City Of The Living Dead (1980)

AKA: The Gates Of Hell

My rating - 7.5/10

(click on images below for larger versions)

City Of The Living Dead is part of Lucio Fulci's supernatrual zombie trilogy, this also included The House By The Cemetery and The Beyond. Starring Katherine MacColl who also appeared in the others in the trilogy, Christopher George, Janet Agren and Giovanni Lombardo Radice, plus many other well known Italian actors who I'm sure fans of Italian horror cinema will quickly reconize.

I've always loved this film. It's full of creepy atmosphere, has a great score, one of my favorites of Fulci's movies and some amazing gore effects which include brains being squished from heads, a maggot attack, bleeding eyes, and a couple of scenes that are pretty iconic in horror movie history, namely Poor Daniela Doria, who always suffers in Fulci Movies. In this she bleeds from the eyes and then vomits up her intestines in gross, close up detail. Giovanni Lombardo Radice, who also suffers in pretty much every film he's in is the recipient of a power drill through the head in the films show stopping moment. His look of fear was also authentic as the actor holding his head wasn't very gentle during this scene and Radice said that his head got very close to that very real drill.

Let down only slightly by the strange ending, there's lots of rumors about why it ended like it did, but the most often used reason is that the film elements got damaged and were unusable so they had to improvise as they had no time to film it all again. It's a shame as even if the footage is really bad then I'd still like to see it, but it seems to be lost now.

This is the first in the trilogy and despite it's slowish start I can't recommend this one highly enough!.

SCREEN SHOTS

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