Nightmare City (1980) 21st Century Distribution/Horror RT: 92 minutes No MPAA rating (graphic violence and gore, nudity, grotesque images) Director: Umberto Lenzi Screenplay: Piero Regnoli, Tony Corti and Jose Luis Delgado Music: Stelvio Cipriani Cinematography: Hans Burman Sanchez Release date: November 30, 1984 (Philadelphia, PA) Cast: Hugo Stiglitz, Laura Trotter, Maria Rosaria Omaggio, Francisco Rabal, Sonia Viviani, Eduardo Fajardo, Stefania D’Amario, Ugo Bologna, Sara Franchetti, Manolo Zarzo, Tom Felleghi, Pierangelo Civera, Achille Belletti, Mel Ferrer. Box Office: N/A
Rating: ***
To start, Nightmare City is NOT a zombie movie. According to its director Umberto Lenzi (Cannibal Ferox), the Italian-made horror film is a “radiation sickness movie”. Its deformed creatures are humans that have been mutated by radiation. It makes them super strong and super fast. They feed on the blood of the living. Their condition is transferable. They can only be killed by a bullet to the brain. But they’re not zombies… or vampires, for that matter.
Now that we’ve cleared that up, let’s talk about Nightmare City, a grisly horror flick from Italy that plays like a disaster movie. It played briefly in Philadelphia near the end of ’84 under the title City of the Walking Dead. It was a heavily edited version that ran 88 minutes. Damn US censors! This is definitely a scary movie that should have been released with a “No One Under 17 Admitted” policy in lieu of an official MPAA rating. I didn’t get a chance to see it at the movies, but I did catch the R-rated version on video a few years later. I wasn’t impressed. Then I purchased Nightmare City in its entirety on DVD- thank you, Blue Underground! It made a difference. While still not great, it has enough spurt and splatter to make it worthwhile.
Reporter Dean Miller (Stiglitz, Night of 1000 Cats) witnesses something terrifying at the airport while waiting to interview a scientist about a recent accident at a nuclear facility. An unmarked plane makes an emergency landing prompting police and military personnel to respond. They order the occupants out of the craft. The doors open and a horde of not-zombies spill out. They kill everybody on the tarmac while Miller and his cameraman film the whole thing. They manage to make it back to the TV station where Miller prepares to alert the public with a special report broadcast. He’s stopped by his manager who’s been ordered by the government to keep a lid on the news in order to prevent a large-scale panic by the people of the unnamed European city. As if they were acting on cue, the not-zombies attack the station and claim more victims.
While military leader General Murchison (Ferrer, Eaten Alive) tries to come up with a way to defeat the unstoppable monsters, a handful of characters fight to survive the not-zombie onslaught. Miller heads straight to the hospital to find his wife, doctor Anna (Trotter, Obscene Desire), and leave the city. Of course, an attack happens while he’s there. Murchison sends one of his men to bring his daughter Jessica (D’Amario, Cyclone) and her husband Bob (Civera, The Conformist) to safety at military HQ but the couple has other ideas. Major Holmes (Rabal, Treasure of the Four Crowns) phones his wife Sheila (Omaggio, Cop in Blue Jeans) to tell her to lock up, not leave the house and not let anyone but him in. This woman is obviously a genius. She lets her friend Cindy (Viviani, Women’s Camp 119) in when she comes knocking. Also, she forgets to secure the coal door in the basement. Guess what happens next. RIGHT! Both ladies go to the dark basement where the inevitable happens. Good thing the not-zombies don’t feed on human brains. They’d starve.
I’ll be honest. I wish Nightmare City had more of the crimson stuff splashing around. While it has a fair amount, I expect more from an Italian horror movie. What it does have is pretty cool though. Somebody gets an axe to the head. Another person has the top of their head blown off by a gunshot. Somebody loses an arm. A woman has her eye gouged out. Another woman’s breast is sliced off. That’s on top of all the shootings, stabbings, throat-slashings and blood drinking. The makeup effects are okay. Since the walking dead in Nightmare City aren’t technically zombies, it’s okay that they’re not made up to look like rotting corpses in various stages of decomp. Instead they look like sick people with bad burn marks on their faces. It looks cheap, but how many of these spaghetti horror flicks are big-budget affairs? The answer is NONE. On the funny side, one of the not-zombies looks like the bald Right Said Fred guy.
Okay, so the plot makes no sense. It feels cobbled together from other similar horror and disaster movies. The English-language dubbing is bad, the acting worse and the dialogue atrocious. You wouldn’t believe some of the lines the actors are forced to say. When I think about it, pretty much everything said in Nightmare City sounds stilted and idiotic. Therefore, I’m not going to provide choice quotes. Any random piece of dialogue will suffice.
At times, Nightmare City is riotously funny and it’s not on purpose. Take the out-of-nowhere disco dance number. The program interrupted by Miller’s special report is some music show where hot chicks and gay guys dressed in neon-blue spandex shake their booties (and everything else) to generic synthesized disco music. They’re the first to go when the not-zombies attack. I also got a few laughs out of Dr. Anna’s conversation with a teenage patient worried that he’ll lose his leg in an explosion before he’s able to play soccer again. It’s funny because it has NOTHING to do with how he’s bumped off later. Well, that and the fact that he looks five years past his teens.
Of the ending, I’ll only say it’s one of the biggest cop-outs I’ve ever seen. I’d even call it an anticlimax. If nothing else, it gives Nightmare City an extra element of “D’OH!” Let’s call it the Homer Factor. It’s a bad movie alright, but I still like it. Blame it on my weakness for bloody 80s horror flicks and badly dubbed Italian-made genre movies. Lenzi fuses the two things together to create something not at all original yet unlike anything you’ve ever seen.
SPECIAL NOTE: I used the US poster for City of the Walking Dead for nostalgic reasons. It’s the one I remember seeing on display at the old City Line Theater as a coming attraction. Never let it be said I’m not sentimental.
