Nightmare City: 05 of 31 Horror Movies I've Never Seen!

I think it's safe to say that most people have had a moment where they watch a movie by a director that they appreciate figuring that at the bare minimum, EVEN if the film is bad, that it will have some quality that shines through that makes it feel remotely watchable.  Then that hope is promptly dashed to pieces and the film watching experiences ends up feeling like a boring waste of time that can never be gotten back.  It's these experiences that allow us to develop a certain taste in the hopes that we can avoid such an experience in the future, but we always end up trying to give those awful movies a chance.  Where am I going with this?  Umberto Lenzi's Nightmare City, a movie so bad that it makes a 1hr 32min run time feel like a god damned eternity.

Where do I begin?  It's not so much that film is poorly shot, so much that the acting is atrocious, the story is laughable at best, and the hallmark gore that defined Lenzi's early career in the horror exploitation genre is subdued, except for maybe two or three scenes, for some bizarre reason, taking all of what would otherwise be called fun completely out and throwing it into a bottomless ravine.  What can I say?  This movie is total shit.

Hugo Stiglitz delivers one of the most wooden performances of any actor's career, as Dean Miller, a television news anchor who happens to witness a plane full of nuclear contaminated zombie like things that can run, communicate (non verbally of course), use weapons ranging from knives to sub-machine guns, and have an insatiable lust for blood.  You can't sympathize with him at all as he blunders his way through the situation set up in the film, whose ending is one of the biggest let down's of all time.  If I didn't have any integrity, I would just spoil the whole thing to save the rest of you some time, but who knows, maybe you want to watch the film anyway.

Okay, three paragraphs of utter venom, I suppose I should try and make some lemonade out of this situation.  I can at least say that it's pretty well shot, using stylish camera movement which was a staple of the mid 70s to early 80s Italian horror genre.  It's got a pretty funky soundtrack, also a staple of that era, but the choreography of certain shots is just utterly ridiculous.  There's one scene in particular which ALMOST was good had I not noticed the fact that each stab, mauling, and bludgeoning performed by the "zombies" was done after a solid beat where the stunt actor receiving the blow stops moving, as if to just LET the "zombie" hit them.

Maybe I could have enjoyed this film more with a few beers and a few friends.  It's perfect fodder for a Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode.  If you're just plain curious, or you want the proof of what I'm talking about, you can find Nightmare City on Netflix, though you can only watch the Italian Dubbing.

1 skull out of 5.