directed by Umberto Lenzi
runtime: 92 mins
Zombies? Vampires?? ZOMPIRES??? Oh my.
Crazed, irradiated men that look like an army of burnt Toxic Avengers spill from an unauthorized aircraft onto the landing strip with axes and shit! They also mow down military fools with Uzis! Reporter Dean Miller (a baggy-eyed Hugo Stiglitz) looks on. It isn’t looking like his TV interview will be taking place today. Instead he must reconvene with his wife, Dr. Anna Miller (Laura Trotter, looking like she could be Blake Lively’s mother), and attempt to flee the city that has been overrun by the bloodthirsty horde.
If exposition were measured in meters then the DVD for Nightmare City would come with a shitty 26.2 sticker on its cover. The rest of the film is a gory and ludicrous Umberto Lenzi heyday that should satiate most gore-hounds. Hospitals, churches, amusement parks, TV studios recording disco music dance shows, helicopters, nothing is safe from sprinting knife zompires. Especially not boobs. They like themselves some boobs.
Dean and Anna experience an existential awakening during a moment of reprieve during their escape. They stop at a little gas station and have some instant coffee, and Anna explains that they have been shortsightedly living their lives in the concrete jungle. Dean waxes that it took all of this chaos to happen for them to realize this fact. Then they throw a Molotov cocktail at an ambulance.
There, carnage goes on. Zombie/Vampires with burnt marshmallow faces leave piles of bodies in their wake wherever they go. My favorite part is when Hugo Stiglitz throws a gun at a zombie. Then they climb a roller-coaster and escape dangling from a helicopter. Anna falls and kinda dies. Then there’s a bollocks twist and an ending that would ruin the whole movie for the more casual moviegoer, but it’s delightfully stupid and cements Nightmare City as a supreme piece of schlock.
The nightmare becomes reality…
8/10
Stay slime, and be rad at all times
-Rat
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