Zombi 2
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- Release Date: August 25, 1979
- Directed by: Lucio Fulci
- Written by: Elisa Briganti and Dardano Sacchetti
- Runtime: 1 hour 31 minutes
- Series: Living Dead (Unofficial) & Zombie
Zombi 2 holds a very special place in my heart for a big reason: it was the very first Italian horror film that I ever watched on my own. As I mentioned in my writeup for Alien 2: On Earth, this was one of the first examples of unofficial Italian sequels that I found. For anyone who doesn't know, George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead was re-edited and retitled Zombi for its European release. Being a big hit, producers obviously wanted to cash in on Zombi's success with their own sequel. Dardano Sacchetti's script for an original zombie film was bought, rewritten, retitled to Zombi 2, and given to Lucio Fulci to direct. All the production weirdness aside, the end result is not only an iconic zombie film, but also my favorite zombie film of all time.
Despite its numbered title, Zombi 2 clearly features no story connection to Dawn of the Dead. In fact, the film is simply known as Zombie here in the U.S. The story focuses on a woman named Anne who travels with a journalist named Peter to an island to search for her missing father after his abandoned yacht drifts into the New York harbor. While on the island, they encounter a rising zombie plague that is ravaging its inhabitants. What I always appreciated about this movie is the fact that it's more of a slow-burn. For the first hour of the film, we only get a few brief encounters with the zombies. Some examples include opening scene and an infamous scene where a zombie fights a shark underwater. If you're not into the characters and story, you may find this first hour to be a little boring, but I've never had that problem. I enjoy seeing these characters travel to the island and slowly uncover what is going on, and the short zombie encounters we get at first are very memorable. Once the one-hour mark hits and our heroes find a group of zombies feasting on a torn-up woman, the last 30 minutes are an almost nonstop barrage of action and zombie gore. Heads are blown off, throats are torn out, and the movie builds to an amazing climax in a burning building, complete with zombies on fire. It's such a thrill ride, and after the slow buildup of the rest of the movie, the final battle is such a treat.
This movie is legendary in the horror world for its extreme gore, which even got its home media release banned in the U.K. in the 1980s. You have an infamous scene where a zombie pulls a woman onto a shard of wood and gouges out her eyeball, and another where the worm-eyed zombie from the poster bites another woman's throat out. If you're a fan of gore films, there's a lot to love here, and the bloodshed effects even make some of Dawn's look tame by comparison. As for the zombies themselves, they feature my favorite undead makeup next to Tom Savini's amazing work in Day of the Dead. They're slow and stiff like Romero's zombies, but with several extra layers of decay on them. I've always loved how their rotting flesh looks like it has bits of dirt and debris caked onto them, since they pulled themselves up out of the ground. These zombies are also the result of a voodoo curse, which not only is a fun change of pace, but it goes well with the movie's island setting. I honestly don't think I have a negative thing to say about this movie when it comes to effects or creatures. Everything here is a prime example of what I love about the excesses of Italian horror films of the time. Apparently some theaters provided barf bags during screenings of this back in the day, and if that doesn't convince you of how good the gore is, then I don't know what will.
Zombi 2 may not be for everyone, but I personally hold it in just as high regard as I do Romero's original Dead films. While it lacks the social commentary that Romero's films did, it makes up for that by showcasing some of the best gore and violence that Italian exploitation films had to offer at the time. It was also successful enough to spawn its own line of sequels that were completely separate from the Dead films. After a long career of making comedy films and a few suspenseful giallos, Lucio Fulci set a very high bar for himself when it came to his first full-fledged gory horror film. From here, the ideas would only get much more original and out-there, and Fulci would eventually cement his place in film as the "Godfather of Gore."