Not your everyday zombies

Nightmare City (1980)

Well zombies might not be the technically right term for the infected people in this movie, but they are undead, thrive for human blood and can only be killed by a shot to the head. But that's not all, not even close. They can also run, use weapons like knifes and machine guns, fly airplanes, set up traps, cut phone and power lines and fight rather tactical warfare. But only if it's convinient for the "plot", otherwise they are just reduced to those slow moving rather dumb kinds. So they most certainly are not your everyday zombies and this movie most certainly is not one to be taken too seriously. Even though the movie focuses on the raging zombies, there is a bit of a story behind it. A reporter (Hugo Stiglitz) goes to an airport to interview a scientist about a recent radioactive leak on a nuclear power plant. However the plane carrying the scientist is full of these infected people who are a bit of a mix between zombies and vampires because of their thirst for blood, lets just call them "zombires". These zombires plan to take over the city and the reporter tries to get his wife into safety. Another thing which probably comes from their vampire side is the fact that they seem to haunt some of the people, instead of just eating them like normal zombies. But I guess that self moving lawnmover looked so spooky that they had to fit it in somehow. So yes the plot is thin and I guess so was the make-up budget as the zombie masks are mostly rather bad. The acting wasn't any better, but then again it gave me most of my laughs so I guess it was fine for this movie. The score by Stelvio Cipriani was quite far from his best, but it wasn't that bad, I guess he didn't want to waste too much time on this movie. Which I guess the director Umberto Lenzi was thinking as well as he focuses the movie on the killing and tries to get the stupid plot over as quickly as possible. I have to mention the ending, which was something ingenious in stupidity, if that even makes any sense. It was just brilliant in a corny way. Anyway, this movie is trash, but it's quite funny, so I bet I will be revisiting it again and who knows maybe eventually it will grow on me. But for now it's among the average of it's kind, the bad movies which turn into good movies because they are so funny.
55%