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Dir. Lucio Fulci and Bruno Mattei
Italy
The original Zombie Flesh Eaters (Zombi 2) is far from the best film from
Italian director Lucio Fulci, but
with its atmosphere and music, it is still effecting and understandably his
best known film. Zombi 3 is the
creation of pure redundancy; Fulci was
stuck making low budget horror films, despite the great virtues of the ones
from the early eighties, but what’s significant about this one is that he
became ill and had only filmed forty to seventy minutes of the final footage,
leaving it be finished by scriptwriter Claudio
Fragasso and, in the still warm director’s chair, Bruno Mattei, the creator of Strike
Commando (1987). Even before that, researching a bit more about the film,
it may have been the case that Fulci
thought Fragasso’s script was awful
and got into arguments with him about changing passages of it. About a zombie
breakout caused by a military made virus, it shows brief moments of Fulci’s older films, of green lighting
and quiet tension, but Zombi 3 is
ultimately painful in how characterless it is, Mattei apparently turning the film into a virus movie with the
military, and with Fragasso not
helping the circumstances of this film’s origins either. One has to ask whether
the fall of Italian genre cinema, alongside the increased power of television
in entertainment, was also to do with both directors willingly, to keep up with
the fads of the period, stripping away the gothic or idiosyncratic
personalities to their filmmaking, and letting individuals like Mattei and Fragasso, just from this film, being anywhere near a movie
production. It would explain why Zombi 3
feels like the kind of churned out junk released in this period.
It has plenty of ridiculous,
go-for-broke ideas in vast contrast to the ominous first film – explosions,
flying zombie heads, a scene with a pregnant woman, and most bizarrely, undead
birds, not unsettling in the way shown in Fulci’s
own Manhattan Baby (1982) or Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), but
closer to the Mexican-Spanish René
Cardona Jr. film Birds of Prey (aka.
Beaks: The Movie) (1987), where you are not even safe from canaries and
pigeons. It doesn’t affect you at all however, far too incongruous in
connection to the utterly generic plot involving the military being evil and
wiping out even innocent people to keep the virus contained. The obnoxiously
obvious environmental message that you have to put up with as well may be
sorely blamed on Claudio Fragasso; if
this is how his scriptwriting and directorial work is like in general, then his
infamous film Troll 2 (1990), supposedly
an important work on vegetarianism, is going to be a painful clusterfuck upon
viewing it (if you the reader forgive me for the foul language). The complete lack
of any form of logic in Zombi 3,
where some zombies talk, some are mindless, others can have their severed heads
float in the air from a refrigerator, makes this dread worse, that and make you
wonder where one character managed to get a flamethrower from even if it’s in a
hotel cleared out by a military clean-up team. At least with something like A Cat From The Brain (1990), which was
a later film Fulci had control of,
there was an attempt at something unconventional, with a logic to its
abstractness, for horror filmmaking. This is the kind of colourless filmmaking
that puts people off genre cinema’s potential, a lifeless, woodenly dubbed work
that is paced like a procrastinating snail despite the gunfights. While I have
gained a lot from the first two Demons films
and StageFright (1987), I am very
worried about diving into late eighties Italian genre cinema and finding it as
insipid as this was in general. That and the atrocious hair metal with a reverb
echo that has been stuck in my brain since viewing it.
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