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After seeing Luicio Fulci’s Zombie (1979), I decided to hunt down other well-known features made by Fulci. In the early 80’s, there was a wave of EuroHorror and gore movies released on video, often in oversized display boxes (I even have Fulci’s Zombie to this day in a giant box!). Lots of offensive artwork graced the covers of Herschell Gordon Lewis films, EuroHorror and various exploitation gems. The pioneers in home video tried to cash in on the box office success and notoriety of drive-in money-makers; the companies include Vestron Video, Continental Video, Wizard Video, Midnight Video and others. Although they offered highly sought-after gore films, they released them in murky prints, fullscreen/cropped and sometimes cut. This didn’t deter the collectors, though…..
I went to all sorts of video stores searching for what is probably Fulci’s second-most-popular film, City of the Living Dead. I bought the oversized box release from the 80’s (released through Paragon Home Video) from a little video store that sold hundreds of their used videos. The movie was fantastic, showcasing one incredible gore sequence after the next. This film is one of Fulci's funnest,. However, it's just a bunch of gore scenes held together by a tepid plot involving a priest who hangs himself, thus opening the Gates of Hell (the film's original U.S. title).
After the resident priest of a small Massachusetts town hangs himself in the middle of a cemetery, the dead begin to rise. At the same time, a New York psychic envisions the havoc caused by the priest and appears to die. Days later she is rescued from the grave by a reporter, and they head for the town where it all started.
Meanwhile, strange things happen in the rural town. People begin to die and return to life, hunting human flesh. A few people even start to do out-of-character things; one guy decides to drill the head of the village idiot in full view of the audience.
The reporter and the psychic meet up with a few of the surviving residents and enter the tomb of the priest to stop the evil at its source. They encounter flesh-eating zombies and the walking corpse of the priest…..
The look of this disc is better than previous video and DVD editions. There is artifacting present during some of the scenes. The sound otpions include a newly-remixed Dolby Digital 5.1 track and a nice Dolgy Digital 2.0 Stereo Surround track. The European trailer is present. It demonstrates the flow of a typical trailer used to sell movies to a European audience. The lengthy text bio on Lucio Fulci is very thorough (it's also on the other Fulci discs by Anchor Bay), and the production stills/radio spots are a good addition. The only thing the DVD is lacking is a commentary track. However, without the insight of the director (Fulci died in 1996), a commentary would be pretty worthless.
The artwork is the same artwork used in the U.S. theatrical promotional material (and on the previous Gates of Hell VHS releases from Paragon and Creature Featuers). For some strange reason, a line from Fulci's The Beyond (a far superior disc) is used as a tagline for the disc (although, I guess it's better than stealing one from Romero's Dawn of the Dead, as was done on release material when this film was promoted as "Twilight of the Dead." Romero's troupe sued. In addition, the "e"'s in the title are backwards. Hmm.