City Of The Living Dead (1980)

Basically the only image from this movie that isn't disgusting.

Lucio Fulci's City Of The Living Dead begins with a scream at a seance and a priest hanging himself in a graveyard. Naturally, this opens the gates of Hell and causes the rotting dead to rise from the grave. Bound to happen. But the zombie uprising is just one small piece of the surreal insanity in this, one of the most violent movies ever made.

A bar mirror breaks all on its own. A cat scratches a psychiatry patient's hand. A maggoty, rotten corpse discourages a local scuzzball from getting busy with a blow-up doll. A zombie priest mooshes a handful of bloody, wormy dirt into a girl's face. A woman's eyes bleed and she vomits out her entire intestinal tract before tearing out her boyfriend's brains with one hand. Something in a dead woman's coffin tears a chunk of flesh out of a mortician's hand while the body remains in repose. A woman works on a painting of a rhinoceros head floating over an ocean. Glass from a breaking window impales a wall, causing the wall to bleed. A man uses a machine shop power drill to bore through another man's head and right out the other side. A storm of maggots blows in a window, covering everything in the room, including our heroes, in writhing, wriggling larvae. Zombies teleport hither and yon. A flashing sign assures us that the bar has Schlitz on tap.

It's all foretold in the Book Of Enoch, a 4000-year-old tome the medium at the seance tried to warn the police about. The only person who will listen is a reporter (who comes off more like a low-rent Columbo), who is eager to get to the bottom of the strange occurences. He and a woman who had a vision at the seance (and was subsequently buried alive) travel to the New England town of Dunwich - a town with a dark history of witch burnings - to try to close the newly opened gates of Hell.

Unlike so many zombie movies, this one is truly suspenseful at times: seeing the woman who was buried alive scratch and claw at the inside of the coffin lid; watching from her point of view as the reporter almost impales her through the eyes with the pickaxe he uses to free her... that sort of thing.

It even ventures into the territory of being genuinely scary near the end as our remaining heroes are surrounded by shambling zombies and the undead priest from the beginning in his cavernous, corspe-riddled tomb.

But most of all, City Of The Living Dead is weirder than all get out.

Lucio Fulci's best movies are like fever dreams in the way they throw disturbing images at you with no care for logic or sense. Scenes are cut together with little regard for traditional pacing, stabbing abruptly in and out of horror set pieces to catch up with our reporter hero or the families of the recently dead. The bizarre structure of the movie is unsettling and unnerving, and gives the whole thing a nihilistic, apocalyptic vibe. As a result, City Of The Living Dead presents a more effective Hell on Earth than most any devil movie ever could.

Horrifying, vile imagery is abstract art in the hands of a visionary like Fulci. He is much more effective with the bizarre, surreal horror of this film or his masterpiece, The Beyond, than with his more traditional zombie movies. If you like your outlandish gore packaged with an enigmatic story and atmospheric direction, you don't want to miss City Of The Living Dead.

A special note for death metal fans: City Of The Living Dead was the inspiration for Death's excellent "Regurgitated Guts."