6. City of the Living Dead (1980)
City of the Living Dead is a film which is based on quite a dopey premise but which is also quite good fun to watch. For some reason I can't really comprehend, a priest kills himself and the gates of Hell are opened. This opens the Portal for a flood of zombies to invade a remote town and finish off its inhabitants. Apparently this has all been forecasted in the Book of Enoch and it is up to a psychic and a reporter to go to a small New England town to shut the portal before All Saint's Day. The gore effects are what makes the film. Poor old Giovanni Lombardo Radice gets a powerdrill through the head and a woman vomits up what seems to be an endless string of entrails. Fulci's direction seems a little slow paced. He can create a morbid atmosphere but he cannot really sustain narrative tension. There's just no terror in the bulk of his horror films. If he could take what he had in Zombie Flesh Eaters and injected it into City of the Living Dead, it could have been a really decent horror movie.