ZOMBIE (1979) *1/2 (out of four) Image A Sound B+

Buy at Amazon USA Buy at Amazon Canada or Compare Prices The Lucio Fulci apologists like to say that gore and general impropriety are the raisons d'être of his work, not storytelling, but there's a built-in fallacy to that implicitly macho challenge: it presumes that his films are light on narrative when in fact it's narrative drive that they lack. Purportedly inspired by Jacques Tourneur's I Walked with a Zombie, Fulci's Zombie--in which cipher heroine Anne Bowles (Tisa Farrow, Mia's inexpensive sister) journeys with ace journalist Peter West (Ian McCulloch) to the necromantic island of Matool because her father's boat docked in New York without him--is almost pure tedium, something you can tell just by listening to fanboys rhyme off its so-called virtues. Yes, it's got a cool scene where a zombie grapples with a shark (I still don't know how (or why) that was done), and another where a woman gets a wooden splinter through the eye (Fulci's late-career imprimatur), and another where a maggot-infested corpse suddenly awakens from a lengthy dirt nap--Fulci's a quasi-pornographer in that he steals resonance by being extreme. For a renowned entry in the satire-compatible cinema of the undead, especially one that was promoted in its homeland as a sequel to George Romero's vital Dawn of the Dead, Zombie is egregiously synthetic, with the cruel twist of fate that befalls our heroes in the closing moments traceable to Fulci's well-known antipathy for New York and therefore coming off as more of the same misanthropy that informs the Grand Guignol set-pieces rather than the neo-Serling irony that is the sub-genre's métier. Blue Underground reissues Zombie on DVD in an apparently definitive 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen presentation; this is one of those transfers that won't be appreciated by newcomers to the film, but anybody who's had previous experience with Zombie on home video will marvel at the clarity of the image. Radiant is the word, despite the occasional scratch and patches of pronounced grain. This is also the first time that the film's Italian audio has been made available domestically (in Dolby Digital 5.1 and original mono, no less), though it hardly impacts the performances, which are post-synched no matter the preferred language option. Although both the English and Italian 5.1 remixes show un-Fulci-like restraint, they provide an excellent platform for Fabio Frizzi and Giorgio Tucci's trite but fitfully engaging score. Extras include: international and U.S. theatrical trailers for Zombie (surprisingly, the American one is much artier); a pair of TV spots and a quartet of radio spots for the film; a Zombie-centric gallery of lobby cards, soundtrack covers, video covers, publicity stills (sub-divided into three categories), and the contents of the German press book; credits for the DVD (whose worm-eye menus are actually more skin-crawling than much of Zombie); and the biased, if thorough biography of Fulci by Tracy Taylor that graces Blue Underground's other Fulci titles. Media Blasters has concurrently released a 25th Anniversary Edition of the film under its Italian name (Zombi 2) that claims to contain a longer cut mastered from elements in comparable condition--our knowledge of this 2-disc set is limited to hearsay.-Bill Chambers Running Time 92 minutes MPAA Not Rated Aspect Ratio(s) 2.35:1 ONLY, 16x9-enhanced; Languages English DD 5.1, Italian DD 5.1, English Dolby Surround, Italian Dolby Surround, English Mono, Italian Mono; CC No; Subtitles English; DVD-9; Region Zero; Blue Underground

Find in that a rationale for why George Lucas fills me with bile. It's one thing that he's something of an asshole savant who fell backwards into an archetype by the good graces of his talented friends--it's another that he continues to fiddle with his original Star Wars trilogy. The films don't really belong to him anymore once they belong to us, you see, and the lack of respect he's showing to our memories and pleasures is worse than just larceny, it's something as indecent and invasive as emotional rape. If you grew up with those films, you understand; if you didn't, you liked Episode I. So try to remember that as I approach Lucio Fulci's Contraband and Conquest on DVD after having sampled from his supernatural films (led there initially by an admiration of the early films of Dario Argento and George Romero), I'm doing so from the perspective of a half-reformed mocker. I'd like to tear down these bits of dreck, but there's something really ugly going on in them that requires a more serious treatment. I don't think Fulci is John Waters--I think Fulci means what he says. And a zealot with a platform for his convictions is the most dangerous kind.

Fulci is manipulation whittled down to its crudest elements. When Satan births a serpent at the beginning of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, those in the know flashed back to the opening moments of Fulci's Conquest as a serpent rears up--and phallically--next to a bronze-masked fertility goddess. Gibson's (and DP Caleb Deschanel's) motif is of expulsion, Fulci's of violation, but the trick is the same. Blood rites, snakes in the garden, the despoiling of innocence, and the betrayal of civilization. What follows in both Gibson's film and Fulci's is a period fantasy leaking blood and viscera, scored with drama and shot in operatic slow-motion: tales of martyrs and heroes, of battles against the unclean (more suggested in Gibson's film as a steely-eyed, newly-risen saviour gets ready to rock), and, in their different/same ways, reduced to the barest elements of conflict-action-resolution, repeat. One's subtitled, the other's dubbed--both indifferently crib from a multiplicity of source mythologies and translations. There's no fruit in looking at Conquest as a Christ parable, but there's endless fruit in looking at The Passion of the Christ as a big-budget version of an exploitation/snuff film, packed to the rafters with disturbing suggestions about societal order (gays suffer a lot at the hands of Gibson's fantasies--women, mostly, at Fulci's), and flying in under the radar of social acceptability where Fulci's films have been relegated to the fanatic's collection and the last independent movie store in your state. To say that The Passion of the Christ is the most subversive exploitation film to hit American theatres maybe ever is the least that you could say about it.

Conquest on the other hand is all but forgotten, resurrected by Blue Underground in a presentation that should warm the hearts of Fulci completists everywhere. The story is simple--reductive, even--as Neanderthal-browed Mace (Jorge Rivera) teams up with Rick Springfield-haired Ilias (Andrea Occhipinti), with Mace wielding nunchucks and Ilias a badly-composited bow-and-arrow-cum-lightsaber as they quest across the land looking to kill the abovementioned bronze-masked fertility goddess and her legion of sort-of werewolves. Along the way, many women are killed (one torn apart like a stone crab), almost all of them naked at the moment of their destruction, and a lot of mumbo-jumbo about nothing much at all is spewed as the justification for it.

There's no shortage of misogynistic wonks in the movies, just as there's never been a shortage of puerile, exploitative flicks to serve as a conduit to misanthropic flights of fancy, but upon further reflection, Fulci seems to me to be the most parasitic sort of creep. He leeches onto successful genres (the giallo, the Italian supernatural, the American slasher, the spaghetti western, the Golan-Globus sword-and-sorcery fantasy, the gangster flick, and so on) and produces shadow versions of them teeming with his commentary on what he supposes are the audiences for those flicks. He presumes a lack of sophistication, and his films are like cruel caricatures of popular genre work. Fulci doesn't work in any genre, he sneers at every genre--and the foulest blow is that he hasn't the skill to make his disdain sting. He's the idiot you find yourself having an argument with; the fact of the dialogue reduces you. The monologue by David Carradine's Bill in Kill Bill, Vol. 2 wherein he details how Clark Kent is the alien Superman's commentary on the human race could be transplanted onto an analysis of Fulci's career: Fulci's movies are bumbling messes of astonishingly bad camerawork (there are more "dramatic" zooms in his work than in the entire run of "Starsky & Hutch") spiced liberally with his thoughts regarding how women are meant to be pierced in any number of ways to fuel the purpose, good or vengeful, of men. And he poises them right at the cusp of a breaking trend, gaining them notoriety by association, often as the "worst of" or the "most outrageous example of" a specific movement.

Conquest looks like it was shot through a screen door--if there's lighting, it's backlighting, and if there's atmosphere, something must be on fire. There's some good gore in it, something for which Fulci has a deserved reputation, but it's also only enjoyable if you're there to take the piss out of it with a bunch of friends. The danger with that in this instance, though, is that I suspect Fulci welcomes such a response--adding, as it does, to his own feelings about the topic of film as expressed by his contributions to the medium. When you laugh, you're laughing with him. As you're laughing, he's slipping in a lot of imagery of women being tortured to death by rape, intimate dissection, and an invitation to leer at their sexual abuse and suffering at the hands, in this instance, of animals. It all floats in there under the radar, lumped in with the high cheese factor as "forgivable" in the grand scale of its florid incompetence. The only reason that The Passion of the Christ is more subversive is that more people are seeing it and, by extension, worshipping it.

Contraband (known as The Smuggler on bootleg American copies) is technically the superior film. Sprung more from a tradition of blaxploitation than from Coppola's cosa nostra, it has a certain seventies retro charm to it. It's not saying much to say that it might be Fulci's best-directed picture, reminding for all the world of the video for The Beastie Boys' "Sabotage" by Spike Jonze. Luca (Fabio Testi, a cross between George Lazenby and Jeremy Irons) is a cigarette smuggler in the Naples underground, pulled into a turf war with encroaching drug lords who kill his brother, then kidnap/sodomize his wife. To demonstrate their brutality to the audience, the baddies take a blowtorch to the side of a woman's face; to demonstrate Fulci's disdain for his women characters, he doesn't show the penetration in the rape, but he does show in intimate, scatological detail the humiliation, terror, and pain of the victim. There's no other way to portray rape, I'd argue, though if you must portray it after all, do it respect in all its gory detail. Neither is there resolution for the female character afterwards--this thing that has been done to her is essentially an affront to the hero, victim be damned.

The rest of the piece is the typical stuff, tied together more or less coherently by Fulci this time around, as Luca mills around in his bucolic circle before being drawn into a battle not of his choosing by bestial rivals. The incursion of the rival gangs and the summary execution of the offending godfathers follows in bare structure the process of The Godfather, but it's gone through Fulci's filter here, reduced to blank declarations of machismo and the same ridiculous series of assassinations ad nauseum. The only innovations to the formula are the inventive ways that Fulci finds to torture even incidental women characters--but again, that misogyny is clothed in several layers of nostalgic funk. While it's easy to dismiss from a modern perspective, in a film from 1980, there comes a point when patronizing the values of "the past" becomes a dangerously flimsy framework for a defense.

No avatar of feminist causes (remaining a staunch fan of Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch), I still think Fulci lacks wit, skill, and, most of all, respect for his betters and the legacy that has made his films possible. He is the worst kind of enfant terrible, armed with a bestial cunning and taste and intent on demonstrating his disdain with an insistently predictable parade of cheap rip-offs that use schlock and celluloid catcalls as camouflage for his ape mentality. Fulci has a message: movies are stupid, while women are scary and need to be punished with phallic weapons and Promethean fire. I'm increasingly of the opinion that Fulci is flipping me the giant bird whenever I sit down to watch his films. To my way of thinking, no one who studies filmmaking under Luchino Visconti and Michelangelo Antonioni arrives at movies this bad accidentally. So here's one back at you, Lucio.

Conquest comes to DVD in the best possible video transfer, given the way the film was shot. It looks horrible, in other words, but I can't really blame the telecine operators for that--any movie that makes Gates of Heaven look like it was shot by Greg Toland is among the ugliest films ever made. Presented in a 1.85:1 anamorphic transfer, Conquest, for what it's worth, suffers from no obvious digital artifacting problems, which strikes me as something like a minor miracle. A Dolby Surround soundmix takes Claudio Simonetti's (of Goblin fame) score and squeezes it tinnily through the front mains, but let's face it, Simonetti's work on this stillbirth is really just awful. Garbage in, garbage out. Perhaps sensing that there's not much there, there, Blue Underground provides just the U.S. and international trailers (both clean and in widescreen, the latter with a good deal of nudity and gore), still galleries for posters (5), lobby cards (17), the four-page promo booklet, and four video box covers, and a nice Fulci bio written by Tracy Taylor.

Contraband receives a similar treatment: a 1.85:1 anamorphic video transfer that looks a little washed-out, especially in the outdoors scenes. Aside from that and some obvious degradation in a few insert shots, the things that can be controlled in upgrading the original into the digital age were by all appearances controlled. The Dolby 2.0 mono audio mix is excellent as well, as there are no hisses or sparks in the dubbing and Fabi Frizzi's classic porn score comes through righteous and funkadelic. The disc is a little light on extras, blessedly so in my opinion: Mark Wickum of Anchor Bay fame chimes in with his standard mini-biographical masterpiece, a long essay on Fabio Testi; Tracy Taylor's piece on Fulci returns to round out the platter.-Walter Chaw

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