**NOTE: This review is based on the version of this film known as “City of the Walking Dead.”**

I’ve been getting a crash course in ’70s/’80s Italian horror movies lately thanks to my local dollar store (of all places), where some surprisingly cool titles have been turning up on their DVD rack. A few weeks ago I watched and commented on Dario Argento’s “Creepers” (aka “Phenomena”) and now I’ve also watched the infamous “City of the Walking Dead” (also known as “Nightmare City,” “Nightmare in the Contaminated City” and “Zombie 3,” and possibly a few other titles too, depending on where you are in the world!), which was on the same DVD. I’ve never been a huge fan of Zombie movies outside of the Romero canon, but that’s OK because “City of the Living Dead” (a Spanish/Italian co-production directed by trash movie legend Umberto Lenzi of “Cannibal Ferox” fame) technically isn’t a “zombie movie” anyway, despite its more than passing resemblance to Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead.” The creatures in this film are never referred to as “zombies.” They may have the rotten, scarred look of the Dead Who Walk and they do attack and kill humans, but these “walking dead” have more in common with vampires, as they drink their victims’ blood, rather than eating their flesh. Whatever you wanna call these critters, the movie in which they star is a complete and total Z-Grade hoot and a half. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a film with such cheap effects, terrible acting, and nonsensical script and dialogue, yet I still had a crap load of fun watching it!! The film opens with a news report of a nuclear accident near an unnamed metropolitan area. A TV reporter (played by the incredibly wooden Hugo Stiglitz, a Mexican actor who apparently continues to have a long career in Spanish language TV and film, despite this film being on his resume) is sent to the airport to interview a scientist who is going to update the authorities on the situation. When the airplane lands, a horde of irradiated and irritable zombie-like creatures (with “makeup” that appears to be burnt oatmeal smeared all over their faces) bursts out of the plane, massacres everyone within reach with knives and axes and sucks the blood from them. Before you stop to ask “Wait a minute…since when do zombies use weapons? Are zombies intelligent enough to fly a plane?”, the movie is off and running and you never have a chance to think about it again. Stiglitz and his cameraman haul ass back to the TV station to broadcast a news flash, but are told that an information blackout has been ordered by the military in order to avoid panic. Shortly thereafter the horde of undead attack the TV station (in the midst of what appears to be a broadcast of a “Solid Gold” style disco-dance program) and make short work of the dancers on live television. This scene features some nice gratuitous boob shots and a laughably fake looking scene of a dancer’s nipple being carved right out of her chest by an attacker. Stiglitz battles the undead killers for a while then races to the hospital where his wife (Laura Trotter) works in hopes of getting them both out of the city alive.

The rest of the movie follows Stiglitz and Trotter as they try to find a safe haven from the creatures, mixed with random scenes of Undead attacking various background characters, and a group of military generals who stand around a tiny model of the city and spout a lot of goofball pseudo-scientific dialogue about containing the “contamination.” Especially funny is when they advise police and soldiers that the only way to kill the creatures is to “destroy the brain,” yet anytime you see a soldier open fire on one of’em, they shoot them everywhere except in the head, which of course then ends badly for the shooter. Way to follow orders there, guys. The dialogue is uniformly ridiculous throughout (you can tell it was written by people whose native language is not English), and the special effects waver from being occasionally competent to out-and-out cheap. We see lots of stabbings and throat slashings, a few head explosions, the aforementioned nipple chop, and an eyeball gouging (every Italian horror movie has to have at least one, I suppose) before the finale in an amusement park, where Stiglitz and Trotter battle hordes of the undead while trapped atop a roller coaster (!). I don’t want to violate the Spoiler Warning rules so I won’t even go into the absolutely ridiculous ending except to say it’s the most massive cop-out I’ve ever seen.

So okay, “City of the Walking Dead” was a completely ludicrous piece of Eurotrash grind house cinema. Fortunately it was also fast paced and had enough over-the-top action that it distracted me from the fact that the movie made little to no sense for much of its length. I gotta give Lenzi a little bit of credit for taking what could’ve been a total “Dawn of the Dead” bite and trying to inject something new into the formula, even if the end result is pretty half-assed. This is the kind of film that you watch with a couple of good friends who love bad movies over a case or two of cheap beer. Considering that I only paid a buck for the DVD, I got my money’s worth!

P.S. I absolutely love how the U.S. posters for this movie trumpet the fact that “MEL FERRER, STAR OF TV’s FALCON CREST” stars in it — I guess ol’ Mel must’ve lost a Super Bowl bet with someone and had to appear in this movie as punishment.

Brought to you by Keith Abt, the Dollar DVD Guy. He suffers through these movies so YOU don’t have to!

4.5 Headstones out of 5