ZOMBIE (1979)

Lucio Fulci! I've been reading a lot about this guy, and I finally got around to watching some of his movies over the past couple of weeks. Probably his best-known is this one, though, so I thought I'd start with it right off the bat.

ZOMBIE was made to cash in on George Romero's DAWN OF THE DEAD. It was a HUGE success in Italy, where it was released as ZOMBI. So Fulci was enlisted to make a quick rip-off that would get released as if it was a sequel. For some reason, this kind of thing happened in Italy ALL THE TIME. They'd put out movies that were fake sequels to ALIEN, re-title movies that had nothing to do with other movies to make them seem like sequels, etc. I don't know how they could do it without getting their pants sued off, but there you are. Anyway, Fulci was known in Italy mainly for making mysteries and comedies, but I guess the producers thought he was stylish enough to pull off a straight-up horror movie. And they were ALL KINDS OF RIGHT.

Now, Romero's movies are mostly city-based, and it's never really clear what's brought the dead back to life (and in his movies, they're the unburied dead). So if George made movies that updated the zombie flick to modern urban times, Fulci's movie goes back to the original zombie myths. These zombies are brought back by a scientist in the tropics experimenting with voodoo rites, and they're not just dead folks who happened to be lying around the place. These are also the long-buried dead, like old Conquistadors and stuff.

It starts out (after a short opening on the island) with a ship washing into New York harbor. Cops come to check it out, and there's a zombie on board. One of the cops gets munched on and killed, and the other one shoots the zombie and he falls into the water. We find out that the boat belongs to the father of this woman in New York (so it's lucky that it sailed right into the city like it did), and she teams up with a local reporter and a seafaring couple (the wife scuba dives TOPLESS! YOWZA!) to find the tropical island and her father. Of course, they find the island right when everything's going to hell, and there's an ongoing slaughter for the rest of the movie. The zombie makeups are GREAT, and the gore flows like maple syrup on the pancakes that are our cast. There's an eye-poking scene that nearly made me throw up, and one of those twist ending things that all of these movies seem to have.

I loved this movie! It's kind of skimpy on the story, and it takes a little while to get really revved up, but you can't say no to a movie where a zombie fights a shark! It takes a crazy person to make a movie where that happens, and Fulci is a total madman.