Nightmare City Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		3.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		3.0
Overall		3.5

Nightmare City Blu-ray Movie Review

A nightmare all right.

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater January 10, 2014

After George A. Romero put out his hilarious and terrifying Dawn of the Dead in 1978, the Italian film industry was quick to capitalize on the new zombie craze. Director Lucio Fulci already had an undead movie in production at the time, and it was rebranded in 1979 as Zombi 2 to give the illusion that it was a sequel to Dawn of the Dead, which was released in Italy as Zombi. Fulci's film is arguably the high point of Italian zombie cinema—amongst other delicious scenes, it features an underwater fight between a zombie and a real live shark—and the movies that followed rapidly dropped off in quality, bottoming out in 1988 with the atrocious Zombi 3, which was completed by Bruno Mattei (Hell of the Living Dead) when Fulci got hit with a bout of hepatitis while shooting in the Philippines. While it was the only movie officially titled Zombi 3, several other films made between '79 and '88 were occasionally marketed as such, including Marino Girolami's Zombie Holocaust, Andrea Bianchi's Burial Ground, and Umberto Lenzi's Nightmare City. They're all undeniably awful, but—unsurprisingly, if you're a fan of this genre—not without their ironically entertaining, so-bad-it's-good attributes. Nightmare City (1980), long a favorite of Quentin Tarantino, is especially ridiculous, with hokey special effects, a weirdly prodigious number of breast stabbing scenes, and a tendency to take itself way too seriously.

Umberto Lenzi was one of the great hired guns of Italian genre filmmaking, and by great, I mean prolific more than particularly talented. He's best known for his two brutal, rape-y cannibal films, Eaten Alive! and Cannibal Ferox, but he also made spaghetti westerns and sword-and-sandal epics, gialli, James Bond rip-offs, and numerous poliziotteschi "eurocrime" actioners. Nightmare City was his first zombie film—his only other was a Haitian voodoo snoozer called Black Demons—and it's obvious from the first few minutes that Lenzi doesn't feel beholden to any of the traits of Romero's shambling corpses. In fact, if anything, Nightmare City feels more like Romero's The Crazies—the "baddies" in both are fast-moving homicidal maniacs capable of using weaponry, and both films concern a cynical view of the political/military complex.

In particular, Nightmare City is about the potential horrors of nuclear energy, and in many ways recalls the atomic-age monster movies of the 1950s, where generals and scientists struggle to fight a power now entirely out of their control. The film stars Mexican actor Hugo Stiglitz—looking a bit like Barry Gibbs of the Bee Gees—as Dean Miller, a TV news reporter in some indeterminate European city. Miller is at the city's airport to cover the arrival of Professor Hagenback, a scientist who's been in charge of overseeing the containment of a nearby nuclear plant's recent meltdown. Hagenback arrives, all right, but his plane—an unmarked military C-130—makes an emergency landing with no radio contact. Policemen and soldiers and EMTs surround the plane, and when the door is opened, an undead Hagenback and whole horde of radiation-afflicted crazies pour out and start a massacre. For some wholly unexplained reason, they're armed with knives and hatchets. (I mean, come on, unless you chop your own wood, you probably don't just happen to have a hatchet lying around. Where did they find them on a plane?) We do eventually get an explanation, though, for why they behave more like vampires than zombies, sucking the blood of their victims after having sufficiently stabbed or slashed them. Apparently, the radiation poisoning—which "increases their physical capacities beyond the norm"—also causes their red blood cells to deteriorate, necessitating the constant imbibing of fresh blood. Their lone similarity to "traditional" zombies is that they can only be killed by a shot through the brain.

Soon, the zombies have taken over the city, expanding their ranks as they go. The military, represented by General Murchison (Mel Ferrer, yes, that Mel Ferrer, Audrey Hepburn's ex-husband) and his underling Major Holmes (Francisco Rabal), are practically powerless to do anything besides enact a state of emergency. Miller returns to his TV station in time to witness the monsters interrupt and slaughter an on-air dance troupe doing a choreographed routine in matching unitards. (The film might've come out in 1980, but it's clear the '70s haven't quite died out yet.) It's here that we first see Lenzi's bizarre fetish for mammary-targeted violence. A drinking game where you take one shot for every breast stabbed in the film would leave you in a stupor. One zombie even saws off a woman's areola with his knife. As for the gore and makeup, the low-budget practical effects are lovably goofy. The zombies are supposed to look like they're covered in coagulated scabs, but they kinda resemble burnt marshmallows. There are some decent limb-severings, though, and at least one good cranial exit-wound explosion.

The lone sequence that stands out as genuinely spooky—as opposed to the general hokeyness that runs rampant through the rest of the film—is the mounting chaos at the hospital where Miller's wife, Anna (Laura Trotter), works as a doctor. When the power goes out, Anna stumbles around in the dark with only a flashlight, illuminating one terror after another. She and Miller finally meet up and beat it to a derelict amusement park, where the film builds to a gimmicky let-down of an ending, the less of which is said about the better. In their escape, Anna and Dean have a conversation that attempts to restate the film's anti-nuke thesis statement—"It's part of the vital cycle of the human race. Create and obliterate until we destroy ourselves."—but you really can't take Nightmare City seriously on any level. Thankfully, you don't have to to enjoy it for what it is, a gory chunk of b-grade italo-horror absurdity.

Nightmare City Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

RaroVideo has given Nightmare City an all-new 1080p/AVC-encoded remaster, and the results are mixed but still manage to put prior home video editions to shame. Sure, there are some specks and flecks on the print, and yes, the film's low-budget effects are even more laughable in high definition, but that's all part of the fun. (Maybe it's just me, and maybe it's sacrilege, but I kind of like when films like this don't get the comprehensive, frame-by- frame restorative treatment; a movie called Nightmare City, I think, should look a little grubby.) Raro's approach here is mostly natural— a straight telecine transfer, some light color balancing, and no digital noise reduction and noticeable edge enhancement. For films of this caliber, you really can't ask for much better than that. However, the encode is marred somewhat by heavy compression, which introduces macroblocking and other artifacts, especially in scenes with fast movement. Clarity is greatly improved from the DVD days, though—just look at the bumpy/burn victim zombie facial makeup—and color looks true-to source and consistent, with solid contrast and black levels. No major distractions here.

Nightmare City Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Raro has given us both the Italian and English dubs of the film, both presented in uncompressed Linear PCM 2.0 mixes. (Most likely mono, from what I can tell.) Given the film's international distribution and cast—some of which, like Mel Ferrer, are obviously acting in English, while others are clearly using Italian—purists shouldn't feel obligated to label one language more "original" than the other. And for all practical listening purposes, the two mixes are nearly identical. High-end effects can sound a little hot, sometimes bordering on brash—listen to the approach of Hagenback's plane, with its whining propellers—but that's not unexpected for a film of this era and budget. Pops, crackles, and in-your-face hisses are thankfully avoided though, and on the whole, the film is easy on the ears. Dialogue, while clearly dubbed, is always comprehensible, and the disc includes optional English SDH subtitles in white lettering. Do note that, for some reason, you can't switch audio or subtitle options during the film without entering the pop-up menu.

Nightmare City Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Interview with Umberto Lenzi (SD, 49:27): In this interview, from 2000, Lenzi discusses the popular Italian action cinema of the 1970s, his own film closest to his heart (Paranoia), his admiration for William Wyler and Sam Fuller, Quentin Tarantino's oft-expressed love of Nightmare City, and much more. In English, with no subtitles.
• Italian Trailer (HD, 3:45)
• English Trailer (HD, 3:45)
• Booklet: Inside the case you'll find an eleven page booklet with an essay by Chris Alexander, a short biography of Umberto Lenzi, and and extended filmography.

Nightmare City Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Despite the claims of some, Nightmare City isn't the worst of the post-Zombi 2 Italian zombie movies, but it awful by any metric other than the so-bad-it's-good scale. Fortunately, on that one, it's nearly off the charts. Quentin Tarantino has long sung the film's praises, and it's not hard to see why—it's over-the-top, it makes little sense, and it perfectly encapsulates one strain of the trashy euro-grindhouse horror for which he's so fond. (You may have already put two and two together and realized that Tarantino named one of his Inglourious Basterds after the film's star, Hugo Stiglitz.) RaroVideo's Blu-ray release looks decent and is well-equipped with special features—it includes a 50-minute interview with director Umberto Lenzi—so if fun/bad zombie movies are your thing, this one is a no-brainer.