City of the Living Dead



City of the Living Dead (1980) is considered a classic of Italian horror in some circles, or at least a classic of italian gore. It was also known as The Gates of Hell, but most people know it as That Movie Where A Woman Literally Pukes Up Her Own Guts and a Guy Gets a Drill Through the Head.

A priest in hangs himself in a graveyard Dunwich (a town of Lovecraftian significance), an act that opens up the gates of Hell, or so we are told by the members of a seance in New York City. The youngest and prettiest of the women participating in the seance falls dead, an event that peaks the interest of an otherwise bewilderingly incurious reporter (Christopher George). He for some reason goes to the graveyard where she's being buried, but the gravediggers leave the job unfinished because of "union rules." The psychic woman (Catriona MacColl) awakes in the coffin and begins screaming and pounding, and after about four minutes of this the reporter realizes that perhaps he should investigate. He does this by attacking the coffin with a pickaxe, nearly killing the psychic several times.


"Bactine? Anyone have some bactine?"

The reporter and the psychic decide to find Dunwich, and stop the gates of Hell from killing everyone alive. Isn't that nice of them? In Dunwich all kinds of strange things are happening, including the gut-puking and head-drilling, and a spray of maggots that coats everything in a room except for a couch which was apparently too expensive for the production to ruin. Lots of people die (three people die by the same gore effect of having their brains pulled out the back of their heads), and the movie ends with the hanged zombie priest having a piece of wood shoved in his crotch, saving the world. I think. After that there's another ending, where the two surviving characters are smiling and happy and then a little kid starts running at them, smiling, and then a scream is heard on the sound track and a cracked animation effect makes the screen go black. "The Hell?" is the proper response.


Spider-Man just attacked the movie!

Some people defend this film by saying that the fractured and incoherent structure of everything that happens creates a true feeling of disorientation and horror in the viewer. Those people are smoking weed. While disjointed events could have that effect, they have to be grounded in some kind of reality by characters we can understand. And the characters we're supposed to be identifying with here are just as insane as everything else in City of the Living Dead. To give an example besides the reporter going at an occupied coffin with a pickaxe, there's also an insanely long scene where another woman calls her shrink to her house. She asks him if he thinks she's crazy. He says something casual about how all women are crazy. They talk about this some more, and finally she shows him what's bothering her. There's an old lady's corpse lying on the floor of her kitchen. The two of them discuss some more whether the woman is crazy, and the shrink says that he will call the sheriff if he can't come up with an explanation for how the corpse got there.


"Yep, you have corpses in your kitchen. You'll have to tent for that."

The Hell? Who would be so blase about finding a corpse? The whole movie is like that. The fact that most people in horror movies don't act like people really would in those situations is why most modern horror movies are more elaborate jokes than anything actually scary, but the people in City of the Living Dead act more like they are aliens who have fell to Earth and don't understand our Earth emotions or Earth logic. Add to that a glacial pace, and you have a film that's Hell to sit through.


"When I was eight years old I wanted to marry my father. I guess all girls that age want to marry their fathers. Anyway, I got over it pretty quickly. He was a drunk." That's not a joke, that's the actual dialogue that goes with this picture.

Posted: Sun - August 29, 2004 at      

©