Michael's Horror Lase-O-Rama - Zombie: Special Edition (1998, ROAN Group)

In a commentary track recorded especially for this release of the film, Ian McCulloch recounts an incident from the very first day he set foot in New York.

Arriving from the UK, he tells the woman working customs that he's in New York to work on a film. Unfortunately for Ian, he's travelling on a standard tourist visa, and not a work visa. This doesn't go over well, so he calls his employer and asks what he should do. "Tell her you made a mistake," they reply. "Tell her you aren't here to work in New York, you're just here on your way to work on a film somewhere else."

McCulloch returns to customs and, using his formidable acting talents, relays the line the executives told him to use. The woman explains, through carefully-formatted and delivered expletives, that she doesn't believe him. She goes so far as to mark his papers with a special stamp stipulating McCulloch is not, under any circumstances, to engage in any work while in New York.

Naturally a short time later he and the rest of the crew are filming a scene in New York Harbor while surrounded by real-life, off-duty NYPD officers (it was cheaper to hire them than it was to get regular extras, because they brought their own uniforms and equipment). Any of these guys could have, with a single request to see everybody's work visas, completely shut down production and deported Ian over a work violation. The second scene of the entire picture was shot by the skin of everybody's teeth, and yet it all worked out in the end. Robert Rodriguez may have popularized the concept of "guerrilla filmmaking", but here's Fulci putting it into practice two decades earlier. This, I feel, goes a long way towards explaining what makes Zombie such a damn fine movie.

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Zombie's story starts in New York, with a boat drifting into New York's waters and the harbor patrol heading in to check it out. Two officers board the boat, and while they're checking things out, an obese giant with a terrible skin condition bursts out of a storage closet and attacks. One officer is killed, his throat ripped out by the creature. The second officer pulls his gun and puts several rounds into the thing's torso. It staggers off the side of the boat and vanishes into the water. Later on in the morgue, the Chief Medical Officer and his assistant examine the body of the slain officer, noting the extensive tissue damage to the neck that appears to have been caused by human teeth. While they continue their analysis, the sheet covering the dead officer stirs slightly.

We all know what this means, but Fulci leaves us hanging anyway because it's time to introduce our main characters. Peter West, played by McCulloch, is a journalist out to get the full story on the mysterious boat that drifted into the harbor, so he employs the time-honored technique of sneaking into the boat after dark. Anne Bowles, played by Tisa Farrow (Mia's sister), is the daughter of the man who owned the boat. In search of answers, she likewise takes a nighttime stroll down to the harbor for a little midnight peeking of her own. The pair meet up in the dark, and make enough noise that the cop on duty goes to investigate. Quick thinking on West's part has the pair pretending to be a couple who found the boat a nice quiet place for some necking, and the officer lets them go with a warning.

Both Peter and Anne have seen enough on board the ship to know two things: A) Something terrible happened aboard, and B) Anne's daddy is nowhere to be found. Between Anne's knowledge and Peter's contacts, they determine her father was last seen working on a small Caribbean island named Matul. Unfortunately this is 1979, Matul is uncharted, and they can't afford to wait for MapQuest to be invented, so they head for the Caribbean in search of a local who might be able to take them there. They get lucky and find Brian and Susan, a pair of divers about to head to sea. They're going in the right direction, and they offer to drop Anne and Peter off on Matul.

Halfway to the island, Susan stops the boat so she can take a dive. While exploring a small reef, she sees a tiger shark and takes cover in a small grotto. While in the grotto, she's grabbed by a stranger's hand. Turning to see who's down with her, she sees a decaying man with no oxygen tank or diving gear standing on the ocean floor. Naturally she freaks out and heads for the surface. This attracts the shark, who moves in to investigate. When the decayed man takes a swipe at the shark, Susan is able to escape, leaving the two to fight it out among themselves. To get to the bottom of things, they head for the island to get some answers.

Upon reaching Matul, they quickly realize all is not well. The normally active natives are hidden away in their jungle refuges, though a slow and steady rhythm of drums punctuates the silence at all times. The four finally reach a sign of civilization, only to find it barren and empty as well save for Dr. Menard and his wife Paola at the local hospital. Menard has been treating a large number of patients at the tiny island clinic. They've all been infected by a strange illness which kills them in a matter of hours, but then somehow causes them to reanimate and attack the living. Menard's half-crazed with his inability to determine the cause of the infection, its source, or even a cure--he's been forced to wrap up and tie down every corpse in the morgue where, at the first sign of reanimation, he shoots them in the head with his revolver. Nothing else stops the dead from walking.

His wife desperately wants to leave the island, but Menard's unwilling to just abandon the locals to their fate. His stubbornness unfortunately leads to an awful lot of unnecessary deaths as an ever-growing number of zombies lay siege to the hospital. Peter and Anne just want to get back to New York and put Matul behind them, but even if they get off the island, there's no guarantee that distance alone will save them from the horrors to come.

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International readers may know this film by a number of different titles. Here in North America, it was released as Zombie. In the UK, it was known as Zombie Flesh Eaters, where the BBFC slapped it with a ban, labeling it one of the "Video Nasties" and preventing its import and distribution. @Slobberchops could probably tell you more about this if you asked nicely. Elsewhere in the world, you might have seen it distributed as Nightmare Island (screenwriter Dardano Sacchetti's original title for the film), Island of the Living Dead, Voodoo, and Zombie 2: The Dead Are Among Us.

In Italy, it was known as Zombi 2, a title with which Fulci disagreed since it implied the film was a sequel to George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, which itself had been re-titled and released in Italy as Zombi. The two films have nothing in common besides an undead menace. Given the events depicted in the film's conclusion though, Zombie could certainly serve as a prequel to Romero's iconic trilogy since it provides an explanation of how the undead came to be, a point Romero deliberately avoided specifying in his films despite his scripts offering up several in-world hypotheses by different figures.

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I've seen Zombie numerous times over the years. The first time was in the summer of 1996: I found the VHS behind the locked case at a local used book store and had to know what was so awful about it that it was deemed necessary to keep it where children couldn't get at it. My girlfriend and I watched it at her house, and while we both laughed at the out-of-sync dubbing and some of the cheesier special effects, when I went to bed that night I absolutely could not get the movie's chilling theme out of my head:

Fabio Frizzi, you have an awful lot of nightmares to answer for!

That music is utterly terrifying, conveying the menace of something unstoppable engulfing the world like a tsunami swallowing everything in its path. It's hopelessness given form: you cannot escape, you cannot fight, and it will overtake you no matter what you do. It took days to unload this looping composition from my brain, and twenty-two years later it's still powerful.

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This LaserDisc edition of Zombie is downright gorgeous. Struck from the film's uncut print, it runs a full 91 minutes in a 2.35:1 letterboxed format, with multiple soundtrack options including a Dolby Digital mix on the right Analog track, a Dolby Surround mix on the Digital channel, and a commentary track recorded by Ian McCulloch and Jason Slater (editor of Diabolik magazine) on the left Analog track. The only downside to this release is the CLV format used to ensure the whole film could fit on a single disc. To be fair, they do try and get the most out of that time, throwing in a theatrical trailer as well as a few television spots and radio ads after the feature's conclusion. Roan Group loved weird, off-beat films and gave a number of movies their special brand of treatment. It's not quite DVD quality, but damn does it come close, and if you don't have a laserdisc player, the Anchor Bay DVD release from the same year will give you exactly the same presentation and features list in slightly higher resolution.

Gorehounds looking for the best presentation of the movie, however, will want to look for the 2011 Blue Underground two-disc DVD and Blu-Ray release. While the cut of the film presented on disc 1 is the same uncut print used to create the previous DVD and LaserDisc release, disc 2 contains a sopping wet mess of special features including interviews with tons of cast, crew, and other folks who helped bring Zombie to life.

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Ultimately, Fulci did for shambling corpses what Ruggero Deodato did for cannibal films and Sergio Leone did for westerns: injecting enough of his Italian, zero-cares-given sensibilities into the genre that it persists and horrifies to this day. There are scenes in Zombie that, in my mind, have yet to be equaled in any horror release either before or since. If you can't marvel at the shark vs. zombie fight, if you don't wince at the horrifying ocular trauma inflicted on Paola, I can only assume you're a sociopath incapable of emotion. Fulci's zombies have a unique look all their own; while Romero was painting extras blue and having them shamble around with arms extended, Fulci was stuffing eyes and mouths with wriggling worms and maggots, giving his monsters peeling skin and broken teeth, sparing no expense when it came to gouged flesh, blasted brains, and partial body burns. At their core, Romero's zombie pictures are horrifying but still all in good fun. Fulci wasn't interested in fun--he wanted his audience shocked and suffering, and while FX budgets have grown, technology has progressed, and zombies have become their own pop culture phenomenon, his 1979 undead are still some of the most terrifying shamblers to inhabit the screen.

Zombie entertains, but only by forcing us to confront a nightmarish possibility. Dawn of the Dead is a great film, but it's a machismo-infused fantasy/commentary on modern-day life. There's a reason we dream about holing up in a mall during a zombie outbreak instead of trying to tough our way through dilapidated shacks on a mostly-abandoned island where resources are scarce and the enemy looks truly menacing.

If you've not seen it before, this LaserDisc is certainly a great introduction and worthy addition to your collection. Zombie isn't a perfect movie, and it certainly has its flaws, but it's so earnest in its desire to provide an unflinching look at the chaos of an undead uprising that it overcomes all its limitations and goes straight for the jugular. Give the trailer a watch, then track down a copy for yourself and see if you don't agree:

Spoiler alert: They promise you a BARF BAG at the end!