by Everett Jensen

Created on: November 07, 2009

Zombie (Zombi 2)
directed by Lucio Fulci
written by Elisa Briganti, Dardano Sacchetti
starring Tisa Farrow, Ian McCulloch, Richard Johnson, Al Cliver, Auretta Gay, Olga Karlatos


Zombies that produce legitimate sensations of dread are featured in this seminal zombie classic by director Lucio Fulci (A Lizard in a Woman's Skin, The Beyond)

The best zombie films work primarily because the atmosphere they create lends itself to the unfurling of their subject matter. The zombies crawl organically out of the stuff of the narrative and not the other way around. In this film the dead have made their way up through the ground of the story and have become animated in the form of flesh-hungry zombies.

The central story takes place on an island called Matool in the Antilles. A woman named Anne Bowles (Farrow) learns that her father's yacht has been found empty near Stanton Island, New York. Along with Peter West (McCulloch), a reporter covering the story, she heads to Matool to try and figure out what has happened to her father.

The film is exquisitely shot from the opening frame and one is immediately thrust into the story which at times is quite terrifying and not so easy to manage. The zombies here move very slowly like in White Zombie, and the Night of the Living Dead films yet they are tenacious and relentless in their approach to living flesh.

The gore in this film is explicit and very effective throughout. The zombies randomly bite whomever is closest to them as they are not particularly discerning.

Here the zombies are elegantly filmed and there is a tremendous romantic quality about how they move. These zombies move achingly with a delicacy that is rarely found in zombie films. They are indeed the products of some kind of wicked black magic but they are rendered with a purity of form that provides them with a genteel quality; they don't come off as particularly threatening yet they just won't stop coming which is a classic maneuver of zombies who are driven by one purpose, one singular goal which is the delicious flesh of those living monsters who plague the landscape with their insistence and continuing brutality.

This film provides a bit of sex to its death march which always adds a necessary element to any such film. There are a few topless nude scenes which alters the viewer's hormonal balance and prepares them for the gore which is subsequently associated with raw, pulsating sex. Somewhere in the little teeming brains of viewers the sight of Susan Barrett's (Gay)

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>