'Nightmare City' (1980)  - Umberto Lenzi.

Excluding his razor-sharp, fabulously flamboyant Gialli, 'Nightmare City' has always been the, Umberto Lenzi film that frequently draws me back into its fetid, warmly worm-infested folds, not because it is the very best of maestro, Lenzi's mercurial career as the reigning slaughter-savvy sultan of super stylised celluloid shock, but because it is arguably the most consistently entertaining, fiendishly inventive, fearsomely flesh flaying, eminently re-watchable, mesmerising bloody phantasmagoria the celebrated Cannibal King ever created!

Not long after an anomalous military plane makes an unscheduled landing when it proceeds to violently discharge its gruesomely grimacing, grot-faced cargo of hyperbolically hateful, disturbingly fleet, wantonly weapon-wielding, mayhem manifesting murder mutants in a breathlessly bravura display of barnstorming B-Movie mania that grabs you viciously by the throat and refuses to relinquish its grip until the quite literally nightmarish conclusion!

Proceeding rapidly at the dizzying rate of some delirious fever dream, our Stoic journalist hero, Dean Miller (Hugo Stiglitz) and his earnest surgeon wife, Anna (Laura Trotter) find themselves desperately lost in an unfamiliar, ever more threatening environment as this apocalyptic virus tears pitilessly through the city, fatally spreading its psychotic contagion deep into the corpse-clotted countryside! Everywhere our increasingly desperate couple turn, preternaturally strong, boggle-eyed, pus-drenched ghouls appear seconds away from brutally tearing them asunder in order to sate their ravening hunger for fresh blood! Even if outlandish gore and relentlessly violent incident wasn't enough of a distraction we have another killer score by maestro, Stelvio Cipriani which is no less infectious than the pernicious plague rendering humanity into a rabid, insensate, blood-craving horde of mouldering, madly accelerated murder-maniacs!

There have been far too many snarky snits who have cruelly gainsaid the manly performance of the undeniably mighty, Hugo Stiglitz, and I am resolutely not one of them, he expresses a robust, Gary Cooper stoicism, a dogged, Everyman resolve that creates a pleasingly stolid, weighty counterpoint to his increasingly neurotic wife, and all the unleavened charnal chaos surrounding them! 'Nightmare City' remains one of the fleetest, gloriously wrong-headed, luridly left-of-centre examples of blissfully batso, Euro-zombie bellicosity thus far conceived! For me, this gore-iously savage, screamingly nihilistic, deliciously demented doomsday shocker elevates terror Titan, Umberto Lenzi to that of an untouchable splatter deity! Lenzi Lives!!!!

 

                                                                            'STIGLITZ!!!!!'