Zombie (1979) / Flesh Eaters Review
7/10
A sailboat drifts into New York harbor with nobody aboard. Two harbor patrolmen investigate and one of them doesn’t come back. The dead man’s daughter and a journalist go looking for her father, who was working on an island in the Antilles.
The 7 is for a film that’s structurally sloppy, badly dubbed, indifferently acted, and contains four or five sequences nobody who has seen them has forgotten. Fulci isn’t a storyteller and he’s one of the great arrangers of images in the form.
Everything wrong with it is in the script and everything right with it is on the screen. The pacing sags, the dialogue is functional at best, and the atmosphere is thicker than almost anything else on this page. It’s a film you watch for its look instead of for anything that happens in it.
That’s a limited recommendation and an honest one. Plenty of films are worth watching for one thing, and this one has four or five of them.
I have a real soft spot for this ugly, lurching film. I laugh at the dubbing and fidget through the middle hour, and then the conquistador climbs out of the dirt and I forgive it nearly everything. The 7 is me admitting it’s a mess and admitting I’d still pick it over a dozen tidier horror films.
It Is Not a Romero Sequel
Dawn of the Dead was released in Italy as Zombi, and this was made to follow it commercially under the title Zombi 2, with no connection to Romero and no permission required. What Fulci made instead is a throwback. These zombies come from voodoo, the island has a doctor investigating a curse, the local population understands what’s happening in religious terms, and the film belongs to the tradition of White Zombie and I Walked with a Zombie instead of to 1968.
That decision is why it lasts. A straight imitation of Dawn would be a footnote, and going backward to an older form produced something that looks completely different. The dead here have been in the ground. They’re rotting, slow, filthy, and full of worms, and none of them is recognizably a person who died last week.
Giannetto De Rossi’s makeup is the reason, and I think it’s the best thing in the film. Each corpse is built as a specific stage of decomposition instead of pale skin and blood, and nobody has built a better zombie than the conquistador who rises in the cemetery.
When you’re asked to imitate something successful, go backward instead of sideways. An older version of the same idea will look original to an audience that only knows the recent one. The technique requires you to know the older version well enough to use it properly.
Decay is more frightening than violence. Corpses that have obviously been buried for years do something a fresh body cannot. That’s to suggest duration.
Design each monster as a specific history. A conquistador, a drowned man, a recently buried woman, all requiring different work, and the audience reads the difference without being told.
The Two Sequences
Everybody who has seen this film remembers two things and both of them are technical achievements instead of narrative ones.
The first is the splinter. A woman is dragged by the hair toward a shattered door and the film holds on her eye approaching the wood for a very long time, in close-up, with no cutting away. It’s unbearable, it’s entirely practical, and the effect was reportedly built with a prosthetic head and a mechanism that pushed the splinter at a controlled speed.
The second is the shark. A topless diver encounters a zombie underwater and the two of them fight a live tiger shark, in open water, with a shark handler in a zombie costume and no trick photography, which makes it impressive and also alarming.
Neither sequence has much to do with the plot. The film stops, delivers something wild, and resumes, and that habit is both its weakness and the reason anybody still watches it.
The shark fight is my favorite thing in it. When that handler in zombie makeup grapples with a live tiger shark, I think somebody should have been fired and somebody else should have been given a medal.
That’s worth a craft observation in itself. A film organized around images instead of around a story will be remembered in fragments. That’s a legitimate way to be remembered and a poor way to be watched a second time.
Fulci Composes
The plotting is poor and the images aren’t. Fulci’s instinct is for the held shot, the slow approach and the face filling the frame, and he uses all three relentlessly.
The cemetery sequence is the film’s best sustained stretch. Hands coming out of soil, filmed from ground level, with the camera close enough that the dirt is the whole image, and the sound reduced to insects and movement. The conquistador himself is the payoff. Something that’s been in the ground for four hundred years, still in armor, with soil falling out of the eye sockets, and the film gives him a slow rise with no music over it at all. Fabio Frizzi’s score does an enormous amount of the work, and I adore it. It’s a repeating synthesizer and percussion figure, heavy and slow, closer to ritual than to suspense, and it builds dread in scenes where nothing is happening. Half the atmosphere I credit to the island belongs to Frizzi. The island itself is the other asset. Shot in the Dominican Republic, humid, overgrown, with a hospital that’s falling apart and a church nobody attends, and the setting supplies an atmosphere the script never has to describe.
Richard Johnson’s doctor is the only performance in it with any weight. He’s a man who arrived to study something and has understood for some time that he’s not going to leave, and he plays the resignation instead of the fear.
A work can survive bad plotting if the images are strong enough, and it can’t survive good plotting with weak images. Structure still matters. The point is about what readers retain, and that’s almost never the sequence of events.
Hold the shot. The splinter works because the film refuses to cut, and the equivalent in prose is refusing to move the paragraph on when the reader wants you to. Let the score carry scenes with no content. A repeating figure over an empty corridor will do more than any amount of description.
What Is Wrong With It
The characters are names attached to functions. A journalist, a daughter, a boat couple, a doctor, and none of them has a want beyond reaching the next location.
The dubbing is poor even by the standards of Italian production of the period, and the English track is flat in a way that removes whatever the performances contained. Almost nobody on screen is speaking the language they’re dubbed into.
The film is also very much of its period in its treatment of the island population, who exist as background, as victims and as a source of superstition, and the picture has no interest in any of them as people. That is a bigger flaw than the dubbing.
The pacing in the middle hour is slack. Characters travel, arrive, discuss, and travel again, and the film is waiting for its next set piece in a way the audience can feel. The hospital siege at the end is where all of that stops mattering. A wooden building, a handful of people, molotovs, and an entire island’s worth of dead pushing at the walls, staged with a physical conviction that the rest of the film had apparently been saving itself up for.
The Ending
The survivors escape the island by boat and hear a radio broadcast establishing that New York has already fallen.
The last shot is the dead crossing the Brooklyn Bridge in daylight, in a line, with traffic abandoned, and it’s the only moment where the film connects to the Romero tradition it was pretending to belong to.
It’s also a good image and was shot without permission, guerrilla style, on a working bridge. That’s the kind of production detail that explains a lot about how this film exists at all.
The structure is a circle, since the film opened with a boat arriving in New York carrying the infection. The audience has watched a story about an island and the last thirty seconds reveal that the mainland was the subject. It was also enormously successful, was banned in several countries, and appeared on the British list of prosecuted titles during the video panic of the early eighties. That did for its reputation what censorship reliably does.
Close the circle you opened. The boat arrives at the start and the consequence appears at the end, and the reader gets the satisfaction of a shape without a word of explanation. That structure costs almost nothing and covers a great deal of slack in between.
Save one image for the last thirty seconds that reframes the location of the story. An island becomes a prologue if the mainland is already gone.
A final image can be worth more than a final scene. Nobody speaks over the bridge and nothing is resolved, and it’s the shot everybody remembers.
Should you watch Zombie?
Yes, for the images and the atmosphere, and it’s a 7 because the story doesn’t hold up. The plotting is sloppy, the dubbing is flat and the middle drags, and I still think the cemetery, the splinter, a live shark and the dead walking across the Brooklyn Bridge earn it a place on any horror shelf. I’d trade a lot of competent zombie movies for those four scenes.
