Horror/Sci-Fi/Thriller
1 hour and 28 minutes
Rated: Not Rated
Written by: Antonio Cesare Corti, Luis María Delgado, and Piero Regnoli
Directed by: Umberto Lenzi
Produced by: Diego Alchimede & Luis Méndez
Cast:
Hugo Stiglitz
Laura Trotter
Maria Rosaria Omaggio
Mel Ferrer
The Nightmare Becomes Reality
After the outstanding box-office success of George A. Romero's zombie film Dawn of the Dead, a slew of imposter movies were created in rapid-fire succession, released upon the theater attending public like a horde of undead flesh eaters. Most famously was Italian Godfather of Gore Lucio Fulci's film Zombie, which was released one year after Romero's film and was also an international box-office success. With the surprise success of Fulci's Zombie, other Italian filmmakers were looking to cash in quick on the zombie craze before audiences became corpse-cold to the overall premise. One of those Italian filmmakers was Umberto Lenzi, who previously had proven himself a capable filmmaker with various different genre entries stemming from gladiator films to gialli flicks.
But Nightmare City could hardly be described as being Lenzi's first project pertaining to flesh eaters. Five years prior, Lenzi directed the jungle adventure film Man from Deep River which has gone on to be debatably called the first ever cannibal movie. That being said, if Man from Deep River's focus on cannibalism remains questionable, there can be no doubt about the consumption of flesh being the main topic of discussion in Nightmare City.
Perhaps looking to differentiate himself from both Romero and Fulci, Lenzi opts to give an explanation regarding the cause of the film's flesh eaters' motivations. Borrowing a hinted at solution from Romero's earlier zombie film Night of the Living Dead, Nightmare City lets its audience in on the fact that its zombies aren't technically zombies at all, but infected human beings. These flesh eaters have been over exposed to nuclear radiation, which in turn has altered both their physical flesh and their mental instincts. Nightmare City sets itself apart from both Dawn of the Dead and Zombie, aligning itself more closely with yet another earlier Romero film, The Crazies, by being a contagion film instead of a true blue zombie movie. The differences are subtle on face value, but here one does not see the slow meandering zombies that Romero popularized. These infected people can run and utilize weapons when it comes to hunting down their human prey. It is something that Lenzi ultimately is able to get away with purely because the film sets the clear distinction in place from the minute the bloody mayhem begins.
Speaking of the bloody mayhem, Nightmare City's gore effects are unquestionably its strongest asset. Special effects artists Franco Di Girolamo and Giuseppe Ferranti clearly saw the extreme levels of blood and guts that this subgenre of horror was destined for with future films like Romero's Day of the Dead and Fulci's The Beyond, and boy do they deliver the goods. Multiple heads are shown to explode from gunshots in fantastic close-ups, a man is impaled by a speargun, multiple stabbings become the norm, and there's even a tip of the hat to Zombie in an intensely graphic eye gouging sequence. Perhaps the most upsetting and arguably most unnecessary effects deal with two sequences where separate female characters have their breasts mutilated in horribly graphic detail. This obsession with breast mutilation is showcased in other films of Lenzi's, such as Cannibal Ferox, and is undeniably sexist. There's a line between a good bit of graphic fun in the name of good-humored horror films, and too much existing only for sadistic purposes of the filmmakers. Unfortunately, this is a line that Lenzi was often times quite fond of crossing throughout the course of his career. Nevertheless, the gore effects, for the most part, do remain both impressive and fun. Equally impressive are the film's makeup effects, also handled by Di Girolamo and Ferranti. The infected people look wildly different from the decayed zombies of Fulci's and Romero's films, as is the intention. Here we see various degrees of what appear to be burned and disfigured individuals, or more or less what one would expect to happen to the human body if one were exposed to high amounts of nuclear radiation.
Unfortunately, despite its radically different storyline from the zombie films before it (not including the contagion flick The Crazies, as mentioned), Nightmare City remains a rather dull and unimpressive film when it comes to its story. Not much really occurs in the way of plot. Once the infection is introduced, we're taken from one character to another who either thwart off their attackers, or succumb to a grim and brutal fate. This continues all the way until the film's third act. No stakes are ever raised, no potential cure is introduced, and ultimately, because of its switching between so many characters, no real connections can be made by the audience to the characters they are watching. Perhaps even more damning than its dull storyline though is Nightmare City's plot twist, delivered as the surprise conclusion of its climax. While the twist is shocking, it is only so because of just how unbelievable it is. What Lenzi essentially does is pull the rug out from underneath the audience, hitting them over the head with such a drastic twist, then asks that the slate be wiped clean entirely regarding the previous majority of the film that has just been watched. It of course ends on a "cliff hanger" letting us wonder if what we had seen already happened, didn't happen but is about to, or won't happen at all. It's a bit unfortunate and feels more as if writers Antonio Cesare Corti, Luis María Delgado, and Piero Regnoli were just out of ideas by the time they reached the end of their script and inserted the most ludicrous conclusion they could come up with.
The performances in Nightmare City are entirely unimpressive, the biggest contributor to said problem being the already mentioned lack of time spent with the characters to provide for a more intimate connection between them and the audience. Laura Trotter manages to scream her head off like any other typecast blonde in a horror movie, but that's really the extent of her contributions. Mel Ferrer as the in charge general never feels threatening nor important enough to be a focus to the story's overall point. In fact, he has nothing more to do than offer up exposition. The film's hero of course is meant to be Hugo Stiglitz's character, but perhaps the only impressive thing about Stiglitz is his beard.
Nightmare City is not without its charms though. Other than the already mentioned brilliant special effects work, the film boasts a terrific score. Composer Stelvio Cipriani delivers a nice 1980s-style synth score that, while isn't anywhere near as brilliant as Goblin's score for Dawn of the Dead or Fabio Frizzi's and Giorgio Tucci's score for Zombie, manages to hone in on the same fun and entertaining atmosphere that the two more successful films had. Lenzi, for all of his bad qualities, does manage to create some rather brilliant and engaging moments within Nightmare City that are frightening and riddled with tension. A sequence where Laura Trotter's character is searching through a hospital with no power and comes across some infected individuals is rather creepy, and, similarly, a sequence regarding a young couple being killed along a country roadside is heartbreaking to watch - perhaps in regards to how close this movie came out to the real-life Zodiac murders and the murders committed by Ted Bundy. The film's climax, set in an abandoned amusement park, where both Stiglitz's character as well as Trotter's have to fend off an impossibly large horde of infected monsters is the kind of edge of your seat excitement that should have been present throughout the entirety of Nightmare City.
Despite some problematic issues, including a dull storyline, characters that remain rather unimpressive, a ludicrous twist conclusion, and some blatantly sexist undertones which seemed to be a theme in the filmmaker's canon, Nightmare City remains a decently impressive entry into the zombie-movie archives largely for its attempts to differentiate itself from the more popular films that had come before it, thus setting a precedent for later, more successful, contagion films that would follow in its footsteps.
6/10
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