A Selection of Lucio Fulci Classics....

Lucio Fulci is a big name in Italian horror and he's quite keen on including zombies in his films. One of the big attractions of his films is his inventive use of gore, allowing him to provide zombies that are not only scary as hell, but genuinely look dead and rotting. Three of the films reviewed here were placed on the UK "Video Nasty" list: "Zombie Flesh Eaters", "The Beyond" and "The House By The Cemetery".



Zombie Flesh Eaters (Zombi 2) (1979)

I'd heard very mixed views of this. Just to clarify, this movie has several titles. The actual original title was "Zombi 2", posing as a follow-up to Dawn Of The Dead (which had the title "Zombi" in Italy). In some places the movie is known as "Zombie", "Island Of The Living Dead", "Zombie Island" and "Woodoo".

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Zombie Flesh Eaters 2 (Zombi 3) (1988)

An entirely new setting and this time the zombies aren't linked with voodoo at all, but are entirely the fault of bio-chemical research. Scientists are working on viral research, but someone decides to steal their work and ends up accidentally unleashing it on the general public. After that, the military attempt to clean up the mess.

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City of the Living Dead (1980)

When I first discovered this film it was part of a general search for zombie movies. I then discovered that this is the first of a whole trilogy of Lucio Fulci movies about gates opening to hell. The second installment is "The Beyond" and the third is "The House By The Cemetery".

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The Beyond (1981)

I was a little worried going into this, but I decided to make a go of it. I made myself some pasta and sat myself down ready to go. I then quickly realised I was going to need to stop the movie and eat the pasta first, because the film begins with some pretty nasty violence and gore that really threatened to put me off my food.

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The House By The Cemetery (1981)

Okay, so I came into this one with a very different attitude to "The Beyond". While I knew this wasn't supposed to be as good, I couldn't help but hope for the best. From a fanart poster on Reelizer (see above) I realised that the eponymous house is the same one where the mysterious blind girl lives in "The Beyond". However, it seems that's more for budgeting reasons. There isn't actually any clear connection between this film and "The Beyond" at all. In fact there's actually no mention of gates to hell.

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X-posted to candycorncomm