‘The boat can leave now. Tell the crew…’
Horror is a weird genre. If I tried to make a non-horror fan watch Zombie Flesh Eaters they would be utterly baffled as to how anybody could enjoy it. The acting is inconsistent and compounded by the fact that all dialogue is dubbed (as was the way for all Italian-produced films of the era), the plot is either incoherent or non-existent, the camera work amateurish. How to explain that it is all these disparate elements that make Zombie Flesh Eaters such a treat…
Zombie Flesh Eaters (or Zombi 2 depending on where you are watching it) takes the humble zombie movie back to its voodoo roots. Peter West (Ian McCulloch) an intrepid journalist joins forces with Anne Bowles (Tisa Farrow), an increasingly frantic young woman, on an unlikely quest to find her father who has gone missing on a remote island. All the male actors sound like Steven Toast. All the actresses are interchangeable. It was truly a different time. A better time? Well, no. But a different time nevertheless.
Despite being a key zombie text, Zombie Flesh Eaters is actually shot and performed like a slasher movie. The way that the undead stalk their victims and the increasingly elaborate death sequences are clearly influenced by Black Christmas and Halloween, as well as the Giallo slasher films of Dario Argento and others. The difference is that what master director Lucio Fulci comes up with here is more grisly and grotesque than anything else that was around at the time. This is a true masterclass in practical effects and make-up. Fulci’s ghoulish zombies have perhaps never been bettered.
Again, if you don’t like horror films it’s unlikely you are going to be lining up for a film named Zombie Flesh Eaters but there is no denying that Fulci’s best-known work was incredibly influential in terms of this nasty little subgenre and the effects still more than hold up today.