Back when I was first properly getting into horror films at the turn of the century I would pretty much buy anything that looked interesting. The zombie genre in particular was a highlight of horror for me, and so seeing Lucio Fulci's City of the Living Dead (a horror legend, not that I knew that at the time) on DVD I purchased it, fully expecting it to live up to the title. I did not like what I got, instead of an undead filled extravaganza I instead had a supernatural horror full of bizarreness. I hadn't seen it since, but hearing it was heading to limited edition 4K UHD, as well as heading to the ARROW streaming subscription service I just had to check it out, to give it a fair chance that my younger self didn't do. It turns out some of my memories of this were correct, but other parts I had thankfully misremembered.
A priests suicide in a graveyard in the American town of Dunwich results in the gates of Hell being opened. Having had a vision of this event occurring, a young New York based psychic woman, Mary (Catriona MacColl - The Beyond) teams up with a reporter named Peter (Christopher Bell), as she believes her vision has shown her that the only way to close the gateway to Hell lays with the priest, and that they must get the gate closed before the approaching All-Saints Day is reached. Their task becomes a lot harder once they arrive at the town, and discover that a variety of supernatural events are occurring, including the dead refusing to stay dead...
The whole film has a feeling of a nightmare to it and so elements of this only make sense in a kind of dream logic type of way. From what I remembered there were not actually any zombies in the movie, thankfully that turned out to be incorrect, with the whole third act turning the film into a zombie one. The make-up effects on the walking dead was fantastic, corpses look to be rotting, with live insects such as worms and maggots crawling over them. In a really novel way, the undead are supernatural in nature, having the pretty chilling ability to not only teleport, but having super strength and able to make people literally puke up their internal organs just by locking eye contact with their chosen victim! The story is a bit bare bones, and it is never really stated exactly how the heroes are going to be able to close the gateway to Hell. It all leads up to an infamously terrible ending that rumour says wasn't actually meant to the end, but that the footage was somehow lost or destroyed and so, not being able to afford a re-shoot, Fulci had to make do with what he had. It is a shame that the last scene in the film is also the worst, it leans into the dream logic, but it really makes no sense whatsoever. Following on from some really strong scenes it did put a bit of a dampener on an otherwise near flawless final thirty minutes.
It is an upward path to this living up to its title, but the horror that comes before is frequently pretty neat. The priest teleports around town murdering random people (always showing up still hanging from his noose), there is a tense scene in which a woman buried alive is constantly nearly pick-axed to death by the man trying to save her(!), and at one point the protagonists have to endure a rain of maggots. Disgustingly this scene was actually done using real maggots, with the poor cast having thousands and thousands of the insects blown over them by a giant wind machine. I hate insects being used as a means of generating horror, I don't find it scary, just gross and sickening. Maggots likely don't have feelings, but I still felt bad seeing them treated in such a bad way. Other moments are cool though, such as a mysterious fireball that erupts out the floor, mirrors smashing on their own, cracks in walls opening up, and walls bleeding. Then there is the ultra violent scene where the town idiot has his head forced into a spinning drill. Being the eighties the effects are of course all practical ones and look suitably great. Also great is the soundtrack, it sounds very much like Goblin's style, and was wonderfully catchy.
I had hoped that giving the film a second chance would improve my feeling towards it, and I was right. Rather than a poor quality DVD transfer, the film here looked crisp and clear, really adding a lot to all the nightmarish scenes. I still think the many scenes involving real insects was ill-judged and gross, but the other horror makes up for it, especially with the undead whose ability to teleport made them an intimidating foe to face, and of course the wonderful practical effects. City of the Living Dead comes to ARROW (here), and releases on limited edition 4K UHD on 25th March.
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