SlashBack Cinema

Zombie (1979) Worm-Eye Gore & Peak VHS Exploitation

• Ryan Dreimiller and Shanny Luft • Season 1 • Episode 40

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Summer aint over yet..join us for a tropical getaway for Lucio Fulci’s Zombie (1979) (or Zombie Flesh Eaters and also know by many other names) — the infamous Italian horror classic that brought us zombie shark-fighting, and eye-popping gore done with italian style. Join us as we break down the atmosphere, outrageous effects, and why this one still stands as a high-water mark of Euro horror.

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Shanny Luft:

This week, we're digging into luccio folcis gut churning classic zombie. It's 1979 the dead are walking, and somehow we've ended up on the worst Island vacation ever.

Ryan Dreimiller:

We're talking worms in the face zombies, the most painful splinter in horror history, and that unforgettable shark versus zombie fight.

Shanny Luft:

So grab your bug spray and maybe a machete, because things are about to get messy.

Ryan Dreimiller:

This is slash back cinema, where the past is undead and so are we.

Shanny Luft:

Let's get into this. Man, you recommended this movie. Had you ever seen it before?

Ryan Dreimiller:

No, but like, dude, that cover zombie VHS tape is, like one of the most graphic, hardcore ones ever, and kind of scared the shit out of me when I was a kid, years ago, seeing it in the video store, I think the tagline in the American version was, we are going to eat you. And, yeah, so I've never seen this. I knew about it. I knew it was pretty gruesome and it had a real cult following, but I'd never seen anything. I didn't know any of the details. So this is a fresh go for me. How about you?

Shanny Luft:

I'd never seen this movie. I'd never heard of it, even like it has a couple of famous scenes that we'll definitely get into. I wasn't even aware of those, so I was coming in completely pure, and my jaw was on the floor two moments in this movie that I just couldn't believe at one point I wrote in my notes, this is undescribable. I don't even know how we're going to communicate what happens in this movie, because some of these sequences are just wild.

Ryan Dreimiller:

Yeah, no. Gore expenses spared. With this one. I think I texted you, don't watch this one with the wife.

Shanny Luft:

Yeah, she's out of town. And so I was watching it alone. And I hate watching horror movies alone, because I get it's especially late at night, because I get creeped out, and then I hear noises, and then I start to freak myself out. But this movie, I wasn't, it wasn't super scary. I did not turn this movie off at the end and think, are there zombies in my house? I have seen other movies that actually left me unnerved, and I would not say this is an unnerving movie.

Ryan Dreimiller:

No, it's got such style foreboding. It's grisly, it's gruesome. It really, definitely has kind of this putrid factor to it. But it's not one that you're like, oh my god, yeah, the zombies coming out of the Clinton out of the closet. I think that's like something about the zombie genre. Like, I've never been concerned as a kid that actual zombies were gonna come and get me. There were definitely other things from horror movies that were to come get me, but not necessarily zombies. Yeah.

Shanny Luft:

What other things were you afraid of? What things from horror movies got to you?

Ryan Dreimiller:

Oh, man. I mean, like the supernatural shit, like things lurking in the shadow monsters, they all seemed a little bit for whatever reason, zombies never seemed. I love the genre. I've always been into comic books and the movies, but for whatever reason, it's horrific, but it's almost like this place you go to when you watch a zombie movie, that it's its own thing. But I'm not really worried about zombies happening in the real world, although serpent in the rainbow definitely creeped me out back in the day.

Shanny Luft:

But right, this movie seems right up your alley because you love zombies, you love Italians, you love one specific Italian, and this movie has it all.

Ryan Dreimiller:

Yeah, Italian horror might be my jam, man, I don't think there's a single one we've served up on slash back that I've walked away from disappointed that I've watched it. You know, fulchy, he really delivers the goods on this one. So, yeah, let's talk about the plot for this one. It kicks off with this sailboat comes to New York City. It's unmanned. They board it and, well, they go to investigate and surprise there's a zombie on the boat that proceeds to kill one of the police officers. And then they find out later that it's this woman, it's her father, his boat, and he's gone missing. So there's a reporter, this guy, Peter West, that gets involved, and they're trying to figure out what's going on. Anyway, it winds up that they take a trip to this Caribbean island where her father was to figure out what's going on. And you come to find out that there's a little voodoo happening. There's a medical doctor down there, Dr David Menard, who is trying to figure out what the source of these undead happenings are. And they all arrive on this island, and things go sideways from there is people start to come back to life as zombies. It's zombie Island. Yeah, I know you're shocked to find out there's zombies in a movie that's called Zombie, but you know, plot twist, doesn't it have a bunch of other names too. Oh, my God. You know a movie is good when I think it actually has like, 12345, it's like eight or nine different names. It was zombie, zombie two, zombie the dead walk among us, zombie flesh eaters. Voodoo. It keeps going like, you know, my god, yeah,

Shanny Luft:

and we've talked about this before, is these movies. We saw this with the other Italian movies we've seen. They're made for an international audience, and so I think they just dub them into multiple languages, and they will name them whatever. Or, I think the producers think will, like, get the most bang for the buck. So the reason it was called Zombie and zombie two, so it would seem like a sequel to was it Dawn of the Dead that came out that Night of the Living Dead? Yeah, really. Okay, yeah. So it has nothing to do with that movie, but they thought if they call it zombie two, it'll people might be tricked into thinking it's the sequel to that movie, right?

Ryan Dreimiller:

So the background, and it's so confusing because, like, there was that intersection of Return of the Living Dead, also with Night of the Living Dead, but digging into it, Night of the Living Dead as it went to get released in Europe. It got recut by Dario Argento. He did the goblin score, recut it, and it was called Zombie there and then, because of these loose copyright laws in Italy, you could position your film as a sequel to whatever that other movie was. And you know, the talents were like, oh, molto bene. Good. Good to go. Yeah. So zombie two had nothing to do with zombie or Night of the Living Dead.

Shanny Luft:

So let's you want to talk about favorite scenes. First, I feel like there are two scenes that this movie is so famous for, that's all you need to talk about. But I'm curious if there are some others that pop out at you.

Ryan Dreimiller:

I'm kind of laughing because so many good scenes.

Shanny Luft:

Yes, yeah. It is like a feast of I feel like this movie is not so much a story as it is a couple of good scenes that they strung together to make 90 minutes.

Ryan Dreimiller:

Yeah, criticisms, is it really known as a master of plot or strong narrative, but before we get in the scenes, I think one of the things that just stood out to me in this film is like, again, with the Italians, it's so much fucking style, like the soundtrack the zombies I just loved in this movie, like, like versus Dawn of the Dead and all those which these felt like old, musty corpses that had come up from the ground and been brought back to the life, like the worms coming out of the eye, the makeup, the way they were done, you could just almost like feel the dust and smell these zombies And the way they moved, I thought was kind of cool. Like, very slow and kind of like staggering, but then all sudden they would strike, like, sort of like instant attack, like suddenly there was like, Yeah, Snake Quick, quick attacks.

Shanny Luft:

Really cool. You're right, the look of these zombies, I mean, they kind of look like what you think zombies are supposed to look like, which is just like rotting corpses. But there's something weird about these particular like, masks that these actors are wearing, they look like they are coming up into the ground or something. There's a scene where that happens, and it looks like they've been buried for a while, and there's no CGI. This is 1979 so it's just, you know, rubber and latex and makeup. But there's something weird about the way these zombies look. It really is unsettling and kind of unusual compared to other zombie movies. I thought,

Ryan Dreimiller:

yeah, it definitely stands out as its own thing and approach, and in terms of the makeup and special effects, I think the guy was, the only problem with the Italian names is I butcher them, but it's gianetto derossi was the special effects guy. I thought he did a killer job on this.

Shanny Luft:

One thing I noticed about this movie that reminded me of other Italian movies we've seen is because the actors just are speaking different languages because they didn't care, because they were going to dub over everything. So some characters are speaking English, and then other people, their lips are moving, but the sound you hear is not lining up at all. I feel like sometimes in the movie, the audio sounds like people like they're in a 70s porn, especially with the like the Calypso music in the background.

Audio Clip:

Oh, Hi, there. Hi youself. Hi. How you doing? I am Peter West, and this is Ann Bowles, but you wouldn't be looking for a boat? We would.

Shanny Luft:

And then at other times, it sounds like a, like a 1980s soap opera where it's like, super melodramatic. You don't know what you're saying.

Audio Clip:

How you'd like to be able to pass me off as crazy. I'm going to tell everyone that you're the one who's crazy.

Shanny Luft:

Okay, so favorite scenes! The one--there's two scenes I want to talk to you about, but one, I happen to know something about a fear that you have. Oh, yeah. And when I saw this in the movie, I thought I cannot wait to talk to Ryan about this, because this movie is the first time we've seen your biggest fear.

Ryan Dreimiller:

It's true. Yeah, let's, let's lay that that scene out for for the listeners. And yeah, probably Gore warning, although you're listening to a hard podcast, this is pretty gross, yeah?

Shanny Luft:

So you have this anxiety about eyes being poked out, right? I remember that from like, high school, yeah,

Ryan Dreimiller:

I would walk into a hardware store and, you know, there's, there's hooks that come out right from the display rack with the pegboard they hang their items on. That was one of my fears going down and taking one of those through the eyeball. And then later in college, I remember one of the art classes we were studying the surreal. Said it was Louis bun. Well, this French filmmaker on unci An Angelo he there was a close up of, I think was a cow or horse eye, like, sliced up with this razor blade, still to this day, like, what they call that eye bleach, like that. I'll go to bed at night and see that in my, in my mind's eye, like, horrific. So, yeah, yeah. When this scene came out, I was like, Jesus Christ.

Shanny Luft:

There's a scene in this movie where a woman is hiding in like a closet, and she's holding the door shut because there's a zombie on the other side pushing against the door, and you can't get through the zombies this movie not especially strong, which I kind of like, I like, for some reason, zombies that have the strength of the human being before they became a zombie. I don't know why I like the verisimilitude there. So the zombie is just like a dude who is trying to push a door open, and he can't get it open, so he starts to, like, bash through the the wooden slats of the door. One of those wooden slats broke in such a way that it's a little pokey, and it's like facing her, and then the zombie then grabs her, and in slow motion, pulls her toward it, and the actress has to get pretty damn close to that splintery piece of board before they switch to like a mannequin or whatever. But even when they switch, it's pretty horrifying.

Ryan Dreimiller:

So grotesque, yeah, because I thought they were gonna cut away and like, oh no. He like, is like, you're seeing it all and like, I didn't want to watch, but I had to make myself watch,

Shanny Luft:

yeah, is this what you're gonna see at night when you go to bed? Is it? Was it as traumatizing, you know, unwell.

Ryan Dreimiller:

I'm okay. I'm okay. I appreciate you checking in on me. But yeah, that was that was something else, and apparently he's got a bunch of other eye things in some of his other films, so that he might have had this shared fear. We might have had a nice espresso together talking about our our fear of eyes being punctured by sharp objects. So yeah, but it did make me want to go out and get some safety glasses for mountain biking going forward.

Shanny Luft:

Okay, so that's favorite scene number one. Do you want to talk about one of your favorite scenes?

Ryan Dreimiller:

It's hard to not talk about the shark versus zombie fighting scene. Which boy you wouldn't think zombie and a shark battle would be a part of a zombie movie. Susan decides she's gonna do scuba diving by not really wearing a bathing suit. She takes it off. She's not worried about chafing, like

Shanny Luft:

She's just wearing, like, a bikini, a string Bikini Bottom, and that's top, yeah. And then she puts on the scuba gear. So yeah, then she hops in, and then for like a minute or two, it becomes like Jacques Cousteau nature documentary.

Ryan Dreimiller:

She's just swimming around, enjoying taking pictures and checking out the coral and the fish and really having a good time, until she sees the shark comes up. She's like, Oh my God, it's a shark. And then like, oh shit. And then the guy's trying to shoot the shark.

Shanny Luft:

This is, if you've seen Jaws, you know that they have a mechanical shark. They're not, not that level of special effects in a 70s Italian horror movie

Ryan Dreimiller:

with a bunch of, like, 240k yeah, this is a real fucking tiger shark.

Shanny Luft:

Yes, that he looks like he's like, eight feet long, and he's just swimming around. And so she's freaking out. And then then they ratchet it up this, it's the best scene in the movie, because you think she's gonna get eaten by a shark, but at the bottom of the water, there's a zombie hanging out down there that grabs her,

Ryan Dreimiller:

and that zombie puts the hand on her, and then she's like, What the fuck anyway. So she gets away from the zombie, and then then the zombie and the shark proceed the face off. And it's pretty unbelievable. You just need to go watch this scene you can find on YouTube. But, yeah, it's just wild. I did re watch it a couple times, and there are some sequential errors in what happens, like, essentially, the zombie is holding on to the shark and he's trying to bite the shark. Then they cut to the zombie's missing his arm, but still holding on the shark. Then they cut to the next frame where he's got his arm back, and then this shark is biting his arm off. So anyway, all that aside, it is just an amazing spectacle of filmmaking that this even happened, this battle, and it proceeds to play out with the zombie getting defeated by the shark.

Shanny Luft:

It's not just that the shark is swimming around, kind of like it was with the woman. He literally wraps his arms around the shark and then tries to bite the shark multiple times, because he's a zombie. The guy, like, grabs the fins. He's like wrestling with it. It's stunning. And the shark is like human size. It's a man sized shark, and so and the shark itself just looks kind of just once. Right away, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals would not have approved this movie. But this this shark wrangler worked with this particular shark, so he was trained not just with sharks in general, but with this shark. So they kind of knew each other. But, um, it is insane.

Ryan Dreimiller:

Digging into the lore on this the guy was Ramon Bravo, who he wasn't even credited the shark handler, so I did read a piece about kind of how that came to life and and also, folci didn't even want to do this scene. He thought it was stupid. But the producer, this guy who. Ugo Tucci was like, this is happening. And so it was actually the second camera crew with a different director that captured this, this iconic scene.

Shanny Luft:

Italians saw jaws, and they were like, hold my Prosecco. And then they get a real shark and stick a guy in a rubber mask and he and they just say, could you just act like you're biting a shark? It's insane. All right, so those are the two scenes that stuck out most to me.

Ryan Dreimiller:

It's a scene, but it kind of feeds into the last third of the movie. Was Peter and Anne take a break. They're laying on the ground. They start smooching a little bit, and then all sudden, the zombies start coming out of the ground. One grabs Susan by the hand, comes up, grabs her by the hair, and then it's this whole like scene of the zombies coming out of the ground. But that's when you see one of the zombies with the worms coming out of his eye. They're just so well done. It's got such a vibe, ton of style.

Shanny Luft:

Maybe this is a good time to then transition to stabby scores. How many zombie bites out of five are you giving? Zombie slash zombie two, slash eight other names for zombie movies.

Ryan Dreimiller:

You know, in Vermont, one of the things that indicates the quality of something up here, we don't have soft serve. We have creamies. You don't have saucers. What did you say? Soft Serve? Ice cream? Oh, soft it's not called soft serve, because called creamy. And you can tell the quality of a creamy stand by the number of e's added to the end. So it's like, if it's creamy, like, you know it's gonna be good. And sort of, I'm applying the same logic here. The fact that this movie has so many names is really an indicator of the quality of this film.

Shanny Luft:

It's zombie. Yeah, yes, on me,

Ryan Dreimiller:

the acting's questionable, although we've watched a lot of movies on this podcast that I would say the acting was better than some of the stuff we've watched. The plot was pretty straightforward, but for me, really, this movie was it was really about him delivering this kind of moody, unique take on the zombie genre, like it's got some, like, gut wrenching hardcore Gore, really stylish camera work. Like, some of that kind of, like the way the camera would Zuma and the zombie faces while they were walking, yeah, the synth set, 80s soundtrack. Like, I just thought it was really gross, but gorgeous. And I've given this one four zombie bites out of five zombie bites, Shanny, good stuff.

Shanny Luft:

Yeah, that's what I expected for you. Yeah. I, when we watch these movies, I spend a lot of the movie thinking about what my score will be, and then I'll it'll like adjust as the as we're watching, and I'm kind of wrestling with, I don't know, is this a good movie? Is it's not a good movie? Is it's not a good movie? And what I found about this movie is I would kind of perk up at a couple of sequences that I thought were amazing, and I just want to watch those sequences. But as a whole, I would like lose track of what the hell are they doing. What is the goal of the characters in this movie? I mean, at the very end, it's just get off the damn island with the zombies. But prior to that, there's like a doctor. He's talking about his mentor. The doctor keeps shooting people in the head because there he doesn't want him to turn inside. He's got a pile of bodies. It's not clear what he thinks he's doing

Ryan Dreimiller:

It's a hospital! Yeah, well,

Shanny Luft:

it's mostly an end of life hospital!

Ryan Dreimiller:

There's like blood spatter all over the walls. It just wrapped up sacks with bullet wounds to the head.

Shanny Luft:

Yes, I hate giving three stabbies or three zombie bites to a movie. I always feel like you got to be bold. But I decided that this movie is the perfect three zombie bite movie, because unless you are a zombie aficionado and a zombie completist, or you're interested in, like, the history of the genre, I don't think that this is a good movie as an entire movie, but I do think it has like, two or three scenes that are worth watching and are better than most other entire zombie movies just those scenes. So you just need to watch the shark scene and the eyeball scene, and then maybe that scene where the couple's making out and the zombies come out of the ground. So to me, that is a three Chompy movie.

Ryan Dreimiller:

One other thing that I was thinking about this was one of those films that made it to the British Board of Film classifications list where it got banned. This fell into that video nasty category. This was a banned movie. I think they were even like originally talking about how they needed to cut certain scenes to get to an X rating for this film. So I think it got released unrated when it came to the US. It was banned in certain states. It was definitely on the obscenity radar. But there's the whole bucket of these 70s, 80s movies that landed in the this is forbidden. It's too horrific for the public to even see. And this fell into that category of government banning a lot of music and film that they deemed that would be corrupting. Youth or unsavory for people's minds. So I think that was part of the appeal with this one, too. So I'm glad we were able to dig in and embrace the corruption with this film and check this one off the list. That wraps up another trip down memory lane. Hopefully you enjoyed revisiting zombie, zombie, two zombie, Flash eaters, or whatever you want to call this movie, as much as we did,

Shanny Luft:

and we want to remind you that slashback cinema.com has a merch store as well as a link for donating to the show. Every little bit helps, and we promise not to spend it all on Shark wranglers indeed.

Ryan Dreimiller:

And we do want to hear from you if you've got a great favorite memory from the 70s or 80s as a car movie that you'd love us to dissect, drop us a line at slashback cinema.com your suggestions keep the conversation alive.

Shanny Luft:

Thanks for tuning in to Slashback cinema. See you next week!