Incubo sulla città contaminata

On an airfield a plane's door opens and bloodthirsty zombies burst out and begin to overrun the city. TV news reporter Dean Miller must find his wife and escape the city's crazed killers.

Nightmare City (Incubo Sulla Cittá Contaminata)is a crude mix of the Crazies, Let Sleeping Corpse Lie to name a few. It also has a slight ambiance of Shivers and Rabid.

As you'd expect it's suffers from the failings of most Italian gore pictures of the time, bad dialogue etc. Nightmare City is certainly a product of its time. Nevertheless, while the makeup is terrible, the leads are more than effective. Umberto Lenzi's camera work, direction and starkness of the city setting are appealing. It's fast paced - packed with comic –like violence of stabbings, biting, hacking and shootings as the zombie maniacs cause blood soaked havoc in the city and surrounding areas.

The ending twist is quiet refreshing and although a cliché you don't see the device used these days. While not a zombie film in the truest sense, they move fast, can weld machetes and fire guns it's a competent splatter film that is far better constructed and executed than Bruno Mattei's Zombie Creeping Flesh (1980) made the same year.

Overall, it's one of the better trash horrors out there.

Despite the atrocious dubbing and the poor makeup effects, this is an extremely enjoyable zombie flick, with a unique "mood" that perhaps only an Italian production like this one could have captured. The mass attack sequences (which must have been great fun to shoot for the people involved, especially the "zombies") are all standouts. (***)

While not to be entirely dismissed as drivel, Lenzi's would-be zombiefest known as NIGHTMARE CITY nonetheless comes off as trying to be too different, too "off-the-beaten-zombie-path", and as result, ends up falling flat in an unsatisfying mix of missed opportunities.

Instead of going with "living dead"-style zombies (i.e. lumbering oafs) Lenzi - against producers wishes who wanted basically a Romero-style-clone - instead argued for and got his wish of the 'zombies' simply being victims of a nuclear radiation accident. All the 'creatures' become supermen of sorts - with heightened strength etc. - not to mention retaining their human faculties of running, driving, being able to fight with weapons etc.

As a result though - pretty much all suspense is thrown out the window, as the movie quickly bogs down into a violent and graphic game of hide and seek. The action is intense (and the blood and gore plentiful) but the 'creatures' or victims simply look like poorly-designed Halloween costume party attendees, who - after realizing they are late for their scheduled gathering - grabbed whatever they could out of their fridge and slapped it on their faces. The result is an unconvincing and inconsistent mess of effects that underwhelms the viewer. Some victims have little makeup, others are nearly indistinguishable under piles of green and red facial clay, (yet ALL sneer menacingly at the camera) and ALL are out for the blood of their next human victim (the creatures need blood to regenerate their cells to keep living. As a result, their victims in turn become creatures as well).

While I applaud Lenzi for at least attempting something different (in an interview on the disk, he explains how he wanted the film to be viewed as an environmental warning etc.) it comes down to the simple fact that the movie ends up failing - the zombies move too fast to be truly creepy and come off as poorly-dressed terrorists from a bad Chuck Norris movie - and basically plays out as a b-level gore bore, weaker on the gore, heavier on the B-bore.

While NIGHTMARE CITY may not be totally rank, let's say ya might wanna drink that milk today - know what I mean?? As in, it smells a little funny - not totally spoiled, but nowhere near fresh-enough to serve to guests. Feelin' lucky??

Recommended for genre completists only.

Sure it may seem ridiculous to modern audiences, but it is important to remember this film was made several years before the Geneva Convention outlawed the use of knives and hatchets by zombies, as well as such zombie subterfuge tactics as cutting phone lines and sneaking up on people and choking them with a bit of rope, and the implementation of spear-guns. This is actually all quite historically accurate.

disclaimer: obviously, if you don't have a pre-existing love for zero-budget Italian horror, this won't be your cup of tea.

But if you do! My, what a treat! I overlooked this film for years because I confused it with "City of the Living Dead." I otherwise exhausted the genre's offerings. When I realized I hadn't seen this one, I was very excited, but I didn't expect much. I was in for a pleasant surprise.

Ugh, I'm no good at paragraph format.

The Pros: 1. The title, "City of the Walking Dead," is appropriate. This really is a city-wide infestation. This is not a board-up-the-windows movie. The scale is epic. So often, low budget zombie films restrict themselves to a few characters on a farm or something to save money. This one doesn't. I can't imagine how he was able to use some of the locations. (Actually, I suppose the title isn't quite appropriate, because the antagonists are neither walking nor dead. They run, and they're sort of still alive.)

2. Breasts are present.

3. I usually don't like zombies that deviate from Romero's mold, but Lenzi takes a risk and scores. These creatures combine the hypnotic element of Romero's zombies with the overwhelming danger of running zombies. According to an interview on the DVD, Lenzi did not want to just do another Romero rip-off, and insisted on coming up with his own sort of creature. He did it well.

4. For the first 2/3 of the film, the characters are sufficiently believable for the viewer to care about them. For example, a reporter finds himself in the middle of the zombie outbreak, and desperately tries to get a hold of his wife, a doctor, who can't be reached because she's in surgery. This is a realistic, human element absent from most films in the genre.

Cons:

1. 2/3 of the way through, it kind of falls apart. The characters who haven't died reveal themselves to be one dimensional after all.

2. The special effects are really inconsistent. Sometimes killings are mimed bloodlessly. In other scenes, heads explode.

3. The soldiers are pathetic.

In short, highly recommended.