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) breasts gets mixed up with images of zombies munching on the flesh of one of its pretty victims. Sex measures up to death in a tyrannical zealous pursuance of cold, measureless oblivion.
Anna and Peter meet Susan and her boyfriend Brian Hulll (Cliver) who agree to ferry them to the island. Once in Montool we discover that the island's dead have been expunged from the earth and are now walking about looking for flesh to devour. They meet Dr. David Menard (Johnson) who has been working to understand the nature of the phenomenon of the walking dead. He is married to a hysteric named Paola (Karlatos) who tries to convince him to leave the island but he holds firm leaving his wife to fend for herself. Naturally she is attacked and in one of the seminal images in horror her eye is gouged out with a splinter from a door a zombie has partially broke through. It's an exquisite shot more so for the time it takes for the splinter to enter her eye.
The mostly electronic score by Giorgio Tucci and Fabio Frizzi expertly sets the mood immediately and maintains it for the duration of the film. The opening theme by Frizzi in particular is evocative and seething with melancholy and a great heaviness.
Overall, this film offers a genuinely terrifying exploration of the zombie motif through its setting and music. The zombies are realistically somber yet distinctly elegant in their maneuverings across the island. The level of terror is ratcheted up as the film progresses toward its unsettling conclusion which is quite frightening in its implications. Ultimately, the camera work adds an enchanting quality to the dynamics of the film and each scene intoxicates the viewer while simultaneously dragging them albeit it willingly toward the gaping nightmare of the great chasm.