Movie Monday: City of the Living Dead

From the bowels of the earth they came...to collect the living!

City of the Living Dead is the first of director and madman Lucio Fulci's unofficial "Gates of Hell" trilogy, which later went on to include The Beyond and The House By The Cemetery. It features dead priests, zombies, ancient curses, plus one guy getting a drill to the head.

The plot could not be more basic: after a priest (Fabrizio Jovine) hangs himself, the gates of hell are opened. Zombies start to show up (seriously, Fulci shows us our first zombie at the 4:09 mark), and then all Hell literally starts breaking loose.

All of this fooferaw is sensed by psychic Mary Woodhouse (Fulci favorite Catriona MacColl), who dies of fright during a seance. She is buried, only to come back live while being buried. In a bravura sequence, absent of gore but full of menace, a newspaper reporter investigating the case hears a weird sound and digs her up:

The Reporter and and the Psychic (which would have made a great TV series) team-up, and discover that all of this is part of a prophecy spelled out in the Book of Enoch. The only way to stop the dead from taking over the Earth is to head to Dunwich, New England and close the gates of Hell before All Saint's Day, after which it will be too late.

Great premise, right? For some reason, Fulci then deals with several sub-plots featuring other characters, and our main characters take a very relaxed approach to their mission: at one point they even talk about getting a bite to eat and taking in some of the local scenery! Um, excuse, me, aren't you guys on a deadline to, you know, prevent the end of the world?

That aside, some of the fun's most fun (read: gory) moments come from the side characters, like when another member of the undead puts a Lugosi-esque whammy on a young girl, causing her to regurgitate tons of organs right out of her mouth. Her boyfriend watches in horror, only to be rewarded by having his brain ripped out. There's also a sub-plot about a town pervert who gets murdered by an angry father of a young victimized girl. I mean, a really angry father:

The film ends in a giant crypt where zombies come out of the woodwork and attack our heroes, and it is quite scary and nightmare-inducing, with its claustrophobic framing and feeling of utter dread.

City of the Living Dead ends on a happy note, as happy as anything ever is in a Fulci film. Then there's a final shot that is fairly baffling and unexplained, I've looked it up on the web and no one seems sure exactly what it means.


Overall, COTLD is a fun, gory time, if that's your sort of thing. I'm not expert on the man's work, but there are other films of his that I've enjoyed more, and didn't have such long drawn out dull parts. The gore is right there on the screen and imaginatively conceived, as it usually is when Fulci's involved. The way other directors liked to scare audiences, or take them to other, far off worlds, Lucio Fulci liked reducing the human body to so much pulp.