Paura nella città dei morti viventi (1980)

... aka: City of the Living Dead
... aka: Ein Zombie hing am Glockenseil (Zombie Hung on a Bell Rope)
... aka: Fear in the City of the Living Dead
... aka: Frayeurs (Fears)
... aka: Gates of Hell, The
... aka: Pater Thomas (Father Thomas)
... aka: Zombiernes by (Zombie City)

Directed by:
Lucio Fulci

In a small New England town, priest Father William Thomas (Fabrizio Jovine) hangs himself in a cemetery. Meanwhile, in New York City, psychic Mary Woodhouse (Catriona MacColl) and some of her colleagues are having a séance. Mary has visions of the suicide and of a zombie rising from the grave, freaks out, breaks the link and keels over onto the floor dead. When police show up at the scene, they're told she was scared to death. Not buying into the story, wisecracking journalist Peter Bell (Christopher George) decides to look into matters. He goes to the cemetery, rescues Mary from being buried alive when she miraculously springs back to life and then accompanies her to a friend's apartment to learn all about a prophecy contained in the Book of Enoch, a religious text written over 4000 years ago. According to the book, the gates of hell will open somewhere in a small town and mankind will be wiped out because no dead body will ever be able to rest in peace again. The only remedy to the situation is closing the gates before All Saint's Day.

Back in Dunwich, strange things are afoot. Winds are atypically strong, the town is enveloped in a cloud of “dust” (fog), windows and mirrors shatter on their own, walls crack open and sometimes bleed and cute little kittens attack their owners. Even worse, the dead priest has returned from the grave and now has supernatural powers that he doesn't hesitate using against the townsfolk, who are rumored to be descendants of “Salem witch burners.” He starts out by force feeding pretty young Emily (Antonella Interlenghi) a mouthful of worms and muck. During the film's most memorably gross bit, he appears before a pair of necking teens and squeezes the brains right out of the guy's head after making his girl puke up all of her internal organs. Others disappear or start turning up dead and the recently deceased return to life and add to the army of the undead. At a mortuary, an old lady kills a thieving mortician. Emily returns as a pizza-faced zombie to haunt her parents and kid brother. And so on and so on.

Since Mary saw “Dunwich” written on a tombstone in one of her visions, she knows just where to go. Peter, despite his skepticism, decides to tag along. I'd like to say the two are in a big hurry to get there considering a zombie apocalypse and the fate of all mankind life is at stake. But nope. With just 48 hours to find the town (which isn't even on a map), the two decide to flirt, act casual about the whole ordeal and even take a detour to sample some fine regional cuisine. Getting directions from another priest in a nearby town, the two finally make it to their destination, but not until many have died and everything's pretty much gone to (literal) hell. Our heroes eventually team up with town shrink Gerry (Carlo De Mejo) and one of his patients, neurotic painter Sandra (Janet Agren), in an effort to close the gates. The four get showered with maggots at one point and the big finale takes place in an underground tomb and some catacombs.

This is one of the key titles on Fulci's filmography that helped turn him into a cult director during the early days of home video. Like most of the director's other works, it drags at times (particularly around the midway point), some scenes work better than others and there are about 1001 zoom shots into eyeballs, but it's also atmospheric, gloomy and gory. Nicely shot by Sergio Salvati (who shot all of the director's films around this time), this also boasts an excellent score from Fabio Frizzi and a more straightforward and less confusing story line (co-written by Dardano Sacchetti) than some of Fulci's other efforts.

Italian horror / exploitation fans should recognize much of this cast. Aside from those already mentioned, small roles are also played by future director Michele Soavi, Fulci regular Daniela Doria (who almost always gets the best death scene in these things), Venantino Venantini, Luciano Rossi, Robert Sampson and Fulci himself as a pathologist. Giovanni Lombardo Radice (aka “John Morghen”) has a memorable bit as the slow-witted town outcast whose girlfriend is an inflatable doll and who may or not be a sex predator. He also meets a memorable demise when the father of one of his supposed victims pushes a huge electric drill through his head (an excellent effect). American porn actor Michael Gaunt also turns up playing a gravedigger in one scene alongside Percy Pirkanen of Cannibal Holocaust fame.

Here in America, this was picked up by Motion Picture Marketing, who wanted to release it as Twilight of the Dead with ad art copying Romero's DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978) until they were served a cease and desist order. It was then re-titled The Gates of Hell, great new posters were made and it played theaters unrated and uncut in 1983. On home video, it was issued the following year by Paragon, also unrated and under the same title. Later VHS, DVD and BR releases (from Anchor Bay, Arrow, Blue Underground, etc.) used the City of the Living Dead title. The full running time of the uncut version is 93 minutes, though some countries (like Australia) received a shorter cut missing some of the gore.

★★1/2

Stay Awake, The (1987)

... aka: Pánico en la residencia (Panic in the Residence)
... aka: Stay Awake - Nacht des Grauens (Stay Awake – Night of Horror)

Directed by:
"John Bernard" (Johan Barnard)

In 1969 in America, ponytail-sporting Satanist serial killer William John Brown (Lindsay Reardon) is convicted of murdering and sexually assaulting eleven young female victims and is sentenced to death. Before dying in the gas chamber he warns (in a demon voice) “You fools cannot kill me! I am the Angel of Darknessssss!” and promises to return one day in the near future to kill off all the children of everyone responsible for his demise. Nineteen years later at St. Mary's School for Girls in “Europe,” William's spirit arrives and causes all kinds of problems for a handful of young tootsies staying there. It slams doors, topples over furniture, turns lights on and off, kills lab rats and other animals outside, knocks a framed photo of the Virgin Mary off a wall and makes a boombox blow up and melt during aerobics class. Despite all of the weirdness, eight schoolgirls decide to carry on with plans to have a “stay awake” in the gymnasium where they will stay awake all night in order to raise money for their school.

Overseeing the evening's festivities is science teacher Trish Walton (Shirley Jane Harris), who's recently noticed some “vandalism” at the school and has elderly caretaker Mr. Stark (Ken Marshall) looking into it. At the sleepover, the girls watch horror movies, eat junk food, talk about boys, play volleyball, play a prank on their teacher by pretending to be dead, sneak in a few cigarettes (rebels!) and start exiting the gym for one reason or another, where they disappear after encountering the evil spirit. Said spirit sometimes takes regular human form and sometimes takes the form of a rat-headed rubber monster with large red eyes, claws and a long tongue it uses to grab or strangle victims with. In between monster sightings, there are gratuitous POV shots of the spirit floating around the school making weird noises, which include laughing, groaning, gurgling and mimicking a baby and a little girl. The sound mix on this film is loud and incredibly obnoxious, by the way.

Any time someone knocks the Slumber Party Massacre series, I always point them in the direction of something like this so they realize they didn't know how good they actually had it. The SPM movies are dumb but entertaining, fast paced, fairly well made for what they are and provide viewers with the blood and nudity they actually want to see. This movie provides viewers with absolutely nothing they want to see. None of the kills are memorable and most are bloodless, shot in dim light or take place completely off screen. Even worse, this has perhaps the all time worst group shower scene in history. The camera focuses on the girls' faces making sensuous looks, starts slowly panning down and then suddenly cuts away before revealing so much as a hint of cleavage. You can even see the top of a bikini an actress is wearing in one instance. And then there are shots of the camera tilting up from the floor showing a foot and then a leg before stopping mid thigh. We also have a girl opening her towel to flash her friends with her back turned to the camera. You either show the T&A or you don't even bother going there. And for God's sake, turn on a fucking light so we can at least see what's going on!

The mixture of awful writing / dialogue and amateur acting ensures we could care less about any of the characters. Though the ladies who populated the SPM movies were hardly budding Meryl Streeps, they at least managed to be likable and show a bit of character. The girls here are pretty enough but they're boring and almost completely devoid of personality. Since the film lists the stars in the opening credits but not in the end credits, I even had to waste an hour of my time online stalking some of these broads so I could match the actress to the role. So for what it's worth, Tanya Gordon plays Samantha, the snobby girl who says “You're fat! Gross!” to a girl who weighs about 90 pounds. Jayne Hutton (a former beauty queen and model) plays Carrie, the sweet girl. Heath Potter plays Debbie, the bookworm. Michelle Carey (not actress Michele Carey as falsely listed on IMDb) plays Toby, the black girl. Maxine John (also in HOWLING IV) plays Cheryl, the prankster. Christobel d'Orthez (also in the 1989 “remake” of The Masque of the Red Death) plays Allison, the slutty girl who invites her boyfriend and three of his friends over so they can raid the prop room for monkey masks and then quickly be dispatched. Rounding out the group are Heilie Oeschger as Amy and Joanna Rowlands as Jennifer. Both of them are just kind of there.

Stay Awake is so pathetic that it can't even set up a basic plot. At one point the spirit claims he's there to “ravage all the young girls” because he's looking for a “bride” so he can “plant the seed of evil deep within her.” That still doesn't explain the prologue or why the demonic spirit of an American serial killer would go all the way to Europe to possess a bunch of dull schoolgirls who are in no way connected to him, his capture or his execution. Having this all take place 19 years after his execution hints that at one point they were planning on linking at least one of the girls (or perhaps the teacher) to the killer but those dots are never once connected. I also probably won't be spoiling much here but none of the girls are actually shown being killed. They simply scream at the approaching demon and are later shown possessed. And the stupid ending leaves all of their fates completely up in the air as we never learn what happens to any of them. I'd like to think they all went straight to hell and took the director with them.

Home video distributors have done a good job keeping this turkey in circulation over the years. I couldn't find a theatrical poster for the film, but IMDb claims it had a very limited big screen release here in America through MPCA. It was then issued on VHS and laserdisc by Nelson and later given a DVD release through Image. It's also been released in South Africa (where it was filmed), the UK, Germany, Spain, Japan and numerous other countries. The only known name in the credits is executive producer Avi Lerner, who's still extremely busy to this day and has nearly 300 producing credits to his name.

★