ZOMBIE FLESH EATERS

In the port of New York, a small boat without a crew arrives. The boat belonged to the father of a girl named Ann Bowles (Tisa Farrow) who decides to go to the island of Matul, located in the Antilles, in search of her missing father. With her leave the journalist Peter West (Ian McCulloch) and a couple of oceanographers consisting of Brian Hull (Al Cliver) and Susan Barret (Auretta Gay). On the same island, where Dr. Menard (Richard Johnson) and his wife Paola (Olga Karlatos) are located, the corpses rise and attack the living... With "Zombi 2", Lucio Fulci ventures for the first time into the territories of horror, the genre that identifies him the most and to which he owes his fame. Thanks to this association (in truth very reductive given all the themes he addressed in over 50 films), he will be awarded important titles such as "godfather of gore" and "poète du macabre". Fulci's approach to the genre that would make him famous was rather casual. "Zombi 2", on paper a simple means of making money by making a fake sequel to Romero's "Zombi", was first proposed to Joe D'Amato and Enzo G. Castellari. Given their unavailability, Fulci's name was then suggested, at the time fallen into oblivion and recycled as a director of some television programs whose protagonist was a Franco Franchi at the end of his career. Thanks to Fulci, what would have been the usual banal exploitation born on the wave of a famous film, became one of the most successful zombie-movies in cinema history, as well as a resounding commercial success: costing just 410 million lire, it earned around the world well 30 million dollars, and according to many sources, in some countries it even earned more than Romero's film! Between "Zombi" and "Zombi 2", it must be said that the similarities are to be found only in the title and the presence of the living dead. One of Fulci's merits was undoubtedly that of making original and personal works despite moving within commercial logics and beating film tracks already marked by others before him. This very appreciable virtue accompanied him since his beginnings in cinema, where if he shot a western he tried to make it differently from Leone's, and if he made a thriller he tried in every way not to be assimilated to rival Argento. As for "Zombi 2", the Roman director used to say that his was a true zombie film and not a film with a sociological character like the Romerian work, in which the living dead was the emblem of the new society that devoured the old. Another original feature of the film is having brought the figure of the zombie back to its original core: classic voodoo. In addition to being a straightforward adventure film and devoid of political-social metaphors, another difference of the Fulcian work lies in the characterization of the true protagonists: the zombies. While those in Romero's film are very similar to the living in physical appearance and clothing, Fulci's zombies are made up in such a way as to be corpses where decomposition is already underway and whose clothes are simple rags, in order to mark the difference with the living more. Their realization, entrusted to the great Giannetto De Rossi, is one of the best things about the film and is even more suggestive than that of the more prestigious USA title. De Rossi also takes care of the extraordinary gore effects, these even more impactful than those, however always remarkable, of the overseas counterpart. Among the splatter scenes, it is impossible not to mention the famous one, a true anthology of horror, of Olga Karlatos' pierced eye: a scene perfectly realized from the point of view of special effects and from the directorial point of view, with a remarkable sense of fluidity. Another famous scene, albeit controversial, is that of the fight between the shark and the living dead in the marine depths. The sequence is certainly effective and has the merit of presenting the figure of the zombie in an unprecedented environment such as the aquatic one (an intuition that will later be fully exploited by American director Ken Wiederhorn for his "The Eye in the Triangle"). All of this was not shot by Fulci, but inserted later at the producer's request in order to exploit the success of Spielberg's "Jaws" and to shoot was Giannetto De Rossi. Regarding the actors, although not of excellent level, their interpretation is perfectly functional to the story, also because being the zombies the real stars, the psychological characterization of the humans is reduced to a minimum. The only characters with some depth are entrusted to the best actors, namely Olga Karlatos, called to play the unfortunate wife of Dr. Menard, and Richard Johnson who plays David Menard, a man unable to surrender to the inconceivable and slave to preconceived and inconclusive rational visions, who until the end does not understand that the corpses resurrect not for scientific reasons but for voodoo: a "stubborn rationalist" typical of Fulci's films. An interesting anecdote concerns the scene shot near the Brooklyn Bridge: in fact, permission to shoot was not given (better... it was not requested), so Fulci's ingenuity devised a ruse worthy of his reputation: he made the extras dressed in rags, with improvised makeup, pass in front of the camera at dawn to avoid being intercepted by the authorities: immediately after the carousel, the extras were quickly loaded onto a minibus so that no one would notice their presence... "Zombi 2" is ultimately a small film, but it is very well shot and has a very strong personality; proof of its qualities is enough to cite all the problems given to poor Romero who had to delay the release of his "Day of the Dead" precisely because of the Italian film. It is a film with characteristics that strongly recall Fulci's qualities: a small craftsman who, when the muses smiled on him, raised his head and was able to hold his own even with the great masters.