SHANNON’S DRIVE-IN: NIGHTMARE CITY

Shannon watches the Italian-Spanish zombie movie Nightmare City and marvels at the early days of 1980’s zombies.

Blood-thirsty, irradiated ghouls overrun a city while a TV reporter and his wife try to escape the chaos.

Director: Umberto Lenzi

Writers: Piero Regnoli, Tony Corti, Jose Luis Delgado

Stars: Hugo Stiglitz, Laura Trotter, Maria Rosaria Omaggio, Francisco Rabal, Mel Ferrer

At some point in my travels, I picked up a DVD double feature of Umberto Lenzi’s 1980 zombie movie Nightmare City paired Dario Argento’s 1985 movie Phenomena at a local library sale. This was most likely a good thing because it was one of those DVD releases with a slick modernized cover with a 2010’s horror movie aesthetic, so I wouldn’t want a poor, unsuspecting soul picking this up thinking it’s something of the modern age when in reality it’s not.

Though Nightmare City seems to be a forerunner to running zombies years before that became a thing in the 2000’s.

Reporter Dean Miller (Hugo Stiglitz) meets a scientist at an airport to interview him about a recent nuclear accident. A plane makes an emergency landing and the fun takes off when the plane doors open. A horde of people emerges in make-up resembling the remnants of a backyard mud puddle. Easy enough make-up job, just stick your head in a puddle and become a zombie!

Dean does the noble thing and flees back to the TV station to alert the public about the incident. He gets a talking to by General Murchison of Civil Defense (Mel Ferrer), due to the trouble the broadcast might have stirred up. The zombies eventually break into the studio and munch up an ‘80’s-style aerobics TV show.

Let’s point out how these zombies are different than the flesh-eaters we’re used to. First off, they don’t have the traditional zombie habit of eating flesh. Instead they drink blood, some of them even resort to drinking it out of plastic jugs as if it were Kool-Aid spiked with vodka. Even the characters are left wondering at one point if the creatures are really vampires.

These zombies also know how to use guns, which is absolutely wild. Bub from Day of the Dead has a long way to go compared to these ghouls. They also bring the sleaze as they tear people’s clothes off. The sequence at the hospital is nuts as a zombie just goes up to a nurse and rips off her uniform.

The movie goes along at a good pace, following Dean and his wife Anna (Laura Trotter) to different locations until they end up at an amusement park, which is always a great set-piece. You just got to get through all of the scenes used to pad out the movie as almost every Italian horror movie has.

Lenzi felt that Nightmare City shouldn’t be labeled as a “zombie movie,” but instead as a “radiation sickness movie.” While sharing a quiet moment together with Dean, Anna says in regards to the outbreak, “However it is not the fault of science and technology, but of man.” This quote nudges us to think more about what’s going on in the background of the craziness of the film. Nightmare City is a good afternoon snack away from reality, with the message creeping into the corners.

In 2015, Fangoria magazine announced that horror FX legend Tom Savini wanted to direct a remake of Nightmare City, with Lenzi as an associate producer. The project got as far as being funded through an Indiegogo campaign, but it seems to have either been stalled or cancelled, which is a shame. Savini taking this movie and updating it for a modern audience? Sold. It could’ve been something great with the padding taken out and some updated gore effects.

This isn’t the greatest zombie movie ever made, but if you like your Italian horror movies with added zombies, you can’t go wrong. It’s weird, sleazy, and the zombies are up for anything crazy, giving birth to the titular Nightmare City the way only these Lenzi zombies can: running, covered in mud, on a mission to drink blood and rip people’s clothes off.

Shannon Grant is a writer, performer, adventurer, and horned cryptid living in the wilds of upstate New York. Her work can be found in many small press anthologies such as A Guide to Useless Sidekicks, Catskill Chaos, and The Lizzie Borden House Anthology. She is currently at work on a vampire novella. When not writing, she can be found haunting drive-in movie theaters, karaoke bars, and looking for ghosts in the woods.

PLEASE NOTE: The views and opinions of the staff of Memento Mori Ink do not necessarily represent those of Memento Mori Ink or Crystal Lake Publishing. Thank you for understanding.