DVD-2 34 BLUE UNDERGROUND TO MY GREAT shame, I'd never ...
BLUE UNDERGROUND
TO MY GREAT shame, I'd never been that big a fan of Lucio Fulci's gut-munching masterpiece, Zombie. I loved zombie pictures in general, but this one, for some reason, left me cold. The new Blue Underground edition of the film, however, has completely turned me around.
The movie was released in 1980 under the Italian title, Zombi 2. The "2" was added to make it look like a sequel to the previous year's Dawn of the Dead-which, in Italy, had been called Zombi. Fulci's movie, which had been in production before DOTD came out, was in no way a sequel-though it borrows several elements from George Romero's original Night of the Living Dead.
After an empty yacht drifts into New York harbor, an investigative reporter (Ian McCulloch) and the daughter of the man who owned the yacht (Tisa Farrow) team up to figure out what happened. This leads them to the Caribbean, where they hire a vacationing couple to sail them to the uncharted (and cursed!) island where the woman's father was last reported. There, they find an over-stressed doctor (Richard Johnson), a lot of scared locals and hundreds of hungry zombies. Whether it's a virus or voodoo that's bringing the dead back to life is never made clear. It doesn't matter-the zombies do what they're supposed to.
Notorious for its over-the-top gore, Zombie doesn't disappoint. People are torn open, entrails are pulled out, pointy sticks are shoved through eyeballs in close-up.
Although the "zombie vs. shark" underwater battle doesn't quite live up to its promise-how could it?-the last five minutes of the film are pretty spectacular, as fine an ending to a zombie picture as I've seen since Romero's 1968 original.
It ain't The Godfather, no, but it accomplishes what it sets out to accomplish, and does so with panache.
I'm not sure what turned me around on Zombie. I'd seen it half a dozen times previously and was left unimpressed every time. But this time things were different. The plotline is still thin, the acting and dialogue still nothing to write home about. But it still sucked me in. In the case of all those previous viewings, I'd been watching washed-out, grainy prints with bad sound, and was more than willing to blame this on bad filmmaking. The new Blue Underground print is gorgeous (well, considering what you're watching). The picture is razor sharp, the colors are vibrant. There are no annoying distractions. Maybe that's all I needed.
The package is a little slim compared with previous BU releases-some trailers and radio spots and a lot of posters, stills and promo materials, but that's okay. In a case like this, the picture itself, blood-drenched as it is, is all you really need anyway.
JIM KNIPFEL