Review of Nightmare City

Introduction

Umberto Lenzi (who also made the notorious Cannibal Ferox) directed this rather bizarre, yet popular zombie movie. It stars Hugo Stiglitz as Dean Miller, a television reporter who is covering a nuclear accident in a major city. When a mysterious plane makes an emergency landing near the accident site, Miller goes to cover the story and watches as a horde of flesh eating zombies burst out of the plane. These irradiated zombies behave nothing like their risen from the grave counterparts. In fact, they run to chase their prey and even use weapons when given the chance. Frightened by these super zombies, Miller grabs his wife and heads out of town. Unfortunately, the zombies follow him, leading to a showdown in an abandoned amusement park..

Video

The video is presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen and given the origin and vintage of the movie isn`t as bad as I had feared. The image is grainy and suffers from specs of dirt and other marks periodically and isn`t especially detailed. Colours are a bit washed out, but overall, the picture is perfectly watchable.

This is a zombie horror movie, so the special effects guys have a field day with the army of the undead, who have appropriately unpleasant complexions, and there is plenty of blood during the attack sequences. However, compared to the realistic violence we see in today`s movies, things seem a little tame nowadays.

Audio

The soundtrack features Dolby Digital 2.0 in English in place of the original Italian dialogue, and the dubbing isn`t of the highest standard, with the lip-synch a long way off, making some scenes tiresome to watch.

There is the usual mix of cheesy 1980`s horror film music and sound effects, which are adequately reproduced, but neither offer any excitement.

Features

The extras consist of a featurette, in Italian with subtitles, biographies and the trailer. The featurette runs for about twelve minutes and is quite interesting.

The menus are well animated and easy to navigate.

Conclusion

Most 1980`s horror movies are fairly tedious nowadays, and Nightmare City is no exception, the action scenes are quite uninteresting, the acting quite dreadful and the dubbed soundtrack distracting.

Video and sound are both average, and the extras minimal, therefore this isn`t one to rush out and buy unless you are a big fan of the genre.