Nightmatre City

Alternate titles : City of the walking Dead, Incubo Sulla Citta Contaminata, Grossangriff Der Zombies, Invasion by the Atomic Zombies, La Invasión de los Zombies atómicos, Attack of the Zombies.

Tagline : "Now they are everywhere! There is no escape!"

This daftly enjoyable Italian zombie film from the infamous Umberto Lenzi (Mr Cannibal Ferox himself) starts with a news report about a radioactive leak at one of country's main nuclear plants. The scientist in charge, Professor Hagenback, is supposed to be flying in to give a TV interview, and so news reporter Dean Miller (Hugo Stiglitz) and a camera crew goes to the airport to meet him.

As they arrive, they see the security forces rushing to surround an unmarked military carrier, which has just landed. So grabbing their cameras, they they go in for a closer look. But to everyone's surprise, the plane's doors suddenly open and a flood of radiation scarred zombies, lead by the aformetioned Proffessor, burst out, completely overwhelming the surrounding police and army units.

The news crew capture the spectacular scenes of mayhem on camera, but when they try to air the footage at the TV station, the Military pull the plug. But before Millar can argue the point, the zombies then attack the TV station in another gory rampage. Having just barely got out alive, Millar decides to get grab his wife, who works at the Hospital, and flee the city. Only to arrive just as the zombies turn up, and yet ANOTHER gory bloodbath ensues.

Though Miller and his wife Ann (Laura Trotter) manage to escape, they quickly fall foul of more zombies and end up fighting a series of running battles in their attempt to flee the city. As the police and Military, lead by General Murchison (played by US actor Mel Ferrer) continue to loose ground to the radioactive zombies, in several spectacularly violent battles.

This is one of those films that you either love or hate, zombie lovers and euro-horror fans will undoubtedly love it, whilst fans of mainstream American horror will undoubtedly loathe it (lets face it, it's no Dawn of the Dead). Don't be put off, whilst the films relatively low budget is rather apparent (ill fitting uniforms, rough acting, poor dubbing etc...) it more than makes up for this with it's fast pace and graphically gory content in which we get to see zombies hacking at peoples faces with various gardening tools, gouging peoples eyes out with pokers, and hacking off women's breasts with kitchen knives. Great Stuff!!!!

Overall Marks : 6/10.

Terrifying Trivia

• Director Umberto Lenzi really wanted to hire either Franco Nero or Fabrio Testi for the lead role, but with it being a Mexican co-production, the producers insisted on Hugo Stiglitz (despite his wooden performance) as he was a well known star there at the time, and they wanted to be able to sell the film there.
• The basic idea for the film came from an incident that happened in Northern italy in 1976, known as the Seveso Disater. Where an explosion at a Chemical plant released a cloud of toxic gas into the surrounding area, causing horrendous skin burns to anyone that that came into contact with it. The incident is currently ranked 8th in the list of the worst man-made environmental disasters.
• Mel Ferrer, who plays General Murchison, filmed Nightmare City during a period he spent appearing in European films during the late 70's/early 80's. His other euro-horror credits include "Big River Alligator", and Lenzi's "Eaten Alive" (aka Mangiati Vivi, Emerald Jungle). He has appeared in numerous other low budget horrors, including Toby Hooper's "Death Trap" (Eaten Alive), though he's probably best known for appearing in 80s TV show "Falcon Crest".
• The film supposedly takes place in an unspecified American city, but was actually filmed in and around Madrid.
• Umberto Lenzi says he considers the monsters in this to be Vampires, as opposed to Zombies. But whose need to ingest blood is to replace the radiation damaged blood cells in their body. Despite this, the film is still widely regarded as a zombie movie and is considered to be the first example of fast running zombies. Lenzi has also claimed that Danny Boyle borrowed heavily from this when he made "28 Days Later".
• Quentin Tarantino is a huge fan of the film, so much so, that he named one of the characters in his film "Inglorious Basterds" Hugo Stiglitz, after the lead actor in this.
• The special effects crew started at 3am to make up the extras into zombies, so that at 10am they were all ready for the scene where they burst out of the transport plane.
• Director Lenzi actually makes a cameo appearance in the film, as the news reporter during the intro.
• The film was released on UK video in the early 80s by VTC, which cut just over 1min of the gorier footage. Sablecan re-released the film in 1986, but this version had over 3minutes of gore cut by the BBFC. Anchor Bay got the film passed uncut in 2002 and all UK Disc releases since then have been of the full uncut version.
• The scenes at the airfield were filmed at Zaragoza Civil Airport in Spain, using a transport plane borrowed from the Military Base next door. Lenzi did not have permission to film at the neighbouring Military airfield, but needed some shots of the Military aircraft. So he set up a scene using a fake camera, pointing away from the Military side of the airfield, whilst secretly filming the Military aircraft out of the back window of one of the vans.

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