O Pesadelo dos Mortos-Vivos

Cuidado! Desta vez, não se trata de um filme B barato, mas de uma ambiciosa coprodução internacional com cenas de multidão, helicópteros e muitos tiros de metralhadora! E até com um desfecho surpreendente no final, sublinhando a ideia do filme! O argumento é bom: há sempre qualquer coisa a acontecer, o cenário em que se movem os personagens principais está em constante mudança e a violência - aliás, descaradamente brutal e maioritariamente exercida contra mulheres - é ousadamente sádica. Mas é aí que terminam os elogios. Umberto Lenzi é um realizador de filmes ultra B, e isso sente-se na falta de medo e de ambiente, na direção dos atores e na lógica com muito buracos terríveis (dispara-se contra as criaturas com uma metralhadora e não acontece nada, mas quando se lhes metem os dedos nas portas, elas gritam como se se parissem). E as máscaras de látex são ridículas. (03/10/2003)

Umberto Lenzi repeatedly asserted that his film is not about zombies and one can only agree with him in principle when considering the behaviour of the mutant killers in Nightmare City. Nevertheless, it’s impossible to deny that this film piggy-backs on the popularity of zombies at the time, particularly the boom in Italian zombie productions kick-started by Fulci’s Zombie, which itself was made as on the back of the international box-office success of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (which was released in Europe under the title Zombi). Nightmare City persistently gives one the impression that its makers saw Fulci’s breakthrough Zombie and decided to give viewers a sort of direct sequel of that film. The main attraction is thus the spread of an apocalyptic contagion to modern metropolises, while a handful of characters strive to survive in the chaos that has arisen and stay with their loved ones. Though the resulting film radiates the filmmakers’ ambition to shoot a spectacular vision of the apocalypse with the scope of Hollywood disaster movies, it’s impossible to overlook the cack-handedness of everyone involved and their roots in exploitation cinema. What good is it to have a magnificent narrative scope when the greatest emphasis is placed on piling up the cheapest and most straightforward attractions, which make the planned epic just another in a long line of misogynistic trash flicks that revel in sequences of close-up nudity and brutal destruction of women’s bodies. (18/07/2013)

A slight air of mystification surrounded this movie, as many versions of the title contained the words "zombies" or "the walking dead", and at the same time, there are no reanimated corpses in the classic "Romero" sense. There are people who have mutated due to radiation, who drink blood like vampires and cooperate in a coordinated way, chopping heads off with a machete, and shooting with submachine guns. At the same time, when one literally translates the original Italian title, one gets no mention of the living dead (on the other hand, the Italian title partially reveals the twist at the end of the movie). That was just a few words on my slight disappointment, now to the movie itself. It is just trash. It is a poorly written and shot movie that cashes in on the success of Dawn of the Dead with terrible acting performances, awful dialogues, a complete absence of logic, and the already mentioned twist at the end, which negates all of the previous events in the movie. Also, those bulging eyes of the “infected” behind horribly made latex masks were laughable. (05/05/2019)

Tarantino's favourite zombie film, where the zombies are not actually zombies, but irradiated people with mud on their faces, axes and machine guns in their hands, driving around in cars, cutting telephone cables and ripping off the shirts of extras. Said to be the first zombie film where zombies run around and show signs of intelligence, but this was far more playfully or cleverly sketched out by other, later zombie films (Return of the Living Dead, 28 Days Later and Land of the Dead). Still, there are a few memorable scenes, such as the zombies invading a live broadcast of a typical 80s dance show or their visit to a surgery room. (18/03/2018)

It was even dumber than I expected. Bad actors, among which stands out the unbelievably crappy acting of Hugo Stiglitz, which could be boldly classified as the performance of a porn actor. The good thing is that there is always something going on in the film and boring speeches are kept to a minimum. The viewer gets to enjoy the zombies a lot, or rather the infected and mutated creatures. They're always running around, always murdering someone and, like vampires, sucking blood like maniacs with their eyes bulging. In short, a proper B-movie that constantly tempted my diaphragm with its stupidity. And the unintentionally funny twist at the very end is just the icing on the cake. (06/08/2004)