Alrighty, at long last and with the excuse of halloween giving me the push I needed, I am finally getting round to my rundown/review of one of my unironic favourite zombie movies of all time.
Zombi 2.
Premise: A woman searches for her missing father on a Caribbean island where a voodoo-cursed epidemic is raising the dead, leading to a brutal battle with flesh-eating zombies
This movie legit holds a special place in my heart. It is straight up the first old school splatter movie I ever watched back way when in the mid 00s after I saw a bunch of clips on IMDB and fuckin geocites and such, and may well be the zombie movie I have watched more than any other. It ain't a perfect movie by any stretch of the imagination, there are no deep character or story elements worth noting and the acting can be kinda bad at times, and if you are not one with a decent tolerance for reasonable stretches of late 70s dubbed exposition and establishing scenes, but if you are able to ride that particular wave then this shit is as good as classic zombie horror gets in my modest opinion.
Execution: We cold open with an unseen figure pointing a gun at the camera as a shroud covered corpse rises from the bed in front of it. One bullet later and we get a closeup of the bullet hole in the shroud and get our first taste of the quality of gore we will be seeing. The figure tells someone else that "the boat can leave now, tell the crew" and we cut to the opening credits. Gonna randomly interject with some autistic tier trivia here, as the score for this movie is unironically one of my favourite horror scores ever and this track is the absolute fucking best of the batch and some of Fabio Frizzi's best work, but weirdly enough this specific track is a remix of music he made for the infamous italian psychedelic colourisation of the first Godzilla movie "
Cozzilla" which was itself a vague instrumental cover of the prayer song from the OG Gojira which is one hell of a weird ancestry for this particular song but I thought it worth noting.
As the credits end the aforementioned boat is drifting in New York City harbour, with nice shots of the twin tower'd skyline for nostalgia sake. It almost gets crashed in to by the Staten Island ferry in what I suspect to be an unlicensed bit of filming. It quickly becomes apparent the boat is vacant as a harbour patrol copter and eventually a boat shows up and eyeball it. Deciding its abandoned two harbour patrol cops head on board and find it, also its probably worth noting that the dubbing here aint great but whatever. On the boat they find the cabin looking like your average NEET pod with rotting food and trash everywhere covered in flies and maggots and one conspicuously closed door. One cop heads further in to investigate and after rooting through a bundle of rags finds a severed and rotting hand covered in bite marks....and right on cue one of the freakiest and fattest fucking zombies in cinema history smashes through the closed door in a kinda weird edit that stiches him slamming the door open and smashing through it together.
In a quick but perfectly claustrophobic set of shots this fat fuck promptly tackles the cop to the ground, who in trying to fight it off is only able to rip off a patch of rotting flesh from its arm...jesus fucking christ this shit is nasty...and gets his throat quickly ripped out in another closeup before fat fuck zombie goes after the second cop on deck. The cop fairly understandably freaks out at the sight of him and shoots him in the chest a bunch of times, causing fat fuck to drop into the water and ominous music starts to play as the camera moves back up to the New York skyline. Cut to some newspaper office where some editor guy played by the director Lucio Fulci assigns the story to a random British journalist by the name of Peter. IIRC this scene was filmed around Rupert Murdoch's office at the time, and a bunch of crew accidentally walked in on him having a meeting which caused him to chimp out at the production. Anyway peter is reasonably acted and dubbed enough for me to not call attention to his bald spot.
On the boat a nervous looking chick who reminds me of the lady from
Airplane! is being interviewed by the cops and she is apparently the daughter of the boat's owner. Apparently he left to the Antilles a few months back and this whole interview scene is shot kinda weirdly with the camera swinging round every time someone talks. Anyway this is our second lead Anne and she is played by Mia Farrow's sister and is kinda shaky on the acting but generally tolerable enough. Cut to a nearby hospital and the dead cop is getting autopsied by a weirdly aggressive doctor and his assistant who he palpably despises for no clear reason, who is so busy sneering at him he fails to notice the corpse start to move right as we cut back to the boat at night where Anne is snooping around only for Peter to jump out of her and sounding like a rapist as he orders her not to scream. A minute of bickering later and they decide to team up to find out what the hell is going on and find a letter from her dad who says he caught some weird disease on an island he visited and is probably dead by now. A couple airports later we hear upbeat steel drum music that signifies they are in the Caribbean.
Heading to the nearest dock they find a surly blonde bearded guy and his reasonably hot wife and ask if they can hitch a ride to the island in question, which Bearded guy says is apparently cursed but decides to take them along anyway. Cut to said cursed island where Doctor Menard played by our second classically trained British actor of the feature is trying to call someone on the radio until his even hotter if poorly dubbed wife comes to nag him. Being the bitch she is, she is inexplicably wanting to leave the Island full of the scariest fucking zombies ever put to film and repeatedly insinuates the Doctor is up to something nefarious as she has an honestly understandable seething and drunken breakdown about how much she hates him for bringing her there while he acts condescending and evasive until he eventually slaps the shit out of her. Sorry for the spoiler but this plot point won't actually go anywhere, and is probably a holdover of the original script/concept which basically
The Island of Doctor Moreau with zombies according to the production team which meant this guy was originally gonna be creating the zombies or somesuch, and its this original script that I suspect was recycled for
Doctor Butcher along with the sets and half the actors of
Zombi 2 given how that movie almost exactly aligns to this premise aside from the crowbarred Cannibal Holocaust ripoff shit. Anyway the Doctor storms off as we get a close up Hotter Wife's pretty green eyes which I really hope remain intact and unskewered for the rest of the movie. Also for some reason this island in the middle of the Carribean has a stereotypical mexican gardener who is assigned to guard the house.
In his grimy ass lab the doctor sciences around with microscopes while the main characters slowly cruise their way to the island. Bearded guy's Hot Wife decides she wants to go scuba diving so they stop the boat while she gets her tits out as Peter unsubtly leers at her, and she jumps in to take some photos as the rest of them see the Island in the distance. Unda da sea and a tiger shark shows up to menace Hot Wife and...actually comes pretty dang close to her given its a real shark they had for this scene. Understandably freaked out she paddles to some coral to hide only for a fucking zombie to jump out at her and...kinda looks like he is fucking her but she is able to escape him as the shark and the zombie start wrestling and eating each other in one of the most famous scenes of the movie. IIRC the zombie is played by the shark's trainer which is probably why we got so many good shots of him trying to bite the fuck out of it but uh...yeah. They had a guy in pretty damn good zombie makeup fight a real tiger shark. This movie is fucking awesome. Back on the boat Hot Wife babbles about the zombie and we cut to the Island church which has real fuckin Haiti 2025 vibes inside and out.
The church has been turned into a hospital and is full of dead niggers, dying niggers, and one single extremely servile living nigger who arrives to speak in full unga bunga native talk to Doctor Menard about how all the villagers have fled because of some unspecified witch doctor and gone to "make voodoo" which Menard sneers at as we get footage of something watching them from the undergrowth, said something eventually making its way to Menard's house at nightfall. Paco the Mexican gets spooked by something offscreen and flees, and we cut to Hotter Wife naked in the shower with strategically placed mirrors so we can see her ass from every angle. Incidentally this clip was like the first time I saw nudity on the internet back in like 2002-2003 so uh...yeah lil historical trivia there. The lurking zombie seems to have the same idea as it peeks through the window and starts pawing at the glass, and inside Hotter Wife takes her evening booze and pills just in time to hear it come through the front door. We get a tense few moments as she goes to investigate, hears it hissing as she sees it offscreen before she runs back to the bathroom and is only barely able to lock the door before it forces its way in.
Unfortunately the door is made of fuckin cardboard so it starts breaking its way in, and as she tries to barricade it the zombies's hand smashes through and grabs her hair, forcing her face slooooooowly towards a bigass shard of shattered wood, and we get another of the more infamous moments of the movie as her eyeball is impaled and split open on the splinter which then snaps off in her eye before she is dragged out to be eaten. Its as nasty as it sounds and still freaky to watch for like the fiftieth time, and is arguably the most famous gore scene in horror movie history and probably reason no.1 why the movie was banned/censored so fucking much.
As we surprisingly hit the halfway point given how little time feels like it passed the main characters reach the island, and Doctor Menard who is passed out drunk on the beach.....which feels like literally the stupidest fucking thing to do given whats going on in the island...is informed by kinda mid nurse that another patient has turned. Apparently the boat was damaged by the shark so the survivors are stuck on the island, and we cut back to Menard shooting the still shrouded zombie that's buried out back in a mass grave while back in the hospital a really fuckin sick looking she-nigger babbles about seeing zombies, and in a deserted village street thats weirdly full of crabs and livestock we see a figure in the distance slowly shambling towards the camera. Gotta say its refreshing for a zombie movie to act with restraint with its zombies and not just throw them at the camera every second. Most the time thus far they have only been glimpsed or partially shown aside from Fat Fuck from the start and Shark Zombie.
Oh and apparently Menard has picked up the main characters in his car and is busy telling Anne how her father died, complete with an extended flashback of the scene from the beginning. He then drives through the same village we saw the zombie lurking in as he further exposits about the zombies while Bearded guy randomly gives a mini lecture about the history of Voodoo. Stopping back at the church/hospital he sends them off with his car to check up on Hotter Wife as he goes to attend to yet another dying nigger. As they head off said dying nigger...ok white guy but whatever...informs Menard he was bitten in the village and Menard understandably freaks out and starts barricading as we get a close up of the zombie from earlier and its just as freaky as the first one. Worth mentioning that these zombies are IMO the absolute scariest fucking zombies ever put to film. Aside from the straight up nasty makeup they get which actually makes them look like walking corpses and not extras in face paint with occasional cheap generic wound effects, they act like walking fucking corpses with zero overacting or silly faces or groaning or gurgling or any kind of emotion. It helps that they had the zombies' actors all keep their eyes closed whenever they are on screen and painting their eye sockets and eyelids dark so they straight up look like they have no eyes, which is always one of the weakest part of even good zombie makeup and is probably the result of Fulci's eye fixation giving him a really fuckin good idea.
Anyway the main characters drive through some scenic jungle and reach Menard's house. Knocking on the door they get no answer so they head inside and see one of the few things to have ever actually given me nightmares when I first watched as a kid. Hotter wife has been entirely disembowelled and her corpse is being slowly eaten by four of the previously discussed 'scariest fucking zombies ever put to film' as the freaky ass music swells. Oh yeah and the sound design is fucking horrifying to as we hear each squelch of flesh being torn and eaten. Turning round to GTFO with understandable urgency they find two zombies followed them in, but thankfully the Doctor keeps random fucking clubs and spears on his wall so Peter and Bearded guy are able to dispatch them before they cheese it to the car and leave. Unfortunately a zombie in the road leads to them crashing and Peter getting the mandatory leg injury that slows everyone down, which is kinda necessary as these zombies while terrifying are slow as fuck even by slow zombie standards.
As they head off into the jungle the drum soundtrack picks up again and...huh the characters can hear it. Apparently the villagers "making voodoo" as referenced earlier just means hanging around out of site playing the bongo which never really gets mentioned again and is probably another relic of an earlier script. Speaking of voodoo Menard accosts his Nigger assistant and asks if he think's this shit is voodoo, leading to an honestly mediocre rip off of
Dawn of the Dead's "When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth" line as Menard seethes at the idea. Back in the jungle the main characters take a break while Bearded Guy and Hot Wife come accross a rusty spanish Conquistador helmet which Bearded Guy thinks is neat while Hot Wife realises they are in the middle of an old conquistador graveyard which given current circumstances is cause for extreme alarm. Peter and Anne are having a lie down and uh...apparently they are an item now. Unfortunately someone underneath them wants to make it a threesome as a rotting hand reaches out the earth and grabs her by the hair just as they start kissing, and another grabs Peter's wounded leg.
Hearing the commotion Bearded Guy runs over, leaving his wife in the old graveyard who then sees what is the single most horrifying looking fucking zombie ever created slowly rise from the ground. Seriously there is a reason they put this rotting nigga on all the posters.
As the freaky fucking horror music picks up again Hot Wife just fucking stands there looking like she is about to burst into tears or throw up or both which is stupid....but honestly if I were in her position I would be too scared to fucking think either....and inevitably results in her getting her throat torn out in an especially grim shot where aside from a torrent of blood you see her skin stretch and snap as Zombie Prime tears it away. Having saved the other two Bearded Guy tries shooting it with no effect, so Peter picks up its headstone and smashes its fucking skull open so hard it explodes. Not sure how a 400 year old corpse can have that much blood but uh...yeah I aint questioning it. Bearded Guy is allegedly heartbroken by his Hot Wife's death but they all hightail it out of there....right as the rest of the fucking graveyard starts to rise up one by one as the main theme plays. None are quite as good as Zombie Prime there but they are still covered in still wriggling worms and all look absolutely fucking wonderful. Also this is probably where
Zombi 3: Burial Grounds got its idea to have the zombies all wear corpse shrouds.
With these old ass conquistador zombies following them and the village now swarming with fresher zombies, the main character eventually make it to the Church/Hospital after nightfall. We then get close ups of some of the zombies and they are all uniquely fucking terrifying as they all slowly make their way to the church. As Menard fixes Peter's leg he exposits a little about how he has no fucking idea why the zombies be out zombie'ing beyond it starting a couple months back and...yeah thats about all of the explanation we get. As the zombies start breaking in they all start preparing molotovs, and Menard goes to get more guns only for the white guy who was bitten earlier to jump him and tear half his face off which I guess kills him even though it probably shouldn't. Bearded Guy shows up and kills the zombie, while another of the corpses inside the hospital turns and tears a chunk out of Nigger assistant's arm in a downright painful looking shot before menacing Mid Nurse. Bearded Guy saves her too but then she gets jumped by the zombified Nigger Assistant when he leaves the room.
Back in the main part of the hospital the zombies all start breaking in as Peter and Bearded guy start shooting and throwing molotovs. We get a whole bunch of head shots and burning zombies and fuck this scene slaps even if it doesnt really make any sense given they just cheese it out the back once they are out of ammo. However once out there Bearded Guy meets his zombified yet still kinda Hot Wife who bites him before Peter shoots her and as the church/hospital explodes they make it back to the boat, which is apparently working just ok enough to make it to a nearby port. Bearded guy dies so they lock him in the hold and decide he can be used to prove what they found on the Island, but as they turn on the radio they hear a broadcast from New York about the ongoing zombie apocalypse thanks to Fat Fuck and the cop he bit from the beginning, and we cut to Brooklyn bridge which is swarmed by zombies and fairly unconcerned road traffic as the movie ends.
Analysis: Fuck this movie is good.
- Cinematography: Unironically amazing with well executed close ups and dynamic camera work making scary shit scarier and freaky shit freakier. Sometimes gets a little too cut heavy but it never really impacts the movie.
- Soundtrack: As previously mentioned one of my absolute favourite horror soundtracks ever.
- Effects: I have already waxed lyrical about the zombie effects and acting and such, but the general gore effects are equally good and the set design is fucking on point too.
- Story: Eh it's ok. Nothing ground breaking or intriguing or such, and its kinda obvious that they left in a bunch of setup and leads to scenes and story ideas that were cut like Menard creating/unleashing the zombies or the voodoo witch doctor shit
- Characters: Passable at best....passable at worst....honestly just kinda passable. Bearded Guy was wooden, Anne was a little annoying, Hot Wife had no discernable personality but Peter and Hotter wife were ok. Menard was the best character due to the fact the actor was acting the hell out of this probably mangled part.
- Innovation: In terms of new shit to the genre I submit Shark vs Zombie. On a broader meta sense however its gore and kill effects have been aped by lesser movies for decades now so that is undoubtedly one of it's prime legacies.
- Scares/Kills: Setting aside the zombies themselves being scary as hell IMO, the death and devouring of Hotter Wife were both legit freaky and Zombie Prime rising from the grave and killing Hot Wife was also something I remember terrifying me as a tiny sperglet.
Conclusion: Holds up just as well as the other fiddy times I watched. One of the absolute best zombie movies ever despite its lackluster characters and generic story. This shit is the reason why a thousand ever greasier wops churned out a dozen rip off movies or renamed their movies to get a piece of this movie's well deserved prestige.
FINAL CONCLUSION ON THE ZOMBI SERIES
- Zombi 2 - I think I have summed it up above. Frankly it feels wrong to even include it in this list.
- Zombi 3: Nightmare City - Concept and unique zombie take prop this one up along side the pacing and general quality/lack of serious fucking trash. Shame the zombies have some of the worst makeup on this list.
- Zombi 3: Zombi Holocaust/Doctor Butcher - Kinda surprised to see it this high but its inoffensive and beige enough to not have any serious points against it, something helped by its probable use of an early Zombi 2 script, and the eponymous Doctor Butcher's crazy ass lines were enjoyably cheesy.
- Zombi 5: Hell of the Living Dead - real struggle whether to put this or Zombi 3: Burial ground here given the stock footage and stolen Goblin music, but it had enough charm and decently executed gore and a thankful lack of perverted midgets pretending to be incestuous little boys so it gets this spot.
- Zombi 3: Burial Ground - despite the perverted midget pretending to be an incestuous little boy this movie's set and gore allowed it to edge out the competition
- Zombi 6: Monster Hunter/Absurd - kinda cheating as its a slasher movie, and a shit one at that, but it honestly was more enjoyable and had a better horror vibe than those lower on the list despite it not being scary.
- Zombi 3: The actual Zombi 3 - Hell of the Living Dead but greener and worse in just about every aspect
- Zombi 5: Killing Birds - another "Not even a zombie movie" entry as its basically just a shit ghost movie with zombies thrown in
- Zombi 6: Dawn of the Mummy - Ignoring how Mummies are not zombies, the novelty of the setting and the fact its general shit quality is never obnoxious keeps it from the bottom
- Zombi 4: After Death - Effectively a straight downgrade on all fronts from Zombi 3: The Actual Zombi 3 which itself is a downgrade on all fronts from Zombi 5: Hell of the Living Dead which is frankly kinda shit so uh...yeah. Just a really bad movie that becomes actively annoying to sit through.
- Zombi 4: Panic - Yet another "not even a zombie movie" this reminds me in hindsight of some shit like Monster A Go Go and is so fucking tedious to sit through. Half the scenes seem to be stitched together between two or three movies they threw into a blender and there is straight up no aspect of this shit that is not a fucking drag.
- Zombi 6: Oasis of the Zombies - Combines the absolute fucking tedium of Zombi 4: Panic with shitty cinematography that makes Zombi 6: Dawn of the Mummy look competent and acting worse than Zombi 4: After Death and arguably the most retarded and nonsensical story of the batch. Of all the movies I saw for this list, this one is the only one I genuinely regret watching due to how fucking miserable the experience was.
Thus of all the movies I would actually recommend to another nigga to watch with the standard "this shit is from half a century ago and takes a while to get going so temper expectations accordingly" disclaimer, the only one I would suggest would naturally be
Zombi 2.
Maybe...just
maybe if said nigga was an obsessive zombie fan and actively wanted recommendations for old zombie movies which tried something different then I might consider suggesting
Zombi 3: Nightmare City but only after affirming repeatedly it was not especially good and the nigga would probably not enjoy it much if at all. The rest I would only cite as "some wop tried sticking the Zombi name on this piece of shit to trick people into watching" while maybe referring to those higher on the list as "maybe enjoyable for the cheese while intoxicated" but the rest I would actively warn them not to bother with.
....and honestly this was my
exact opinion before I started this fucking endeavour so uh....yeah this has been a giant waste of time.
