Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!
If I live to be 200 years old, I will never understand Italian horror movies in general. Much like I feel that a great deal of anime passes over me because I always feel like there are cultural elements that are assumed I would know and I don’t, Italian horror always leaves me feeling lost I am constantly under the impression that most of the movies come at the plot secondarily at best. So many Italian horror films feel like a series of loosely connected set pieces. The director has a few ideas (“Let’s have a woman literally puke up her guts! Let’s attack people with maggots! Let’s have a guy killed on a drilling lathe!”) and then tries to patch them together in a loose semblance of story. I’ve had that sense before with Italian horror, but never as much as I did with City of the Living Dead (also known as Paura Nella Citta Dei Morti Viventi).
That being the case, I’m not really sure how much sense a plot summary is going to make. At a séance in New York, a medium named Mary (Catriona MacColl) experiences a vision of a priest named Father Thomas (Fabrizio Jovine) hanging himself, which is evidently going to cause an army of the living dead to rise up. Mary collapses and does such a convincing job of this that everyone thinks she’s dead. Eventually, she’ll be saved by journalist Peter Bell (Christopher George) as she is being buried. This, clearly was an early set piece idea of Fulci’s since getting to this point means that Mary was able to convincingly appear dead to multiple doctors, make it through a funeral service, and get to the gravesite in the coffin without being embalmed. Like I said, it’s a series of set pieces that are loosely stitched together regardless of how they might make sense.
