Nightmare City (1980) – Review

Nowadays, zombies (or should I say, zombies archetypes) come in all shapes and sizes. Fast ones, slow ones, smart ones, ones that can be romantic leads, ones that can be comic relief and ones that technically aren’t zombies at all (the rage infected from 28 Days Later being a good example) – however, no matter what form the lumbering undead take, they’ve always been a rather potent metaphor for the human condition as it seemingly tumbles ever closer to its own destruction.
Yes, watching our own mortality given form as a flesh eating ghoul can be quite depressing, existential stuff, but thankfully we have the insanity of the Italian zombie genre to take the sting out of it. However, while the overwhelming majority of the spaghetti undead were unabashed ripoffs of the works of George A. Romero and Lucio Fulci, someone obviously forgot to tell Umberto Lenzi that any original ideas or concepts were strictly off limits. In a wasteland usually bereft of originally, it’s time to enter Nightmare City – just be warned that not all of Lenzi’s ideas are good ones.

No nonsense reporter Dean Miller waits on a runway as an umarked military plane comes around to land in the unnamed European country where he’s been based. His assignment is to interview a scientist about a recent nuclear accident, but he soon is about to realise that a far larger story is about to find him when, out of the side of the plane, spills a gang of blank-eyed ghouls. Immediately attacking everyone in the area with weapons and drinking their blood, it seems that these beings, heavily deformed by scarring, have all been mutated by the nuclear accident and have picked up vampiric tendencies in order to make up for their bodies no longer being able to regenerate blood cells.
An understandably alarmed Dean makes a beeline to the TV station where he works with the hope of putting out an alarm, but shockingly he discovers that the military and the government have put the kibosh on any such warning, hoping to keep the “zombies” and any panic nicely contained. However, no one thought to tell the ghouls who suddenly overrun the station and mercifully interupt the filming of an awful looking dance programme. Meanwhile, the military brass responsible for the frustrating orders soon realise that their general is a bit on the corrupt side and realise that if they don’t make some sort of move, their loved ones will soon meet the same fate as those that’s on the telly.
Realising that everything’s about to get extra fucked in record time, Dean’s next port of call is the local hospital to rescue his wife, but as the ranks of the blood drinking mutant starts to swell, is there soon going to be anywhere left to run? However, most confoundingly, this is one nightmare that might prove to be exactly that… or is it?

So let’s set a few things straight at the early goings. This is, of course, an 80s Italian zombie production and therefore suffers from a clutch of issues that would usually hamper your average undead apocalypse. The first is that it possibly has one of the worst, most shitty endings I have even seen, that genuinely made me want to put my fist through the wall at how lazy I originally found it. The second is that compared to the detailed and grisly works of Tom Savini or Giannetto De Rossi, Nightmare City’s radiation scarred mutants look like they’ve smeared the faces of the extras with literal shit. Finally, as with most Italian genre efforts, anything even vaguely approaching conventional logic is hoofed out of the window in record time – however, despite all of these issues, the movie not only moves with the mindless, breakneck pace of the crack addict Olympics, but it’s a pretty badass movie about the relentless approach of the end of the world.
You can almost tell that Lenzi was either unaware of or simply disinterested in the type of zombie movies Romero and Fulci were making and pivoted accordingly, creating something more akin to Romero’s The Crazies, where infected people would swarm across a town like a tsunami of insanity while the goverment wrung their hands in an ineffectual nature. Of course, while we have Mel Ferrer’s jackass general screwing everything up by demanding that everything be suppressed from the public, Lenzi also has his bug-eyed blood drinkers take out major institutions in a very specific order in order to make a point. With the apocalypse taking the form of deranged maniacs wearing feces facials, they first hit the TV stations so communication, information and bizarre dancing programmes are no longer an option; next, they hit the hospital before spreading out across the land attack people in their very homes in order to make it feel like an actual invasion from an agressive force. Of course, it’s here where the “smart” stuff comes to a screeching halt, because let’s be honest, Italian zombie movies aren’t particularly remembered for their brains – they’re remembered because how crazy they are and believe me, Nightmare City gets pretty fucking crazy.

For a start, Hugo Stiglitz’s lead may probably be one of the most inexpressive heroes in zombie movie history, but he certainly can handle himself in an apocalypse as he drops his droning mic skills in favour of having the survival instincts of John Rambo. Elsewhere, he not only has to stay one step ahead of roving, undead bloodsuckers, but he has to do it while dragging his hysterical wife everywhere while she ruminates endlessly about society, good and evil and other such reactionary babble when she should be acting more like her husband and strafing the creatures with Uzi fire. As the film goes on, Lenzi drops in random moments of exploitation genius like a surgeon suddenly hurling his scalpel like a throwing knife mid-operation or the outlandishly lurid sight of a mutant slicing off a woman’s breast, but the film’s most advantageous aspect is it’s relentless pace which not only helps the thing manage to outrun it’s more ludicrous aspects, but manages to build up a genuine sense of dread and helplessness as mankind rapidly gets sucked round the u-bend.
However, as much as a deranged rollercoaster as Nightmare City is, with a spoiler alert fully engaged, we have to address that climax which seems solely put in place because Lenzi had no idea how to end the thing. However, not only does he have the audacity to have the whole film be revealed as a dream, but he actually starts the film over again to the point where you genuinely think for a second that there’s been a strange mistake and you’re going to have to sit through the thing all over again. It pissed me off when I first saw it, but I have to be honest, I now take perverse pleasure in watching the people I show it to get annoyed in my stead.

Yes, Lenzi’s fucked-up epic may have its pitfalls, but when compared to lion’s share of undead Italian gut crunches, it actually stands head and radiation scarred shoulders above the usual output despite that rage inducing ending. Yes, for all it’s flaws, Nightmare City remains quite the untapped resource for those lusting after a zombie adjacent adventure that muddles the rules, bathes in nihilism and moves like shit off a shovel.
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