Zombie Flesh Eaters

I can’t believe it took me until the age of 45 (12 years ago) to watch Zombie Flesh Eaters. This gory Italian flick from director Lucio Fulci was the stuff of legend when I was in secondary school in the early 80s. “Have you seen it…?” awe-struck 12 year-olds would ask and I, having seen nothing more horrific than Doctor Who at the time, would reply, miserably, that I had not.

I don’t know if the mini horror fans of my school days were even aware that it was an Italian language film – the version I saw was dubbed, and pretty obviously – or if they would have cared that much. While today it seems pretty tame, thirty-odd years ago it would have been a gore-fest, satisfying even the most blood-lusting teen.

Fulci is today recognised as a horror maestro, although Flesh Eaters is an out-and-out B movie, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It crams a lot in – zombie fighting and then eating shark, zombies eating doctor’s wife, zombies eating nurse…basically, this film delivers what it promises.

I remember one reviewer on Love Film (this was my main source of movies 12 years ago) claiming it was superior to seminal zombie movie Night of the Living Dead – the film from George A. Romero that launched the big screen (and now small screen) zombie as we know it. Romero’s film, made on a shoestring, with an unknown cast – many playing several roles to keep costs down – remains genuinely scary and, actually, very classy. It’s moody, it’s claustrophobic, and it’s pretty gritty.

Flesh Eaters was just a bit of horrible hokum, but we had fun together for that hour and a half. In fact, 12 years on, I can feel a reunion coming on.