Nasty number 39 is my favourite of the lot. A film I'd read about in Dark Side magazine for years before I finally got to see it on Channel 4 late one night with a Mark Kermode introduction calling it a censorship cause célèbre. The version shown that night was the BBFC snipped and certified version and it was missing most of the juicier moments that had made it so infamous...... but there was still something about it that gripped ya. It didn't need it's moneyshots to work.
But they are of course the reason it's still adored forty years after it was released. Oh and there's a scene where a zombie fights a real shark. Yes. A real shark. It is as awesome as it sounds.
In 1978 George A. Romero directed Dawn Of The Dead, his masterpiece and the second in his trilogy of the Dead. Italian horror wunderkind Dario Argento helped Romero get financing and in return secured the international rights to the film. He also edited his own version of the film called Zombi that cut back on it's more dramatic and comedic aspects in favour of it's gory action beats and many moments of horror. His version was a success in Italy and another movie producer called Fabrizio De Angelis saw a money making opportunity and greenlit a new zombie film called Zombi 2 that he could market as a sequel to Dawn because Italian copyright law is kinda wonky like that. Lucio Fulci was brought onboard to direct a script written by Elisa Briganti & Dardano Saccheti and a legend was born. Fulci's previous experience with gory violence as seen during the climax of his 1972 giallo Don't Torture A Duckling combined with Briganti & Saccheti's old skool take on zombie legends worked absolute wonders.
A ship floats into Manhattan harbour and all onboard are dead. Except the monstrous rotting corpse that takes a bite out of the throat of an investigating cop before sinking beneath the water of the East River. The boat is traced back to Anne Bowles as it belongs to her father, who she claims is working on a Caribbean Island called Matul. A journalist investigating the boat attack teams up with Anne and both head south to the tropics to find out what has happened the man. What they find there......well, no point in fucking about is there, they find a lot of zombies. An awful lot of them.
The eye bit. Even the most casual of horror fans know about it. A zombie hand smashes through a door and grabs a screaming woman by the hair. She's dragged towards the door and her eye is slowly gouged out (in close up naturally) by a sharp piece of smashed wood. Fans went wild for it, the film's reputation was built on it. It became a video nasty in Britain because of it. People who'd usually avoid horror like the plague watched to see what all the fuss was about and found themselves pulled into a wildly atmospheric watch that had more in common with 30's and 40's horrors like I Walked With A Zombie and Boris Karloff's The Walking Dead than Romero's modern day incarnations. Here we got to see what walking, rotting flesh really looked like, we got to see them actually rise from the grave, there were no farm houses or shopping centres here to hide in, only conquistador graveyards and derelict churches. The slow but unstoppable shuffling walk of the undead, clad in Giannetto De Rossi's magnificently effective make up and soundtracked by Fabio Frizzi's doom laden but evocative soundtrack. Oh man it was a heady, eerie and brutal mix and early 80's audiences lapped it up.
The ones who really enjoyed it were the ones watching illegally. Nothing adds to a film like a touch of taboo. For it's 1979 cinema release the film was called Zombie Flesh Eaters and was shorn of 1 minutes and 46 seconds worth of blood and guts, leaving it a very tame watch indeed. Irish censors of course just flat out banned it for 32 years. VIPCO released this same version in 1980 on tape and audiences latched onto it because as mentioned earlier it's still a fine film without all it's bloodshed. VIPCO then decided to take advantage of it's popularity and the lack of rules in the as yet unregulated home video market by releasing the full uncut version 1981. UK audiences lapped it up but two years later this version marketed as the STRONG UNCUT VERSION got VIPCO into trouble during the video nasty scare of 1983. It was tried and found guilty of obscenity and the cut version was the only way UK viewers could watch it legally until 1999 when it got a DVD release with 23 seconds missing. Including the eyeball bit of course. It wasn't until 2005 that a full uncut version saw the light of day. Now there's a bells and whistles two disc version on 4K disc but this one still has a beautifully grainy VHS heart.
Did it deserve to be a nasty? No. Don't be silly. It's a zombie film.
Is it worth a watch? YES. It's brilliant.
That's the last of the 39 prosecuted nasties.
There's another 33 that weren't prosecuted. I think I might watch them all next year 😈
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