aka Zombie 2, aka Zombie Flesh-Eaters

• Directed by Lucio Fulci
• Written by Elisa Briganti
• Starring
  • Tisa Farrow
  • Ian McCulloch
  • Richard Johnson
  • Al Cliver
  • Auretta Gay

By convention, I must start this review with a history of the nomenclature of this movie, so hang on:

Romero’s Dawn of the Dead was released in Italy (after having been re-edited by Dario Argento) under the title Zombi. It was a smash hit, and in classic Italian style, Lucio Fulci set out to create a non-sequel which could nonetheless ride the coattails of the popular movie. Thus his unrelated zombie epic was titled Zombi 2. When that movie was imported to the States, it was usually known simply as Zombie, because there wasn’t a first movie for it to be a sequel to. In other words, Zombie and Zombi(e) 2 are the same movie. (I could really blow your mind if I started telling you how many movies by different producers and directors claim to be Zombi(e) 3.)

Contrary to what naysayers will tell you (often sight unseen), Zombie isn’t a Dawn of the Dead ripoff. While it owed Romero for its production impetus, Fulci had his own goals to accomplish with this movie that’s probably his best-known/loved, out of more than fifty movies to his credit. Fulci brought to bear the tools of deliberate imagery and haunting pacing which he had honed in his previous crime and giallo movies; plus, he added a feature that was just gaining notoriety in exploitation cinema: extreme gore. What resulted was a movie that has maintained its popularity ever since on its own merits.

“By my calculations, all hell should start breaking loose right about… here.”

We open with a sailboat drifting unpiloted into New York Harbor. The Coast Guard (shouldn’t that be the Harbor Patrol) investigates and finds nothing but maggotty food and debris. Whoops, and a big fat zombie who stumbles out of a closet and bites one cop on the neck before the other knocks it overboard in a hail of bullets.

The boat belongs to a missing Dr. Bowles, whose daughter Anne (Tisa Farrow) lives there in the city. The mystery everyone wants to know is, where is the doctor, what happened to him, and who was the fat dead dude?

Enter intrepid ex-pat Brit reporter Peter West (Ian McCullough), who’s trying to find out what the police are so hush-hush about. He and Anne just happen to sneak onto the guarded boat at night at the same time, and find the hidden letter from Dr. Bowles, which answers just about every question: He contracted an unknown disease on the remote and obscure Caribbean island of Matou. (Whoops, that still leaves the question about the fat dead dude, doesn’t it?)

So much for sharks preferring fresh meat.

Intent on getting to the bottom of the story themselves instead of turning over the letter to competent law enforcement authorities, Peter and Anne team up and head south, getting as far as possible via air travel and then finding a boat-couple, Brian and Susan (Al Cliver — it’s a Fulci film, you knew he had to show up sooner or later — and Auretta Gay), who agree to help ferry them around in search of the uncharted island of Matou. This despite the fact that even Brian has heard some of the rumors of “cursed” Matou passed around by the natives. How stupid do you have to be to add a cursed location to your vacation itinerary?

Anyway. The fab foursome have their first run-in with the living dead before they’re even in sight of Matou. Susan decides to do some scuba diving (wearing not much beside her tank and a thong) and meets up with a shark. No, the shark’s not a zombie; a living killing machine’s bad enough, thank you. But in trying to get away from the shark, she also runs into a ratty zombie who doesn’t seem to mind drifting around on the bottom of the ocean. For some reason, the shark takes more of a liking to the aged meat than the fresh, and Susan makes it away while the shark and the zombie take swipes at each other. (Yes, it’s an impressive scene, especially when you remember that that’s a real actor playing keepaway with a real shark.)

Bodywrapping technology in its infancy.

Pretty soon we, the lucky audience, get clued in on just how cursed the island is, through the eyes of Dr. Menard (Richard Johnson), a very haggard and frustrated medical researcher. He’s actually the entire medical establishment of the island, save for his nurse, and “mysterious” doesn’t begin to cover the macabre plague he’s trying to head off. The dead waste away, and then a short time later, regular as clockwork, they come back. Menard’s got his reaction down to a T: He trusses up the deceased in a sheet, and when the corpse starts to sit up, he shoots. This is one of the compelling images that proves that Fulci knew more than simple goremongering; watching the shrouded, faceless body slowly rise from the bed, only to fall back abruptly with a bloody hole in its head, is genuinely creepy. And it’s obviously not an accidentally effective bit of cinema; Fulci repeats it at least half a dozen times, and the spookiness of it actually increases with repetition. That’s just good filmmaking, folks.

Not that Fulci’s not going to go for the gross-out. Dr. Menard’s wife is unhappy being stuck on a remote island with an obsessed absentee husband and a bunch of natives slowly being zombified. She gets a lot less contented when she becomes the victim of a zombie attack (Menard’s patients aren’t the only ones coming back from the dead, you know). Of the two scenes that gorehounds invariably mention as being “really cool” in this movie, one is the shark scene above. The other is what happens to Mrs. Menard, as a zombie slowly and inexorably pulls her head into a hole in the wall, impaling her eye on a huge wooden splinter, slowly and in great detail. (It wouldn’t be a Fulci film without ocular violence, would it?)

Well. It’s fortuitous that Matou happens to be the next island the boat reaches after encountering the shark, because the shark headbutted the boat and managed to crack the driveshaft. Menard’s people see their flares and go give them a ride into “town,” i.e., the converted church that Menard uses as a hospital. Menard’s perfectly willing to confirm the rumors of the walking dead, though he’ll be jiggered if he can explain it; he also breaks the bad news of Dr. Bowles’ death… and life… and death to Anne. And then he hands them the keys to his jeep and sends them off on an errand for him, to check on the missus.

Cool – a buffet!

Well, you know what they’re going to find: a bunch of zombies chowing down on the late Mrs. Menard. And this is where it start in in earnest, because their battle to get back to the churchpital takes them through hordes of zombies. Seems the dead have been rising all over the island, and this is the last place for them to find living victims. Brian goes and crashes the jeep after bouncing a zombie off his hood (figure out where the brakes are, fella!), and Peter hurts his ankle in the crash, so avoiding slow-moving dead people isn’t the picnic it might otherwise be. And it’s not just the recently deceased they have to contend with; no, they manage to flop to the earth right on top of a hitherto-unknown Conquistador graveyard just as the mouldy-oldies start clawing their way to the surface.

With night falling and their numbers being whittled down, their only hope is to get back to Menard. But will that be much help? Not with oodles of zombies converging on the flimsy little building. Even the zombie-fighter’s secret weapon, Molotov cocktails, won’t be enough to save them all (especially in a structure built like a tinderbox).

Now, as you may have noticed, the plot’s not much to write home about. But consider that this movie was intended for international audiences, without a lot of weight to be carried by the script (since you can never be sure how well it’ll be translated — I mean, the English version’s not exactly Shakespeare). And remember again who’s directing; compared to the surrealist excesses of The Beyond, this one’s practically got a clockwork plot.

Never seen so many people eager to go to church.

And while Zombie clearly doesn’t have the subtextual depth of Dawn of the Dead, it does manage a certain sophistication through ambiguity (a post-Modern zombie flick?); not unlike Night of the Living Dead, a certain part of the horror for the characters stems from their incomprehension of the root of the problem. Voodoo is mentioned, naturally, but it’s got no weight behind it except murmured native fears. There’s certainly no demonstrable voodoo master raising the dead for some nefarious purpose. At one point, jungle drums are heard from where the natives have disappeared to in the woods, but their significance is maddeningly elusive — are they calling the zombies? directing them toward the hapless Europeans? not doing much of anything except comforting the natives? The drums never come up again; they’re just another clue that refuses to become part of the bigger picture for the desperate protagonists. (Not that they’re really that smart, admittedly.)

All of which means… what? That I think too deeply about Italian zombie movies? Probably. But the fact remains, there’s something about the combination of visual tableaus and brutal violence and maddening vagueness of plot that keeps people coming back.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 17
• breasts: 4
• explosions: 9
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0