Set
piece after set piece of intense over the top gore makes Lucio Fulci's
Zombie a debased cult favorite. Who else besides Lucio Fulci could deliver
so many scenes of eye abuse and throat tearing, along with such insanity
as a zombie fighting a shark underwater?!
After
the huge success of Romero's Dawn of the Dead, Lucio Fulci slapped some
oatmeal on a couple of his buddies and cranked out his own zombie masterpiece.
The story concerns....AHHHH WHO CARES Zombie is filled with gushing
wounds and one of the great scenes in Italian horror history.
When
a zombie's arm bursts through a door to grab Olga Karlatos head slowly
towards a chunk of splintered wood, we await the cut and inevitable
offscreen scream. No way, not my man Lucio Fulci!! Instead we are treated
to an incredible close-up of the orb being penetrated in all its glory!
Of course Fulci can't stop there - she is later discovered being dined
upon by slobbering ghouls who slowly pluck at her organs. Yuck!
Another classic Zombie moment occurs when an extremely decrepit zombie slooooowly rises from his grave to sink his teeth in a dim witted
gals neck. He rips away the flesh to reveal one of the ghastliest wounds in cinema history - a gurgling, bubbling, disturbingly real gaping wound.
And then there is the zombie vs. shark underwater battle. What the fuck was Fulci thinking? My man is bumbling across
the floor of the ocean where he meets up with this huge shark. Before you know it they are going at it! Horrific crunching noises fill the soundtrack as the shark proceeds to tear the shit out of the zombie.
As weird as it may sound I think it's pretty cool that sharks could care less about zombies and treat them like any other silly human.
Special nod to
those involved in the advertising campaign for creating one of
the great posters in exploitation history. A severely decomposed
zombie with maggots in his eye sockets and a few decrepit teeth
poses under a slogan in bright blood red letters screaming, WE
ARE GOING TO EAT YOU!!
