zombie flesh eaters
Directed by: Lucio Fulci
Starring: Ian McCulloch, Tisa Farrow, Richard Johnson
When her father's yacht sails into New York with no crew, Anne Bowles teams up with newspaper reporter Peter West to discover what happened. They hitch a ride with sailing couple Brian and Susan, heading for an island which is in the grips of a voodoo curse!
Like Argento and Bava, Lucio Fulci is a stalwart of Italian genre cinema, having dipped his toe into westerns, organised crime thrillers and Giallo. However it is his horror films for which he is most renowned, and Zombie Flesh Eaters is probably the most notorious: especially in the UK, where it fell foul of the Video Nasty era, suffering numerous cuts on its VHS release.
The film does live up to its reputation - and its UK title. However, this is not just a lurid gorefest. Fulci shows great skill at building suspense and atmosphere throughout the film. It starts with a great bit of juxtaposition - the humid, sweaty medical hospice on the island, switching to New York harbour as we watch the yacht sail past the statue of liberty. When the harbour police board the vessel, they find it awash with rotting food and trash, and an undead crewmate who manages to chomp on one of the officers before being killed.
After this incident, it actually takes a long time for things to get grizzly again. Peter and Anne fly to the Caribbean and hitch a ride with a couple of American tourists, Brian and Susan, in their boat. Susan goes for a swim and encounters a big shark, but although she manages to evade it she runs into a zombie walking along the ocean floor which ends up attacking the shark!
Meanwhile, on the island, Mrs Menard, wife of the good doctor trying to keep a lid on things, goes to take a shower. The camera isn't the only thing ogling her, as we see one of the undead outside the window. This leads to one of the two most infamous scenes (and one to fall foul of the BBFC), as Mrs Menard tries in vain to keep a zombie from getting to her, only for it to punch through the door and grab her hair, slowly pulling her head closer and closer to a large splinter of wood. Fulci does seem to have a fascination with eyes, and the lighting here accentuates it.
The second, and most infamous scene occurs a little later when our travelling companions reach the Menard residence and discover the "zombie banquet", as several zombies are scooping up the poor woman's entrails and eating them. Interestingly, Ian McCulloch had never watched the full scene before as the zombie chomping was filmed separately to their reaction shots. It wasn't until he agreed to record an audio commentary that he saw it!
After all the build-up, the final third of the film is a masterpiece of zombie-work. There are many classic moments, the best for me is when the gang stumble into an ancient Spanish graveyard, and discover that it's not just the recently deceased coming back from the dead! The zombies we see here are different again to those we witness in the "Gates of Hell" trilogy (City of the Living Dead/House by the Cemetery/The Beyond) - these are very slow moving corpses, only springing to life as it were when in the close vicinity of live human flesh.
THE VERDICT:
Arrow’s new 4K remastering looks strikingly lurid, especially with the gore but losing no detail. Its matched by the audio, featuring Fabio Frizzi and Giorgio Cascio's downbeat score. Zombie Flesh Eaters remains a prime example of the genre and of its time and is one of the few films to deserve a slot on the Video Nasties list!
8 out of 10 - Recommended!
MIKEOUTWEST