Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979)

October 3, 2017

Welcome to the first LIW film post! In the seemingly endless recent downtime I have been thinking of ways to expand on and better this site and incorporating TV/film-speak into the goings on here seemed like the next logical step. LIW started in 2011 as a vinyl-only blog and initially grew to cover CD and cassettes. In 2014, it became “format free”, covering music regardless of format or whether I owned a physical copy of the release, and I started doing festival reviews but not many have been included. Anyway – from today, LIW will contain posts about film and over associated media. Cheers for sticking with LIW (although I guess the site name is irrelevant now!).

I’ve recently been on a bit of a kick to catch up on watching films that I’ve been putting off for years, and Zombie (or Zombie Flesh Eaters) was high at the top of the list. Initially, I found that the New York scenes and the scenes in the confines of the boat really didn’t really grab my attention. The scene where Anne and Peter pretend to be lovers to avoid the wrath of the policeman didn’t seem to make much sense at all, but there we go.

Things definitely get better towards the second half of the movie, helped in spades by topless scenes of Olga Karlatos as Mrs. Menard and of course, a zombie fighting a fucking shark. As the action ramps up towards the end, the zombies seem to become more and more disgusting. Absolutely fowl creatures! Fulci most definitely created the ultimate zombie; some of them are absolutely disgusting. Brilliant! Bit of a daft ending too, but I really enjoyed this film. The graininess of the footage really lent itself to the content. Classic!