ZOMBI 2 1980
42%
Directed by Lucio Fulci
Written by Elisa Briganti
Starring Tisa Farrow, Ian McCulloch, Richard Johnson, Al Cliver
Synopsis
A boat is discovered drifting in the New York harbor, occupied only with zombies. The boat’s owner has been missing for months and so his daughter departs for his last known location: a tropical island where voodoo research has been underway.
Why We Love It
If you grew up during the golden age of video rental shops, you’ll remember the horror section and that palpable, seductive fear that came with it, going up and down the terrifying aisle. Walking that valley of death, the shelves lined with VHS cases—psychos and killers on one side, ghouls and the unspeakable on the other—each a clamshell tombstone, beckoning the impressionable to dig in for its R-rated secrets. “Not suitable for a general audience…” they whispered.
You begin hearing about what happens in these movies. The mythmaking starts. The hockey-masked killer who split a boy in twain with just a machete. A burn victim with a hat who literally haunted nightmares. Exploding heads in Dawn of the Dead and Scanners. The raw snuff of Cannibal Holocaust. Or the eyeball kill in Zombi 2. What soul would crave these punishing images?
Director Lucio Fulci had a lovingly gratuitous taste for gore, and so yes, this famed and cringe-inducing Zombi 2 scene with the unfortunate eyeball is absolutely drawn out. The victim is a doctor’s poor wife, who thinks she’s home alone when a zombie punches through the door, grabs her head, and slowly pulls her to the shattered wood. Despite the struggle, her face glides straight towards a splinter, bursting the protective gel of her right eye before going through the socket and out the back of the skull. As a director, Fulci never met an orifice he didn’t want to cover with corn syrup and red dye.
The rest of Zombi 2 is a mix of island voodoo magic recognizing the genre’s earliest origins and scenes set in gritty late-1970s New York—including scores of undead walking the Brooklyn Bridge among full traffic shot without permit. There’s also a zombie punching a shark underwater. Excited descriptions of these images spread from video store to the playground and park, and before the over-exhaustion of trailers and marketing, this was how hype was built, and how a movie that was (falsely) marketed as a sequel to 1978’s Dawn of the Dead in Europe moved from B-movie trash into legend.