Review of Zombi 2 (aka Zombie)

Posted by Zac in Entertainment and Pop Culture Movies.

“The boat can leave. Tell the crew.” Zombi 2 is perhaps the most famous film from Italian director Lucio Fulci. The title is cause for some confusion because in Italy, George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead was distributed by Dario Argento as Zombi. Fulci’s film is an unofficial follow-up, thus in some circles it’s referred to as Zombi 2, while in others it’s simply Zombie. Now that all that’s out of the way…

After a boat drifts into New York harbor, a member of the coast guard is murdered by a zombie who is mistaken for a random maniac. The police question the boat owner’s daughter (Tia Farrow-Anthropaphagus) who then teams up with a reporter (Ian McCulloch-Dr. Butcher M.D.) to find out what happened to her father. In their search they enlist a young couple (Al Cliver-Cannibals and Auretta Gay) to ferry them to the island of Matool, where Farrow‘s father was last seen. There they meet a drunken scientist (Richard Johnson-The Haunting) and an increasing number of the walking dead. Considering the stories I’ve heard about Richard Johnson almost getting cast as James Bond, before losing out to Sean Connery, it’s interesting to see him in the role of a once-promising scientist who is now found lying passed out on the beach. I hope that wasn’t art imitating life.

This film is known for two key scenes. The first is an underwater sequence where a zombie battles a shark, and the other features shard of wood piercing a woman’s eye. While those scenes are delights to gorehounds everywhere, some of the outdoor footage on the island, with the wind blowing dust and debris everywhere, are more atmospheric than one might expect from a movie with the reputation this one has. Yet the film does have it’s drawbacks. The dubbing is…well I’ll be nice and say it’s off at times. I also want everyone to take a good look at the Molotov cocktail explosions late in the film.

Before he died in 1996, many people wrote Fulci off as a hack who stole liberally from Dario Argento. Since then, Argento has continued to put out work which is rightfully regarded as below the bar he set early in his career. Meanwhile Fulci’s output in the horror genre becomes more and more revered. While I do think the opinion of the quality of his work is often clouded with nostalgia, I feel he was neither a hack nor a genius who was ignored until after he died, but fell somewhere in the middle. Fulci’s films aren’t masterpieces, but they are entertaining, and that’s all I ask from a movie like Zombi 2.

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