By chance, this week
I viewed two movies back-to-back: Nightmare City (1980) and David Cronenberg’s
Shivers (1975). These two films made for a fantastic and appropriate
double-bill because they both provide an interesting spin on the Zombie flick.
Umberto Lenzi is
credited with establishing the Italian Cannibal genre with 1972’s Deep River
Savages (aka The Man from Deep River) but, in-between two other Cannibal romps –
Eaten Alive! (1980) and the notorious Cannibal Ferox (1981) – he tried his hand
at the Zombie film. The plot goes like this: after an unidentified plane
exposed to radiation lands at the airport of an unnamed city, a horde of
zombies emerge and go on a rampage, attacking anything in their way.
This film is
different from a lot of the other Walking Dead movies from around the time. The
creatures in Nightmare City are not the same as George Romero’s undead or of
other Italian gore films like Zombie Flesh Eaters or Zombie Holocaust. Lenzi’s ‘Zombies’
are not the dead rising from the grave, but living people who have mutated after
being exposed to radiation which has enhanced their strength but also given
them an insatiable thirst for blood. These, as Lenzi puts it, ‘infected people’
are not living corpses, shuffling about, relying on impulse; no, they can run and
retain the mental capacity to use weapons and even communicate with each other.
They do, however, retain some of the hallmarks of Romero’s flesh eaters: they
can infect a victim with a bite and can only be stopped by a gunshot to the
head.
The movie plays on a
common theme in 1980s horror flicks: fear of the dangers of nuclear power. The
people on the plane were exposed to high levels of radiation and thus became mutated
and developed a taste for human flesh. The film also briefly explores themes
such as freedom of the press, the military industrial complex and human-kind’s
tendency to play God.
Nightmare
City is a fun film to watch and is (ahem) a feast for the gore-hounds out
there. It’s an orgy of over-the-top violence as the Zombies, sorry ‘infected
people’, rampage through the city. Necks are bitten, guts are chewed, eyes are
gouged and there’s even a scene of a woman’s breast being ripped off! It’s a
spectacularly awesome Italian exploitation flick; with loads of action and
thrills. People who love this sort of movie will have a blast.
