ZOMBIE (1979)

Directed by Lucio Fulci

Starring Tisa Farrow and Ian McCulloch

Tagline: "We are going to eat you." Highly entertaining Italian gore-fest from 1979 is a rip-off of "Dawn of the Dead," which was released a year earlier under the title "Zombi." In Europe, this film was released as "Zombi 2," before the makers of "Dawn" sued. If this is supposedly related to "Dawn," it's a prequel actually because it appears to show the origins of the zombie plague.

With decent special effects and a nihilistic, sleazy atmosphere, this flick remains a popular cult hit and made a career for director Lucio Fulci, who went on to make a few other zombie films (most of them dreadful) and a number of slasher movies. Other Italian exploitation directors followed suit with their own gore films for the U.S. market.

Like some other Italian zombie and horror films (most notably "Alien Contamination"), this one starts in New York with an abandoned ship arriving in to the harbor with mysterious cargo on board: in this case a flesh eating zombie. An interested journalist (McCulloch) and girl interest (Farrow) head to South America and run into an army of ghouls.

The storyline is almost nonexistent, but there are some terrific set-pieces including an undersea battle between a zombie and a shark, the highlight of the movie. The film also features the most gruesome eye gouging sequence of all time. The dubbing is laughable. It has a Goblin-esque rock music score.

Original Soundtrack: Zombi 2 (aka Lucio Fulci's "Zombie") original soundtrack

Be sure to see the widescreen edition recently made available on video and DVD. It's in Dolby sound and you can clearly see the exploding heads, a major plus if there was one Seriously, he older versions on video look so shoddy that it literally ruins the movie. After it made millions in box offices worldwide, the film was tragically released in a very poor format by that now infamous early horror VHS company Wizard Video. As wonderful as Wizard was back in the day, this is definitely the version to avoid at all costs.

Tisa Farrow is the sister of Mia, by the way. She even looks like her. She didn't do much else in the horror vein, althoug co-star McCulloch also performed leading man duties for "Zombie Holocaust: Dr. Butcher M.D." and "Alien Contamination."

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