L'avion de l'apocalypse

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.

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.

The reporter Dean Miller (Hugo Stiglitz) is assigned with his cameraman to interview a scientist that is arriving in the local airport. While waiting for the arrival, an unidentified Hercules makes an emergency landing and is surrounded by a military force. When the doors open, a legion of blood thirsty creatures commanded by the scientist attack the soldiers, killing them with hatchets and drinking their blood. Dean tries to warn the population about the happening but is censored by General Murchison (Mel Ferrer). Later the military leaders discover that the creatures have not come from the outer space, but are human beings contaminated by radiation and needing to drink blood to stay undead. Dean unsuccessfully calls his wife Dr. Anna Miller (Laura Trotter) and heads to the hospital where she works, trying to escape from the city crowded of the increasing walking dead creatures.

The trash "Incubo Sulla Città Contaminate" a.k.a. "City of the Walking Dead" or "Nightmare City" is a weird horror movie that could be better and better with a best selection of the lead couple. The uptight Hugo Stiglitz is not tailored for the role of hero and is an awful selection from the producers, and Laura Trotter is too stupid for a doctor, recalling those women from the 40's or 50's that used to scream in every dangerous situation and run to the arms of the hero. The killers are not zombies like in "The Last Man on Earth" or the way George A. Romero has become famous in "Night of the Living Dead", with slow and gruesome movements, but actually a kind of unbeatable "warrior vampire" with appearance of zombie. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): Not Available

You can't honestly give any excuses for this movie; it's just plain cheesy. You could say that it's just a horror movie and it shouldn't be taken seriously, but that's a lame excuse. This movie is just not good at all. From the terrible makeup fx to the hokey dialogue, there's not much of redeeming value in this movie.

The plot itself is pretty humdrum. Hordes of the dead terrorize a big city while spreading their walking-dead disease to others.

The only interesting part of this movie is how it tries to follow several groups of people and their encounters with the zombies. Among the people whose stories are followed are a military major and his wife, General and his daughter and son-in-law and last but not least, a reporter and his wife. The best sub-story is that of the reporter who witnesses the start of the mayhem firsthand and attempts to break the story of the walking dead, while people turn a deaf ear to his reports. The reporter tries to stay alive and rescue his wife from the chaos. Hugo Stiglitz is great as the reporter kicks some major butt, especially near the movie's end. The rest of the substories that the movie oscillates between are boring and pedestrian though.

The "zombies" in this movie are decidedly some of the more active ones in movie history. They run, jump and even use weapons. Some of them actually look like living humans, except they have some ghastly scare. "City of the Walking Dead" was a badly chosen title; "City of the Running, Jumping and Scampering Dead" sounds more apt. You could argue that they are far more lifelike that the people in this movie, especially the military guys, who apparently are too damn stupid to follow the advice of their superiors and shoot the zombies in the head.

The movie isn't too scary at all. There are some genuinely creepy moments, such as when the reporter's wife fumbles around in the dark in a hospital and encounters one of the walking dead. That was one of the only chilling parts of the movie. The scene where the major finds his wife is also pretty creepy, although it was predictable. For the most part, the gore was nothing that hasn't been done better in other movies, although the lively zombies did make them considerably more vicious.

The makeup was really terrible. Most of the zombies look like normal humans, except for a little blood here and there and a crazed look in their eyes. It would have been best if the filmmakers went with that look for the whole movie, as the makeup jobs usually consisted of a few cheesy cast-like extensions and mud-like molds being added to creature faces.

City of the Walking Dead is a decent movie to watch if you aren't took picky with your horror movies. It has some decent action and some novel concepts that were extremely flawed in implementation. Otherwise, stay far away from this one. Furthermore, a word of warning: you will groan at the movie?s ending.

Better known for his jungle cannibal opus "Make Them Die Slowly", Lenzi has here a much more accomplished and entertaining gut muncher.

On an unassuming day, a nuclear scientist is supposed to arrive with important research. His plane breaks flight patterns and lands unannounced. When authorities go to investigate, they find all the people on board are infected with strange kind of radiation poisoning and have turned into violent, cannibalistic zombies. The zombies then begin attacking any and every one in sight; hacking, shooting and eating all they can. Escaping the city is the only hope.

Coming out in 1980, this was pretty late in the cannibal/zombie movie cycle. Fortunately, Lenzi changes up the formula just enough to keep things from being stale. The zombies are are fast, intelligent and have no problem utilizing tools and weapons. Lenzi also ad hears to just enough genre clichés to keep fans happy. There is blood and gore aplenty, random flashes of nudity and some wonderfully cheesy dialogue.

On the technical side, the film is right on par with other films in the same category. Acting ranges from to OK to plain bad, lighting and sound get the job done but never excel, and the writing works well enough to move from point A to point B. One nice element is the pacing, which is refreshingly brisk and free of clutter.

Over all, this is one of the better made and more amusing of the cannibal/zombie films from days gone by. Genre fans should check it out.

7/10