Zombie (1979)

"Do I have something in my eye?"

Italian director Lucio Fulci's "sequel" to Dawn of the Dead is sometimes found under the title Zombi 2, but the hoards of zombie flicks -- ripoffs and otherwise -- in the 1980s would only confuse any numbering system.  We'll call it Zombie and leave it at that -- not the first word or the last word in ghoulish cinema, but a film of note to be sure.

The poster at right pretty much sums up what there is to know about Zombie: It's quite deliberately over-the-top in terms of undead gore -- as well as violence and nudity.  How about that tagline: "We are going to eat you!" No zombie actually says that, but you get the idea.  Taking the more gruesome realism of the modern zombie film and wedding it to the traditional mythology of the Caribbean island zombie, Fulci takes the best of both worlds and creates a uniquely deranged picture of a zombie epidemic.

Until recently, most if not all copies of Zombie on VHS and DVD were lousy, but I had the pleasant surprise of watching the 2004 transfer and remaster by Blue Underground.  This version really showed off the (sometimes) excellent cinematography and makeup, although not much could be done to help the soundtrack -- with its dubbed voices and synthesizer music -- a particular source or irritation for me.  If you're planning to watch, make sure you have a digital transfer from after 2004.  If you want a taste of the potentially poor screening experience, watch this trailer for the film.

Another note about the film is its violence and gore -- which, even today, are likely to make most viewers squirm.  I'll assume that if you're reading this far, you don't mind a little gore --but as I mentioned, Zombie goes out of its way to provoke.  It earned a special degree of scorn in 1979 from the British Parliament, in fact, helping to give rise to the term video nasty and the now defunct 1984 Video Recordings Act.  Shades of the PMRC anyone?  Here's my suggestion: Look at the lobby poster for the film (above) and judge for yourself.

The plot is simple:  Anne (Tisa Farrow) learns that her father's boat has drifted into New York Habor, its only passenger a shambling hulk who attempts to eat a member of the Harbor Patrol who's investigating the abandoned vessel.  Meeting resourceful reporter Peter (Ian McCullouch), Anne agreed to go to the Caribbean island of Matool to find out what might have happened.  Arriving in the tropics, they join up with boat-owners Brian (Pier Luigi Conti) and Susan (Auretta Gay) to find the island.  On Matool, Dr. Menard (Richard Johnson), who works at the the island's mission clinic, is trying to find a scientific explanation for the "curse" of zombies that is beginning to overrun the place.  His wife Paola (Olga Karlatos) wants badly to leave, but Dr. Menard must find the source of the "curse."  In the end, of course, only a few of the main characters survive, and as they sail away, news reaches the ship's radio that increasing numbers of undead are appearing in New York.

While the plot is simple, the narrative lurches along -- slow and clumsy in parts, then surprisingly precise and effective in others.  Fucli is at his best in the scenes were he's trying to horrify you; he's at his worst in the interim, filling it with clumsy expository dialogue and, perhaps more compellingly for some, a great deal of nudity.  I feel compelled to point out that both Auretta Gay and Olga Karlatos had a generous amount of nude or nearly nude screen time in a manner that was nothing but exploitative -- there was no subtlety or cleverness to it at all.  Getting a little bored?  Here's a few minutes of naked!

"Do you have something in your eye?"

Two now-famous scenes are cited from Zombie.  The first is a cleverly conceived but clumsily executed underwater fight between a shark and a zombie.  Fair enough, and probably mind-blowing for audiences at the time.  More gruesome is the lead-up to the death of Paola Menard, who, left at home one night, after a very thorough shower, attempts to fight off a zombie home invasion, only to have her eyeball impaled on a shard of wood.

"You insurance doesn't cover reanimation!"

Without a doubt, the most effective scenes in the film come in the third act, when the Matool zombies are out in full force and bashing down all the walls and eating everyone.  Clearly, Fulci planned out many of these sequences, which are well-paced, interestingly shot, and with truly gruesome makeup effects and mindless performances by the lead zombies.  Most effective is how the story calls for all dead to rise from the graves, including the bodies of those dead centuries before, whose degree of decomposition is truly remarkable.  The lush beauty of the jungle contrasted with the rot of the dead is extremely striking.  Peter and the gang put up a good fight as they attempt to get away with their asses unchewed -- although it takes them a little too long to figure out the effectiveness of the head shot.

Gross and exploitative, unevenly plotted, and suffering from dubbed dialogue, Zombie is nevertheless a fun movie.  It's simple premise is best executed when the director is trying to shock and horrify you.  If you don't ask much more from a movie than that, let the dead walk among you.

I Walked With A Zombie (1943)

Although its title and marketing are sensationalistic, the 1943 film I Walked With A Zombie, produced by Val Newton and directed by Jacques Tournier, is a compelling narrative that offers understated mystery, intriguing characters, and a thoughtful exploration of a tropical setting.

The plot, based on a magazine article by Inez Wallace with dramatic improvements taken from Jane Eyre.Canadian nurse Betsy Connell (Frances Dee) is assigned to care for the invalid wife of Paul Holland (Tom Conway), a wealthy sugar planter on the Caribbean island of St. Sebastian. When ingenue Nurse Betsy comments on the beauty of the islands, Holland has a cheerful response about destruction and decay brought about by the tropics. “Everything good dies here,” he grumbles.

True to the dynamics of Jane Eyre, Holland comes off as a prick, while his half brother Wesley Rand (James Ellison), manager of the sugar refinery, seems charming and attractive. On the island, the descendants of slaves are more respectfully depicted here than in other films of the period, with a few black roles developed into actual characters – most notably Alma (Teresa Harris) , a kind servant in the Holland household who looks after Betsy. The patient, Jessica Holland (Christine Gordon), isn't exactly the madwoman in the attic, but she has a building to herself, where Betsy, a doctor, and the servants attend to her. Mrs. Holland, the beautiful blond woman in white, suffered a tropical fever that badly damaged her nervous system. As Alma says, “She went mindless,” a sleepwalker who can never be awakened.

Betsy's day off with sweet Wesley complicates matters. After Wes has a few too many rums at the local cafe, he passes out – but not before a local calypso singer (played by the legendary Sir Lancelot) lets drop the truth in the lyrics to one of his songs: Before she became zombified, Jessica was about to leave Paul Holland and run off with Wesley. Betsy sees that Wes is a drunk, and learns that Jessica may have been an unfaithful wife. As the days pass, Betsy, who begins to see her boss Paul Holland as a victim and has had glimpses of his softer side, decides that she will try to help Jessica recover. When a new scientific treatment fails to restore Mrs. Holland, Betsy takes Alma's suggestion and slips away one night to take Jessica to the hounfort – he voodoo temple – to see if the houngan and mambo (priest and priestess) can cure her.

In the most effective sequence in the film, Besty leads Jessica through the cane fields at night, down a complicated network of paths, marked here and there by totems of dead animals and guarded at the crossroads by the towering, zombie sentry Carrefour (Darby Zones). Carrefour is easily the most frightening figure in the film – bony, expressionless, shambling, and dead-eyed in the best zombie tradition. At the hounfort, the houngan determines that Jessica is in fact one of the walking dead, and hence belongs with the those who practice voodoo, and not with the whites. Betsy, with the help of the mysterious Mrs. Rand (Edith Barrett) is able to take Jessica back to the Holland compound. But the voodoo-people are going to want that pretty white woman back, it seems.

There's much to enjoy in I Walked With A Zombie. First and foremost, Frances Dee is appealing and engaging as the principled Betsy Connell, and her performance is controlled and pitched perfectly for the screen. Some of the other actors are a bit too polished and stagy, even for the period. As mentioned before, there's also a range of roles for black actors – not all of them stereotyped or patronizing. The film is beautifully lit in the way that only black and white films, and director Tournier makes wonderful use of foregrounding and tracking shots. Made as it was in the heyday of the Motion Picture Code, the filmmakers were limited in what they could show and what events they could relate. All in all, I Walked With a Zombie is more suspenseful than terrifying, more mysterious than shocking, but it's nevertheless engaging as a take on the voodoo-zombie world in the days before eaters of flesh.