Nightmare City

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Okay, so back last week in my Mountain of the Cannibal God post, I really called out Umberto Lenzi and his film Eaten Alive as being vile, misogynist trash. Well, let it be known that I'm not entirely Anti-Lenzi. In fact, I have nothing but love for his Nightmare City.

Nightmare City is a manna from B-movie heaven. It's too good for us mere mortals. It's about zombies. Sort of. They're, like, dudes with fucked up, rotting faces, and they rip people open and drink their blood. Only, unlike zombies of old, they run around (this was 22 years before 28 Days Later and 5 years before Return of the Living Dead, so this is actually pretty novel) and they use weapons, which makes them seem more like The Crazies or the people who drank the bad wine in Grapes of Death. Except they don't talk or have personalities, although they do seem to have intelligence, and they work in teams, and they use stabbing objects, although I guess they don't know how to use guns. So I don't know what the fuck they are, but it's infectious and they look sorta corpse-like so I guess it's zombieism.

This is probably just as misogynist as Eaten Alive, but the tone of this film is so much more ridiculous and fun that it doesn't come off that way. I mean, there's a big difference between sick shit like a woman being raped with a snake-blood soaked dildo (Eaten Alive) and something kinda goofy like a bunch of dancing women in spandex on a dance-themed TV show called It's All Music being stabbed by a bunch of zombies until their clothes fall off (Nightmare City). Okay, now that I've typed that out, they both sound pretty awful, but trust me when I say it treads that ever beloved line between genuinely entertaining B-movies elements, and accidental comedy.

This is not Demons good, but it has it's moments. A dude shoots zombies while running up a rollercoaster. The zombies somehow pilot a plane in the opening sequence and land it, with no further explanation of how this is possible. And at the end, it turns out it's all just a dream... or it is?! I won't lie, I love this shit.