Cold Fusion Video Reviews

aka Nightmare City

• Directed by Umberto Lenzi
• Written by Antonio Cesare Corti, Luis Maria Delgado, and Piero Regnoli
• Starring
  • Hugo Stiglitz
  • Laura Trotter
  • Mel Ferrer

If you’ve got firsthand knowledge of City of the Walking Dead, I’m surprised. This is yet another one of the scrape-the-bottom-on-the-barrel Italian zombie flicks produced in the ’70s and early ’80s. It’s a peculiar subgenre that grew off the success of Romero and died by 1985 like a fungus sprayed with Lysol.

If you know this genre, this is what you can expect:

• Crummy film quality.
• Terrible zombie make-up that looks like the actors fell asleep in their oatmeal.
• Dubbing, even for the actors who were speaking English to begin with.
• A complete lack of pacing.
• A dumb ending. (Of course, you could do a downbeat “protagonist dies” ending, but not everyone can pull it off as well as Romero.)

I’m happy to say that City of the Walking Dead gets a star in each of the above categories. The main character is a reporter assigned to interview a famous atomic scientist as he touches down at the airport. But the plane arrives with radio silence, and when the doors open — zombies! The radiation has mutated their cellular structure, causing them to crave blood; and the mutation is contagious, meaning that those killed by zombies soon become zombies themselves.

As you can imagine from the title, the reporter (and his doctor wife, who got to deal with oodles of zombies at the hospital) try to escape the city, concluding that the sparser population of the countryside will slow the spread of the mutation. On the other hand, these zombies move as fast as the living, so they don’t have much luck outrunning them. Interspersed with all of this is a lot of amateur philosophizing on science having created our downfall through cities and atomic energy, yadda yadda yadda.

Diehard living dead fans are completists by nature, and hold a special place in their hearts for the Italian zombie “auteurs,” so if you’re one of the above you’ll be pleased with this film just because it’s there. For the rest of you, there’s really nothing approaching suspense or characterization; you may decide to sit through it, but it really wouldn’t be fair to force anyone else to do so.