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"Monsters created by monsters" on a Madrid jaunt, Camus according to Umberto Lenzi and no mistake. The pestilent Nosferatu vessel in the age of atomic spills becomes an unmarked military aircraft, from its belly surge hordes of mutated fiends with abnormal force and quite literally bloodthirsty. No walking dead, the contaminated can run, shoot machine-guns, and tear the shirts off buxom starlets before biting their necks—raging eyes and teeth behind an oatmeal mass of charred welts and pustules. "A high degree of radioactivity," a scoop for the conscientious TV reporter (Hugo Stiglitz) and an interrupted shift for his wife (Laura Trotter) at the hospital. (One maniac helps himself to plasma bottles in the surgery ward, another goes straight to the source in the patient's wound.) The design is half Irwin Allen and half Weekend, spacious enough to accommodate gruff general (Mel Ferrer), libertine major (Francisco Rabal), morbid sculptress (Maria Rosaria Omaggio), and young newlyweds determined to enjoy their damn holiday in the middle of the apocalypse. "That sounds like science-fiction." "Metaphysics, if you want." From the network studio to the top of the rollercoaster, a spreading vampiric madness filmed by Lenzi with monstrous zest and vehemence. The cruel adjustments to the new decade include the church sanctuary from War of the Worlds, only now with an infected priest who's bludgeoned with a communion chalice. A dab of Kienholz in the dripping knife on the clay visage, horrors perpetually dreamed up and ground down, "part of the vital cycle of the human race." The gag finish is from Cornfield's The Night of the Following Day in the manner of Buñuel. With Sonia Viviani, Eduardo Fajardo, Stefania D'Amario, Sara Franchetti, and Pierangelo Civera.
--- Fernando F. Croce |