer signs in the windows, teenagers who go park to make out, even their own shrink. In short, there’s absolutely no reason for this town to be mysterious or hard to find. (Yes, I know, it’s becoming a persistent refrain: “There’s no reason for this to happen, there’s no reason for that to happen…” If there’s one constant in the films of Lucio Fulci, it’s that the man didn’t give a rat’s ass about making sense.)

I guess there is one plot-specific reason for Dunwich to be hidden, though; it continues to delay Peter and Mary from getting there. In the meanwhile, as they continue to stop for directions and pore over maps, Dunwich has been invaded wholesale by the heebie-jeebies. Since the majority of these are setpiece scenes of random people getting killed, it’s not worth the trouble of giving them to you in sequence. Suffice it to say that there are plenty of gruesome encounters with the dead priest, the cumulative effect being that of one of those dreams you have after too much cheap pizza. Sometimes he shows up complete with his noose, hanging from whatever’s convenient. Sometimes he shows up with a handful of muddy worms; this fellow had a serious worm fetish, let me tell you. The most infamous scene involves our necking teens, parked on the edge of town (future director Michele Soavi and Daniela Doria). First the girl’s eyes are seized by the priest’s glare, and unable to look away, she starts bleeding from her eyes. Then she starts throwing up blood, followed by worms, followed by her own intestines. With that as a lead-in, the young beau gets off relatively easily; the priest simply appears behind him, grips the back of his skull, and squishes his brains right out.

One of the larger, more puzzling detours of the storyline (and let’s face it — with our putative heroes showing up occasionally to read a map and most of the deaths in Dunwich happening to people we haven’t met before, almost EVERYTHING’S a detour) is the concentration on Bob (Giovanni Lombardo Radice), a semi-handicapped, semi-creepy young guy who likes to hang out in abandoned houses. We keep returning to Bob’s travails, which include finding piles of muddy worms writhing over what may have been a corpse, seeing the hanging priest just hanging around, and being suspected by the townsfolks of having something to do with the disappearance of the other minor characters. After returning to him several times, we finally see him meet his end (via a table drill, at the hands of a father who thinks he’s been messing around with his daughter), and that’s the end of this drawn-out subplot which, even in a movie which confuses “plot” with “stalling,” seems like it was there merely as gory filler.

In fact, if you trimmed out all of the scenes which have no forward momentum at all, you’d end up with a fifteen-minute movie; Peter and Mary would find Dunwich, the local psych Gerry (Carlo De Mejo) and his patient Sandra (Janet Agren) would encounter a risen corpse or two, and they’d all end up at the Dunwich graveyard, entering the priest’s bizarrely-cobwebbed family tomb (wasn’t he just barely interred there?), stare at some more shambling zombies, and do whatever it is that they need to do to close the gates of hell.

As a visualist, you can’t really argue with Fulci; the scenes and tableaus he shows us are so idiosyncratic that one can only assume that that was exactly how he meant them to be. As a storyteller, though (and let’s be clear, that’s the number one job of a feature film director), he hovers somewhere between “surrealist” and “absolutely incompetent.” Thanks to the disconnect between scenes and run-on subplots, there’s no way for a sense of dread to grow toward the climax; we never get deeper than the vague unease that begins with the first scene, the priest’s suicide (though things do get gorier from there). By comparison, Fulci’s next film, The Beyond, is a model of narrative clarity and storytelling prowess.