Nightmare City

It was even dumber than I expected. Bad actors, among which stands out the unbelievably crappy acting of Hugo Stiglitz, which could be boldly classified as the performance of a porn actor. The good thing is that there is always something going on in the film and boring speeches are kept to a minimum. The viewer gets to enjoy the zombies a lot, or rather the infected and mutated creatures. They're always running around, always murdering someone and, like vampires, sucking blood like maniacs with their eyes bulging. In short, a proper B-movie that constantly tempted my diaphragm with its stupidity. And the unintentionally funny twist at the very end is just the icing on the cake. (08/06/2004)

Look out! This time it’s not a cheap B-movie, but an ambitious international co-production with crowd scenes, helicopters and lots of machine-gun fire! And it even has a surprising ending that underscores the idea of the film! The screenplay is fine: there’s always something happening, the setting in which the main characters move constantly changes and the violence – which, by the way, is boorishly brutal and mostly perpetrated against women – is boldly sadistic. But that’s where the praise ends. Umberto Lenzi is an ultra B-movie director, and you can feel it in the absence of fear and atmosphere, in the directing of the actors and in the terribly haphazard logic (you shoot the creatures with a machine gun and nothing happens, but when you slam their fingers in the door, they scream like they're giving birth). And the latex masks are ridiculous. (10/03/2003)

A slight air of mystification surrounded this movie, as many versions of the title contained the words "zombies" or "the walking dead", and at the same time, there are no reanimated corpses in the classic "Romero" sense. There are people who have mutated due to radiation, who drink blood like vampires and cooperate in a coordinated way, chopping heads off with a machete, and shooting with submachine guns. At the same time, when one literally translates the original Italian title, one gets no mention of the living dead (on the other hand, the Italian title partially reveals the twist at the end of the movie). That was just a few words on my slight disappointment, now to the movie itself. It is just trash. It is a poorly written and shot movie that cashes in on the success of Dawn of the Dead with terrible acting performances, awful dialogues, a complete absence of logic, and the already mentioned twist at the end, which negates all of the previous events in the movie. Also, those bulging eyes of the “infected” behind horribly made latex masks were laughable. (05/05/2019)

Tarantino's favourite zombie film, where the zombies are not actually zombies, but irradiated people with mud on their faces, axes and machine guns in their hands, driving around in cars, cutting telephone cables and ripping off the shirts of extras. Said to be the first zombie film where zombies run around and show signs of intelligence, but this was far more playfully or cleverly sketched out by other, later zombie films (Return of the Living Dead, 28 Days Later and Land of the Dead). Still, there are a few memorable scenes, such as the zombies invading a live broadcast of a typical 80s dance show or their visit to a surgery room. (03/18/2018)