jadavix
"Nightmare City" is a movie that hasn't held up over the years as well as I'd hoped, but it's still leagues ahead of 99% of other Italian horror movies.It's not technically a zombie movie. While it does feature hordes of bad guys, who do look like zombies, outnumbering the good guys, they don't behave like zombies. For one, they use weapons. They also motion to each other, suggesting a coordination separate from the average crowd of flesh eaters. Speaking of coordination, they move a lot faster. They also do not each flesh, but rather, drink blood, generally from the chests of women they have just exposed with knives.The "nightmare" begins when an airplane touches down on a runway after a radiation leak is reported on the news. The plane door opens and out spills a horde of hideously mutated, violent freaks. They soon invade an aerobics studio where breasts are hacked off and eaten.The military in this movie is pathetic. The only time they display any acumen for combat is when, in one memorable scene, one soldier is gunned down by his teammate for going crazy and thinking they're mutants, too.The only character with any nouse is, improbably, a scientist, the hero of our story, who also happens to be ugly, balding and bearded. This is the kind of movie where scores of soldiers are killed, and then the hero gets away simply by unbelievable luck; eg. when he throws a TV at the group of mutants and it explodes as if there was a molotov cocktail inside. He later makes an actual molotov cocktail, throws it at a car, which also explodes, roasting several mutants.He carts a lady around - his wife - and it gets a bit tiresome seeing her do absolutely nothing of value while the old man saves the day.Aside from this the only real problem for the movie is that it falls apart toward the end and I lost interest. The characters are one dimensional, and spending so much time with them becomes a chore. There are still highlights at the end, though, and "Nightmare City" is certainly entertaining enough to be worth checking out.
fedor8
They don't come any dumber than this.An extremely goofy, hopelessly unscary film, filled with moronic dialog, cast with bad actors, and utterly short on logic in every aspect imaginable. In short: an Italian horror film. By the time the movie reached its final quarter, I found myself giggling at every other scene. The following paragraphs don't do enough justice to the film's stupidity, of which there is considerably more than I've covered here.I generally don't pay much attention to continuity errors, but this movie is so full of them they're impossible to miss. (Italians, and Europeans in general, don't care about the details as much as Americans; they tend to be sloppy.) 1) blue-skies/gray-skies transition, 2) a zombie isn't on fire, but just because the main character briefly glances to his side, the zombie suddenly IS on fire, 3) zombies ravage a female carcass just seconds after killing a male guard; so who is the female? Where there are a dozen continuity errors, there must be at least several dozen logic problems, right? Wrong. Hundreds. The army issues orders to have the zombies shot in the heads only, and yet the soldiers guarding that top military installation – the one that issued this order earlier – act as if they haven't got a clue about this new directive, and get slaughtered like a bunch of cretins. (Later on, the silly journalist (more on him later) shoots them only in their heads despite not even knowing about this weakness.) Not to mention the amazingly stupid decision by both the government and the military to keep things hush-hush from the public – the same public that is totally overrun by zombies, getting killed in their thousands on an hourly basis. That's like trying to keep it secret from the public that Sean Penn is a moron; I mean everyone knows already, frcrissakes.We've got a hospital surgeon moaning about having to deal with "6 emergency cases in two hours". Is that supposed to be a lot? Sounds normal to me, especially for a metropolitan area, and not at all the kind of numbers I'd expect when THOUSANDS OF ZOMBIES ARE KILLING THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE AT A VERY FAST RATE. Duh.The journalist has the kind of face only a mother would not find funny. I don't know whether it's his beard, his curly red hair, or his awful acting, I can't quite put my finger on it, but he looks bloody silly, especially when he looks concerned - which he always does; he's got one facial expression throughout. There's a wonderful scene in which he slaps his girlfriend/mistress/whatever very hard, after which they start kissing passionately. Wonderful stuff - though not quite as wonderful as the nonsense early on: the stone-faced journalist and his cameraman stand still, filming the first zombie attack as if they were witnessing a school-play, as if filming a zombie horde were a daily assignment for them, and making no effort whatsoever to get to safety, at least to film behind a truck or something. Do they actually believe that zombies give a toss about journalists' rights? Still, the zombies, as if knowing that attacking journalists in a war-zone would not have been in line with proper etiquette, only attacked the cops and the soldiers.So concerned are these unusually advanced zombies with etiquette and proper manners that several of them even wipe blood off their mouths just after a blood-sucking binge over a corpse. I'm half-surprised one of them didn't ask for a napkin. Then again, these aren't real zombies: they use semi-automatic rifles, they run, they think, and they have pizzas smeared all over their faces. One zombie even uses his fists, punching his victim, which I thought was rather stupid – though NOT too stupid for this movie, I might add.We also have Mel Ferrer here, the token Italian-flick American star, probably trying to pay off his debts by agreeing to star in just about anything. The hands-down most ridiculous characters are Ferrer's daughter and her pacifist husband. These two hate the military so passionately, it almost makes you feel like you'd been transported into some bizarre hippie version of "The Naked Gun" movies. My favourite line by the husband: "something strange is going on, usually these roads are filled with traffic". He says this while standing in the middle of a wheat-field in a remote part of the countryside.Now that I've covered the amazingly stupid bits, it's time for some ASTONISHINGLY stupid stuff. Check this out: the journalist's wife (an artist) finds her freshly-molded bust lying on the floor of her studio, pierced by a huge kitchen knife; her face turns to terror. "Where's this psychotic intruder?!" she must be thinking – right? Wrong. The movie leaves her for a while, and then comes back, a half-hour later, to find her doing what? Shrieking in terror? No. FIXING THE BUST, very calmly, as if nothing had happened. Wow. Most of the first half is concerned people phoning their friends and relatives to warn them. Predictably, a lot of these phone-calls fail – sometimes even because the people on the other line don't want to answer! And here I thought all along that Italians loved to talk, anytime anyplace anywhere. Well, apparently not during a zombie Armageddon (which they're of course not aware of yet).The movie even gets political, spewing some rather embarrassing/cringe-worthy B-movie wisdom, with its anti-military/anti-Capitalism message: "we'd be better off without nuclear energy and Coca Cola". What better illustration of left-wing imbecility than a dumb horror film trying to propagate its dumb ideas. Perfect. I thank them for that.And you'll never guess the amazingly original surprise end-twist. Hint: "The Wizard of Oz". Yup. And then some "Dead of Night" thrown in, just for good measure.Rifftrax really need to look into doing this amazingly bad movie. It's ideal fodder.
