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The opening showcases Lucio Fulci's erudition with a transposition of Nosferatu's pestilent frigate to New York Harbor, deep in its bowels (centipedes on piano keys adduce a tasty note from Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie) lies the rotund ghoul caked with rot and viscera. Investigative duties fall to the tabloid reporter (Ian McCulloch) and the missing researcher's daughter (Tisa Farrow), off they head to the cursed Caribbean island. (Marimba groove gives way mid-scene to ominous drums and rattles as a native crosses himself.) "Ever heard of voodoo?" Blood experiments and communal graves for the scientist (Richard Johnson) in the makeshift infirmary, his wife (Olga Karlatos) waits back at their cottage in a bravura sequence that adds eyeball and splinter to Robbe-Grillet's Le Voyeur. The "phenomenon" is glimpsed shuffling from afar in a quite uncanny composition (breeze and smoke blow through the shantytown, a crab scuttles by in the foreground), a shock-cut reveals living corpses like soiled, gutted candles, "they seem possessed by all the devils in hell." A grindhouse distillate of Tourneur and Camus, this undead epidemic oozes demented inspiration. En route to the island, a topless scuba diver takes snapshots of underwater fauna until more beguiling specimens turn up, namely a hungry shark and a hungrier zombie biting chunks out of each other. The same lass later finds herself in a graveyard of conquistadores, one of the bodies rises out of maggoty earth (dirt falls from the lens in POV inserts) and lunges at her neck in a trancelike bit of champ contre champ. Innards under the sun, the Fulci directness. ("Keep the British out of your prose," snaps a newspaper editor played by the director.) The closing apocalypse tips its hat to Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast. With Auretta Gay, Al Cliver, and Stefania D'Amario.
--- Fernando F. Croce |