Nightmare City

Umberto Lenzi's Nightmare City is wildly and absurdly discursive: a dream logic horror that picks at an idea of mounting tension before either smashing everything to pieces or simply losing interest in these situations altogether. Lenzi's film begins with an unmarked military freighter landing at an Italian airport. From its guts spill an army of suit wearing savages, their faces glued with filthy radioactive scabs, who use hatchets and chain flails to butcher the heavily armed police who meet them. Unusually, for really any zombie film, Lenzi is constantly calling attention to the respective ages of his scratched-at subjects. The irradiated zombies are, predominantly, middle-aged and middle class presenting men. Conversely, their prey are the young and nubile. While the throats of younger men are slit then lapped at, these bloodthirsty brutes take great delight in stripping then stabbing the twentysomething women they come across. Blouses and leotards are shredded; breasts exposed and leered upon, before knives are plunged into these heaving chests. Obviously, this clawing procedure is thanks largely to Nightmare City emanating from the sleazier end of the filmmaking spectrum but it seems notable that this caste system, one largely based on physical attractiveness, holds throughout a film in which we are told (but don't really see) that victims are rising up to swell the ranks of their maulers. Other than the revenge of the sexually impotent, we're left with the deranged deductions of Laura Trotter's Dr Anna Miller, a traumatised physician who contextualises this plague of atomic madmen as a metaphysical plea for mankind to reject the automated niceties of post-industrial settlements.