Two Cents is an original column akin to a book club for films. The Cinapse team will program films and contribute our best, most insightful, or most creative thoughts on each film using a maximum of 200 words each. Guest writers and fan comments are encouraged, as are suggestions for future entries to the column. Join us as we share our two cents on films we love, films we are curious about, and films we believe merit some discussion.
The Pick
Some horror filmmakers are renowned for their ability to weld the genre to sociopolitical concerns and events, using the fantastical and grotesque to examine and dissect our preconceived notions of the world. Other filmmakers use the horror genre to seek out and discuss truths about the human condition, about our tenuous and unstable place within this world.
And some, like Lucio Fulci, are just really good at killing people in inventive ways.
Over the course of his 32-year career, Fulci grew to be known as “The Godfather of Gore”, his imagination supplying a seemingly limitless variety of atrocities to inflict on his characters. There may be no other filmmaker in the history of the form with such an affinity for destroying eyeballs in pornographic detail, whether he was stabbing them through with splinters or siccing a horde of angry spiders to eat them out of a skull.
Perhaps his most acclaimed work was the Gates of Hell thematic trilogy, which includes The Beyond, The House by the Cemetery, and this week’s pick City of the Living Dead.
City of the Living Dead opens with a seance, during which a psychic (Catriona MacColl) has a bizarre vision of a priest committing suicide in the town of Dunwich, inadvertently opening up the gates of hell. Convinced that this vision was a prelude to an apocalyptic event, she and intrepid reporter (Christopher George) make tracks towards the town.
Meanwhile, in Dunwich, the strange events (and the dead bodies) are starting to pile up.
Next Week’s Pick:
Stephen Spielberg’s latest science fiction epic Ready Player One opens this week, mashing up references to tons of pop culture properties and franchises in a virtual world of avatars and nerdy nostalgia. Among the most prominently featured characters is the star of our next pick. While it didn’t really grab audiences at first, both the film and its director Brad Bird have become embraced and appreciated in the years since. Join us in watching The Iron Giant and send us your two cents!
https://cinapse.co/ready-player-one-captures-the-magic-f7c03224cc55
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Our Guests
Nick Spacek:
As the first installment of Fulci’s Gates of Hell trilogy, it seems like City of the Living Dead always gets short shrift. The Beyond is the pinnacle of the director’s work, The House By the Cemetery is batshit weirdo insanity, and even the tangential but unofficial installment Zombie Flesh Eaters gets more regard, it seems. City of the Living Dead is something which contains elements of all of these films: Zombie Flesh Eaters’ gore, The Beyond’s American town that doesn’t feel like any part of the country which I’ve ever been in, and the strange unexplained happenings of The House By the Cemetery.
A pleasant side effect of this shunting to the side — which even I practice — is that the film has the ability to surprise. Maybe it’s because there are a couple of other Italian zombie gore films from the same period with similar titles, such as Nightmare City and Hell of the Living Dead, that I confuse all three, and am never quite sure exactly which one has which plot points.
But still: a drill to the head, vomiting up intestines, and flaming zombies in an underworld crypt! All set to the sleaziest of all of Fabio Frizzi’s Fulci scores, too. (@nuthousepunks)
As I am quick to point out, the Fulci filmography is something of a blind spot for me. Thus it was with some excitement that I jumped into City of the Living Dead, the first in his celebrated Gates of Hell trilogy. But if this film is any indication, I don’t think I’m much of a Fulci fan. The effects (especially the gore) are impressive, but there just isn’t much of a movie around them. The characters have only the vaguest of motivations, and because of that the film lacked any sort of emotional anchor telling me who or what I was supposed to care about. Also, from a technical perspective, the movie is pervaded by a feeling of grunginess. It’s a step above your Cannibal Holocaust fare (elevated in part by its use of actual US locations), but only just — and I can’t help but imagine the original film reels coated with a thin layer of grime. Oh, and about those US locations — it’s definitely an improvement over the Euro-horror flicks that try to use European locations to stand in for US ones, but that effect is undermined by the frequent dubbing which gives many scenes what feels like a not-quite-intentional feeling of surrealism. Finally, the ending just doesn’t make much sense. I won’t go into spoilers (not that there’s much to spoil, given the minimal plot), but the editing of the final few shots transitioning into the end credits suggests to me that Fulci either didn’t have an ending, or very suddenly needed to change the ending without being able to film anything new. It’s very weird and unsatisfying in a way that sets it apart from the other “shock” endings it might be compared to.
I’m not letting this one film fully define my feelings about Fulci as a filmmaker, but it does leave me with some strong impressions. I think when it comes to Italian horror there are Fulci fans, and there are Argento fans. The two filmmakers certainly invite comparison, but there are stylistic differences more nuanced than I have time to discuss here. Suffice it to say, I think I’m much more of an Argento fan — and City of the Living Dead is no Suspiria. (@T_Lawson)
The Team
With respect to Mr. Lawson, one of the most astute and thoughtful horror fans you are going to find on these here interwebs, watching a Fulci film for its character development is a bit like reading the Bible for its prose. The star of the show is Fulci himself, the maestro cramming his frame with throbbing mood and grotesque beauty. Like the best of Italian horror, narrative and character logic are secondary to atmosphere, to the all-encompassing feeling that you have wandered into a (bad) dream and can’t find your way out of it. City of the Living Dead has its weaknesses, but in its best stretches it sustains both an overpowering menace and an anything-can-happen-at-any-time playfulness. Hell, the most iconic, memorable kill of the film is completely disconnected from the “gate of hell” storyline.
The best of the films of this era (The Beyond, Zombie, Suspiria) marry the surreal craziness to a straightfoward narrative throughline (go to place, get the thing; solve the mystery of the place where you are) and City of the Living Dead is a bit too sloppy on this front to really enter the echelon of true classics. I’m not sure why Fulci offered to have two separate teams of investigators, or why the ‘main’ couple spend the entire film just trying to reach the titular city. It doesn’t help that whereas those other films I’ve mentioned build to climatic crescendos of madness, City of the Living Dead sort of farts out at the end. The whole climax is a nightmarish joy, but then the film keeps going after that, closing out on a punchline that I can’t begin to make sense of (pretty sure they ran out of money).
Still, City of the Living Dead is a delight, the kind of wild gonzo ride that Fulci mastered. It may be a mess, and it is, but it also features multiple people having their brains squeezed out of their skulls. I can’t not love that. (@theTrueBrendanF)
Fulci is considered one of the greats, not only in Italian horror but in all of modern horror. The titles most often heralded are Zombi and The Beyond. Perhaps seeing both of these films later in life with a ton of hype hurt them for me, but neither does much for me.
A couple of years back, City of the Living Dead was on Fandor and I checked it out, despite expecting not to care too much based on my opinions of his most lauded titles. And… it blew me the fuck away!
This is such a fun and zany horror flick. I can’t promise you that I fully understand what’s going on all of the time, but it’s so great that I simply don’t care.
Since that time I’ve see a few more Fulci films and I can assert that this is my favorite one by a large margin. His catalog is only “okay” for me, but this one is great! (@ThePaintedMan)
City of the Dead isn’t as good as Fulci’s horror masterpieces The Beyond (which achieves a sense of surreal magnificence) or Zombi 2 (for zany fun), nor does it make much sense, but it absolutely delivers on a nightmare scenario and some outrageous body horror nastiness. While many zombie films try to root their happenings in scientific explanations, City of the Living Dead isn’t at all shy about acknowledging that it’s a completely supernatural, unholy, and nonsensical phenomenon.
This was actually the first Fulci film I ever watched, though I remembered very little about it — mostly the absence of anything resembling the “city” promised by the title. The setting is indeed nothing more than a sleepy village of which we see only a tavern, graveyard, and a handful of houses, but on the rewatch I now recognize the name Dunwich as a famous Lovecraft setting which merits acknowledgement. I was surprised at the explicitness of the gore which I somehow didn’t recall being nearly as nasty — maybe I saw a milder cut the first time? Anyway this is a pretty strange and worthwhile horror classic if you can stomach the violence. (@VforVashaw)
Watch it on Amazon:
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Next week’s pick:
https://cinapse.co/ready-player-one-captures-the-magic-f7c03224cc55