Nightmare City (1980)

This film is difficult for me to review, because there are so many parts that work, and so many parts that don't work, and oftentimes those are intermingled with one another, so it's difficult to really explain it clearly.A big thing that did work was how the "zombies" were handled. I've heard the director wanted to go away from the George Romero staple of zombies lumbering around screaming "BRAINS!" at the top of their lungs, and he succeeds greatly. These monsters are well realized, and I would argue they elicit far more fear than "real" zombies. For one, they're intelligent: they attack power sources, cut off phone lines, hunt down their victims like a serial killer would, etc. For another, they move fast - and if I recall correctly, this was one of the first instances of fast moving zombies, long before "28 Days Later" or "World War Z" (though I'm sure some horror buff out there could refute me). Finally, they don't just bite into your scalp; rather, they use weapons. Zombies hack, stab, and bash in their victims, which again gives them more the feel of insane, unstoppable killers than just mindless undead. They even get downright sadistic with their victims, cutting off nipples and tearing out eyeballs, all while their victims still live.Another thing that worked is the panic and tension that erupts in the chaos of the zombie attacks is well realized. Sure, sometimes it turns into a case of extras running around aimlessly in the background (a bit like a Scooby Doo chase down a hallway), but other times it captures well the panic that an attack like this WOULD cause. When the zombies attack an area, I actually felt SCARED for the characters, and wondered how I would have handled such a situation.Then there are the parts of the film which DON'T work...One problem is the consistency of the special effects and acting. While the special effects are your standard fair for an Italian film of this era, sometimes there can be bloopers: eg., in one scene, a woman gets her head blown off, but literally a second later she has her head back, safe and sound. Also, some of the actors are better at doing the "Owe, I'm getting hit by bullets" motion than others. When people are shooting zombies, some of the actors remember that, even if you're impervious, there's a little thing called "kinetic physics," and a high caliber bullet is going to make your body move when it hits your flesh and bone; other actors, however, act like those little kids you knew when you played war, and who ran around like crazy even after you had "shot" them about 500 times. In scenes where people are clearly being shot at, and yet not even reacting to being shot at, it makes it more obvious that the soldiers are using blanks and not real bullets.Another major problem is the portrayal of the government forces. Now, I'm not going to sit here and pretend that all militaries are perfect, or that any one country has the best military in the world...but geez louise, I'm pretty sure even the worst army on this planet would have handled a zombie situation better than the government forces in this movie do. A lot of these soldiers just fire aimlessly at the zombies, then gawk stupidly when they draw near, permitting themselves to be killed. The most widespread gripe about the soldiers in this movie is that, even after they are told that these creatures can be killed by a shot to the head, literally NONE of them do that! Now again, I'm not saying every soldier in the world is a smart fellow, or the best shot, but I am pretty certain if you told a group of soldiers "Hey, you know those crazy monsters hell bent on killing you all, and your families? Yeah, you can knock them down flat by a bullet to the head"...well, I'm PRETTY SURE most of them would remember that, and try to carry it out to the best of their ability. This is, in fact, one of the problems with horror/sci-fi films in general: in order to make your monster/enemy more threatening/intelligent, you have to either work hard to try and make it believable, or you have to make your government/military forces incredibly stupid and incompetent. When a film does the latter, it doesn't do much except aggravate and annoy the audience.But by far the biggest thing that ticked me off about this movie was the ending. I understand the ending brings about mixed feelings, even from die-hard fans of this movie, but it absolutely ruined the movie for me. Basically, right at the part where the reporter's wife dies from falling from a helicopter...the reporter wakes up. OH! IT WAS ALL A DREAM! That's right - one of the endings they tell you in a fiction writing class NOT TO DO, this film does it. And to top it off, that day the reporter goes to an airport where...guess what...A RADIOACTIVE PLANE IS LANDING! Then the words "The nightmare becomes reality..." appear, and that's literally it. That's the end of the movie. I half expected a zombie M. Night Shyamalan to pop out of the plane and shout, "Ooooh, what a twist!" Some people have tried to explain that this is in reference to the movie's title (NIGHTMARE City, derp derp), but that just turns this whole thing into an hour- and-a-half pun, which makes it all even more dumb.Like I said, this movie has some cool takes on the zombie genre - I wanted to like this movie. Sadly, it has too many other aspects to it that either ruin the story, or just make it annoying to watch. If you love zombie movies, definitely give this one a viewing, though.

Of the countless Italian-produced zombie movies that came out in the late 1970's and 1980's, many of them can easily be labelled the worst of the lot. Nightmare City, a silly, gun-and-knife-wielding zombie attack movie directed by hack Umberto Lenzi, is certainly up (or down) there. With it's bland, beardy lead, nonsensical story, lazy plot devices and extremely dodgy make-up, Nightmare City is very bad indeed. But it just manages to squeeze a toe hair over the so-bad-it's-still-bad-but- bearable line and raises a few titters with it's ludicrous execution, and can also boast that it's not quite as bad as Zombie Creeping Flesh (1980).'American' news reporter Dean Miller (Hugo Stiglitz) travels to the airport to await the arrival of a scientist, whom he is to interview following a recent nuclear accident. When the plane arrives, it is surrounded by the military when no-one responds or opens the door. After a brief stand-off, the plane opens it's doors and dozens of bloodthirsty zombies pile out and attack the soldiers with guns, knives, bats and teeth. Eager to report the outbreak, Miller is halted by General Murchison (Mel Ferrer), who wants to hush the incident to save face. When his television station is attacked during the filming of some disco aerobics programme, Miller must find his wife and escape to the countryside.Looking between a mixture of an out-of-date potato and a used teabag, the zombies here are much more human than your traditional Romero zombies, using weapons, moving at pace, and even clearly taking some sadistic pleasure when slitting a throat and carving a woman's breast off. As the film plods on, at a breakneck pace that somehow still manages to be boring, the make-up department seem to lose interest in the 'new' zombies and simply smear their faces with some dirt. But if Lenzi deserves credit for something, it's in keeping the violence inventive. There's eye gouging, stabbings, exploding heads and blood- drinking, and the fact that the gore looks absolutely crap makes it all the more fun.The other familiar Lenzi traits are there, recognisable from his large collection of bizarre giallo such as Seven Blood-Stained Orchids (1972), Spasmo (1974), Eyeball (1975), and Cannibal Ferox (1981). This means lots of boobs. Every female attacked by the zombies seem to have their tops torn off. Didn't nurses wear bra's back then? We also the obligatory wrinkly has-been actor (Francisco Rabal - who made three films with Luis Bunuel) fondling a beautiful European model scene. It's quite despicable film-making if taking seriously, which you simply can't, you can only try and enjoy this for what it is, a film designed to make money by spilling some blood and showing some skin. But even that is hard, as when the film finishes with a 'twist', you feel like you've had 90 minutes of your life snatched away from you in some cruel joke. Pure dread, but it's earned an extra star through sheer audacity.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

First of all, the terrible special effects and horrible acting, as well as the silly story with it's silly (and done far too many times) ending, gives this a 1. I really wish IMDb would add a zero rating. Basically there's a warning of a radiation outbreak that the government claims has been contained. A plane that doesn't answer the tower lands and horribly scarred, running and using weapons, radioactive men clamber out of it, killing everyone in sight and occasionally drinking their blood. The make up on these invaders is simply horrible. It looks like the make up artist simply threw clay at their faces and left it there. Another big error, is this is not a zombie movie. These creatures use weapons, feel pain (watch when one gets a door slammed on his hand or the cries of pain when another gets set afire). They also show a propensity for committing vile deeds on nubile young women. So, is it worth seeing? Yes, for a laugh, but if it's on anyone's top ten list, they likely haven't seen any good zombie movies, like the original Night of the living Dead, or Shaun of the Dead, to name a few.

They don't come any dumber than this.An extremely goofy, hopelessly unscary film, filled with moronic dialog, cast with bad actors, and utterly short on logic in every aspect imaginable. In short: an Italian horror film. By the time the movie reached its final quarter, I found myself giggling at every other scene. The following paragraphs don't do enough justice to the film's stupidity, of which there is considerably more than I've covered here.I generally don't pay much attention to continuity errors, but this movie is so full of them they're impossible to miss. (Italians, and Europeans in general, don't care about the details as much as Americans; they tend to be sloppy.) 1) blue-skies/gray-skies transition, 2) a zombie isn't on fire, but just because the main character briefly glances to his side, the zombie suddenly IS on fire, 3) zombies ravage a female carcass just seconds after killing a male guard; so who is the female? Where there are a dozen continuity errors, there must be at least several dozen logic problems, right? Wrong. Hundreds. The army issues orders to have the zombies shot in the heads only, and yet the soldiers guarding that top military installation – the one that issued this order earlier – act as if they haven't got a clue about this new directive, and get slaughtered like a bunch of cretins. (Later on, the silly journalist (more on him later) shoots them only in their heads despite not even knowing about this weakness.) Not to mention the amazingly stupid decision by both the government and the military to keep things hush-hush from the public – the same public that is totally overrun by zombies, getting killed in their thousands on an hourly basis. That's like trying to keep it secret from the public that Sean Penn is a moron; I mean everyone knows already, frcrissakes.We've got a hospital surgeon moaning about having to deal with "6 emergency cases in two hours". Is that supposed to be a lot? Sounds normal to me, especially for a metropolitan area, and not at all the kind of numbers I'd expect when THOUSANDS OF ZOMBIES ARE KILLING THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE AT A VERY FAST RATE. Duh.The journalist has the kind of face only a mother would not find funny. I don't know whether it's his beard, his curly red hair, or his awful acting, I can't quite put my finger on it, but he looks bloody silly, especially when he looks concerned - which he always does; he's got one facial expression throughout. There's a wonderful scene in which he slaps his girlfriend/mistress/whatever very hard, after which they start kissing passionately. Wonderful stuff - though not quite as wonderful as the nonsense early on: the stone-faced journalist and his cameraman stand still, filming the first zombie attack as if they were witnessing a school-play, as if filming a zombie horde were a daily assignment for them, and making no effort whatsoever to get to safety, at least to film behind a truck or something. Do they actually believe that zombies give a toss about journalists' rights? Still, the zombies, as if knowing that attacking journalists in a war-zone would not have been in line with proper etiquette, only attacked the cops and the soldiers.So concerned are these unusually advanced zombies with etiquette and proper manners that several of them even wipe blood off their mouths just after a blood-sucking binge over a corpse. I'm half-surprised one of them didn't ask for a napkin. Then again, these aren't real zombies: they use semi-automatic rifles, they run, they think, and they have pizzas smeared all over their faces. One zombie even uses his fists, punching his victim, which I thought was rather stupid – though NOT too stupid for this movie, I might add.We also have Mel Ferrer here, the token Italian-flick American star, probably trying to pay off his debts by agreeing to star in just about anything. The hands-down most ridiculous characters are Ferrer's daughter and her pacifist husband. These two hate the military so passionately, it almost makes you feel like you'd been transported into some bizarre hippie version of "The Naked Gun" movies. My favourite line by the husband: "something strange is going on, usually these roads are filled with traffic". He says this while standing in the middle of a wheat-field in a remote part of the countryside.Now that I've covered the amazingly stupid bits, it's time for some ASTONISHINGLY stupid stuff. Check this out: the journalist's wife (an artist) finds her freshly-molded bust lying on the floor of her studio, pierced by a huge kitchen knife; her face turns to terror. "Where's this psychotic intruder?!" she must be thinking – right? Wrong. The movie leaves her for a while, and then comes back, a half-hour later, to find her doing what? Shrieking in terror? No. FIXING THE BUST, very calmly, as if nothing had happened. Wow. Most of the first half is concerned people phoning their friends and relatives to warn them. Predictably, a lot of these phone-calls fail – sometimes even because the people on the other line don't want to answer! And here I thought all along that Italians loved to talk, anytime anyplace anywhere. Well, apparently not during a zombie Armageddon (which they're of course not aware of yet).The movie even gets political, spewing some rather embarrassing/cringe-worthy B-movie wisdom, with its anti-military/anti-Capitalism message: "we'd be better off without nuclear energy and Coca Cola". What better illustration of left-wing imbecility than a dumb horror film trying to propagate its dumb ideas. Perfect. I thank them for that.And you'll never guess the amazingly original surprise end-twist. Hint: "The Wizard of Oz". Yup. And then some "Dead of Night" thrown in, just for good measure.Rifftrax really need to look into doing this amazingly bad movie. It's ideal fodder.