The Curse (1987)

What do Wesley Crusher, Bo Duke, and H.P. Lovecraft have in common? That would be The Curse, a low budget adaptation of Lovecraft's "The Colour Out Of Space." This little gem was directed by David Keith, who is mostly an actor, and featured special effects supervised by none other than Italian gore movie director Lucio Fulci (credited here as "Louis" Fulci.) Also, the Producer's name is Ovidio G. Assonitis, which never failed to make me laugh when it came on screen.

Young Zach Hayes (Wil Wheaton just before he donned his rainbow-y Star Trek: TNG uniform), his little sister (played by Wheaton's real-life sister Amy), and their mousy mother live with Zach's step-father Nathan and Nathan's jerk-ass son Cyrus on a small farm in Tennessee. Their lives are changed when a strange glowing meteor crashes into their field.

The meteor diminishes in size until it disappears, leaving the "experts" to determine that it was nothing more than a frozen chunk of waste released from an airliner. (See also Joe Dirt. Or don't.) Whatever the case, the meteor causes their fruits and vegetables to grow extra large. The joy over the bumper crop is short-lived, however, as slicing into these crops reveals loads of hideous maggots and worms wriggling inside. Eww.

The effect of the meteor on the family is even worse (well, arguably). As they drink contaminated water, they grow blisters and sores on their faces and basically lose their minds. Zach is able to escape this fate by drinking water and eating food bought from the grocery store, but his poor mother has to be locked in the basement and his sister spends most of the movie sick in bed.

Also entangled in the plot are the doctor next door, a local real estate agent, the agent's assistant, and a representative of the Tennessee Valley Authority (played by the Dukes of Hazzard's John Schneider) who is in town to buy the farm and make it into a reservoir.

After a sluggish start, the movie ramps up to a satisfyingly tense, gloppy, gory conclusion. I was impressed by the oppressive atmosphere even before the meteor's arrival, and it only gets better after the family has devolved into madness and mutation. The Curse boasts knife-wielding maniac attacks, dog attacks, horse attacks, and even chicken attacks.  If you are a Lovecraft fan who has exhausted all of the better known story adaptations and can get past the budgetary limitations, you'll find this one to be a pleasant surprise.

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."

Zombi 3 (1988)

Zombi 3 is an Italian pseudo-sequel to an Italian unofficial pseudo-sequel to George Romero's classic Dawn Of The Dead. See, Dawn Of The Dead was very popular in Italy where it was released as Zombi. In the grand European tradition of ripping off good Ameican movies, Italian director Lucio Fulci Immediately put out his unauthorized sequel, which is known in the U.S. as Zombie, but in Italy as Zombi 2. Then he followed that up with today's feature, which doesn't really have anything to do with the films preceding it. Oh, and just to add to the fun, Lucio Fulci's original cut of the movie was way too short. So Bruno Mattei, who was on a break from shooting Strike Commando 2 (with the guy who would later go on to be the first Dumbledore!), shot additional scenes that added up to about 40% of Zombi 3's length.

You with me so far?

Fortunately for those of us who like consistency, the movie itself is every bit as convoluted as the story of its creation. Zombi 3 follows the theft of a military-created bacteriological agent with the cheery name of Death 1 and its subsequent contamination of the populace. In one of many ripoff moments (this time of the fantastic Return Of The Living Dead), the military types kill the contaminated guy who stole the agent and cremate the body, causing the smoke to spread the contaminant. However, this time it's not due to seeded clouds and a rainstorm, but by interacting with a flock of passing birds. Yep, that's right - we've got zombie birds in this one.

Soon the birds have infected a handful of idiot humans who are our protagonists (such as they are). The usual zombie nonsense ensues, with flesh munching, army dudes shooting everyone, and our heroes heroically running from the slow-moving zombie hordes. But that makes this sound like a normal zombie movie, which it is not. It's not nearly as good as a normal zombie movie.

The best way to illustrate the shortcomings of this movie is probably for me to share the list of questions that came to mind as I watched it. Here goes:

• Some scientists working for the military, some military dudes out on a pass, some lamely slutty girls, some random vacationers at a cheap-looking "resort" hotel...  Who are these people?  Our protagonists? Oh no!
• Where are we? It's all jungle-y outside (it was shot in the Phillipines).  Oh, they mentioned safe-houses in Santa Monica and Santa Cruz on the local radio broadcast.  So this is In Los Angeles or something?  Wait, now they mentioned San Antonio. Huh?  A scientist just asked, "what if another epidemic breaks out? In Europe? In the United States?"  Where are we??
• Why did that zombie just shove that one girl out of a window into the hot springs? 
• How did the girl's legs get torn off in the hot springs?  Is there a shark in there (which would recall the great zombie vs. shark fight from Zombi 2)? 
• Why are the zombies hiding in the bushes, waiting to leap out at the military guy? Why can the zombies leap through the air but not walk faster than somebody's 90-year-old grandmother?
• How did the zombie head in the fridge leap out to bite that guy?  Flex its neck muscles real quick?
• Why do the zombies wait patiently outside, watching while the humans barricade themselves in at the hotel?  
• Why did the birds stop being a factor after the first twenty minutes of the movie?  
• Why did the scientists disappear from the movie for a good 40 minute stretch?  
• Why can the Decontamination Squad not shoot four people standing basically side-by-side?  
• Why does the movie go on for another 25 minutes after what seemed for all the world to be the final gut-munching zombie attack?  
• Why did the heavily armed Decontamination Squad make the military duress drop their weapons and then attack them hand-to-hand, especially since the plan was for the D Squad to kill everybody they encountered?
• What was in that small barn that caused a small hand grenade to blow it up like the Death Star?  
• Why are there zombies hiding in the grass like snipers?  
• How did that one guy get way out into open pastureland when a second ago he was twenty yards from the building?

This could actually be a pretty good zombie movie if you were to rewrite the script, hire new actors, put a new director in charge, reshoot the whole thing with better lighting and sets and without the apparent smear of Vasoline on the camera lens throughout.  Maybe revamp the makeup effects and improve the soundtrack, too.  These and just a few more changes would make a remake of Zombi 3 into a pretty decent zombie flick.  As it is, this one should probably only be seen by zombie completists and/or masochists. All others should avoid it like a plague of zombie birds.