Though I wouldn’t consider myself a huge fan of cult horror director Lucio Fulci, I do admire several of the films he directed and, if not always the end results, the concepts he was trying to present to audiences.
Arguably his two best known horror works, Zombie (1979) and The Beyond (1981) were nightmarish tales set in what appeared to be a dream/nightmare landscape. Continuity between sequences wasn’t always strong, but there were images and concepts that kept you tuned in and creeped out.
Arriving between these two films was City of the Living Dead (1980). The prolific director actually made four films (one was a mini-series!) between both Zombie and The Beyond, but this is the one I had available to me and this is the one I saw.
What I found most fascinating about City of the Living Dead (I’ll refer to it as CLD from here on to save on my typing) is that this film is effectively a waypoint between Zombie and The Beyond. Elements of those two better known films can be found in this one, even if the end results aren’t, to my eyes, quite as good.
I’ll pause here for a moment to state the following: Watching a film like CLD today is not the same as watching it when it was originally released in 1980. I suspect the much younger me would have been blown away by the gore and nastiness to be found in this film, not unlike I was for Phantasm (1979), released at roughly the same time.
But here’s the thing: Certain films age with time, and what was once a potent piece of action/suspense/comedy/horror/etc. does not resonate as it once did when removed from the era it originated.
So it is, sadly, with CLD.
This film, like The Beyond, finds the director very much working in a H. P. Lovecraftian horror setting. Unlike The Beyond, this worked in spurts, though especially during the film’s opening sequences and its later half.
The story goes like this: A priest in the town of Dunwich walks the town’s graveyard one dark and foggy night. He ultimately ties a rope to a tree and his intention is made clear: He’s going to hang himself. Meanwhile, in New York, a seance involving Mary Woodhouse (Catriona MacColl) psychically links into what the priest is about to do. Mary watches in increased horror as the priest puts his neck around the rope and then commits suicide. The suicide causes Mary to have a seizure. She falls to the floor and, when the others in the seance check her out, they think she’s dead.
Mary’s body is taken away and ultimately is about to be interred. Peter Bell (Christopher George) a reporter interested in this case, stops by the graveyard where Mary is being laid to rest. But the psychic isn’t dead and her screams bring Peter to her rescue.
Once out of the grave, Mary tells Peter that the suicide of the priest has opened the gates of hell and, by All Saints Day just a few nights from then, the dead will walk the Earth and wreak havoc. Peter is skeptical but agrees to take Mary from New York and in search of the mysterious town of Dunwich, a place not even maps list (besides, we’re in the days before smartphones and GPS). If Mary is right, their goal is nothing less than to stop armageddon.
For a horror concept, it’s not too bad, right?
Thing is, the film’s low, low budget and pace start to work against the overall product. Given that we’re dealing with the very end of the world, its weird how few people we see before the screen. And when our heroes arrive to Dunwich it would appear that town is populated by a total of something like eight people (and by the end of the movie, half of them are zombies).
Even with such a small cast, we nonetheless have sequences involving ancillary characters that never quite connect with the quest of our two leads, including the fate of a strange Dunwich citizen by the name of Bob (Giovanni Lombardo Radice).
What I ultimately came away with in watching CLD was, as I said before, that this is a film the passage of time hasn’t been kind to. Even now I could appreciate what the director and actors were attempting to do but I never felt the horror and dread I suspect my younger self watching the film at the time of its release might have felt.
On the other hand, I really liked the movie’s plot and concept. In an era when too many “big” films of the past are being remade -often very badly- CLD, to my eyes, is a prime candidate for a proper modernist reworking. It’s story is simple yet intriguing and with the right talent could easily be a modern horror classic.
City of the Liviing Dead is certainly worth a look if you’re a fan of Lucio Fulci. Others may want to check out Zombie or The Beyond first.