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It seriously bogs down for a while in the middles...but there is so much here to admire and enjoy......
The bizarre Shark/Zombie fight (certainly unlike anything else ever seen), the iconic Al Cliver English dub by Nick Alexander, nice turns by all the cast ,with Richard Johnson especially using his great voice to perfection.
Then throw in a bit of nudity (full frontal on our Olga if the film is seen in it's full aspect ratio), some great sets, truly superb looking zombie make-up, some amazingly executed gore effects (the oft forgotten throat bite eaily being the jaw droppingly bloody highlight and the slow and sadistic splinter scene is as undying in it's appeal as the zombies themselves) and stunning cinematography.
But this is also a film drenched in apocolyptic atmosphere. As the corpses mount up in the mass burial pits, as the cast is munched down, a real sense of bleakness sets in. Fulci expertly milks this atmosphere for all it's worth in the majestically design Zombie shots where the rotted dead shamble into view (and these wonderful creations walk in the definative Zombie way, that head down, dragging monstrosity of human movement) in ever increasing numbers.
One of the finest visuals, in any horror film ever, has to be the lone zombie stumbling through the deserted wind swept village. And in a magical mixture of fine make-up FX, camera movement, cinematography and music Fulci delivers one of the great horror shots as the camera sweeps around to reveal the Zombie's half destroyed face.
And lets us not forget the best damn chowing down sequence ever as the half eaten body of the Doc's Wife lies on the table like a fucking all you can eat buffet as a group of shadowed ghouls consume her...and the shot of the zombie with it's head down who eats by shoving his face into the bloodied trough of his hand is perhaps the most horrific example of a living corpse eating human flesh!
the finale is also a highlight (even the naff voiceover of the radio announcer is entertaining) as we have oyr survivors trapped on the boat with the undead corpse of their friend bashing on the cabin door as they hear on the radio that the very place they were fleeing to has become the hell on earth they thought they had just escaped! Wonderful!
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