Nightmare City Blu-ray+DVD

Excluding his fabulously flamboyant Gialli, 'Nightmare City' has always been the Lenzi film that frequently draws me back into its fetid, warmly worm-infested folds, not because it is the very best of Lenzi's luminous, mercurial career as the reigning sultan of celluloid shock but because it is arguably the most consistently entertaining and eminently re watchable fear fest he ever created! Very soon after an anomalous military plane makes an unscheduled landing it then violently discharges its gruesomely grimacing, grot-faced cargo of hyperbolically mad, weapon-wielding, mayhem causing murder mutants in a breathlessly bravura display of barnstorming B-Movie mania that grabs you viciously by the throat and refuses to relinquish its diabolical grip until the quite literally nightmarish conclusion! Proceeding rapidly at the grievous rate of some especially diabolical fever dream, our Stoic journalist hero Dean Miller (Hugo Stiglitz) and his earnest surgeon wife Anna (Laura Trotter) become our surrogates as they find themselves desperately lost in an unfamiliar, ever more threatening environment as this apocalyptic virus tears pitilessly through the city, finally spreading its murderous contagion out into the corpse-clotted country; everywhere our increasingly desperate couple turn, a pus-drenched, preternaturally strong, boggle-eyed demon seems the merest seconds away from gruesomely hacking, savagely stabbing, cheerlessly chopping, gorily gouging, garishly gnawing and bodily tearing them asunder in order to gleefully gorge upon the living blood they crave as grisly nourishment! Even if outrageous gore and relentless violent incident wasn't enough of a distraction we have a wicked score by maestro Stelvio Cipriani which is no less infectious than the plague bloodily rendering humanity into a raging, blood-cravingly rabid, persistently perambulating horde of madly mouldering maniacs! There are all too many who have naysaid the performance of the mighty Stiglitz, I am resolutely not one of them, he expresses a robust, Gary Cooper stoicism, a dogged, Everyman resolve that creates a stolid, weighty counterpoint to his increasingly neurotic wife and all the unleavened chaos surrounding them. 'Nightmare City' remains one of the finest, gloriously wrong-headed examples of bellicose Euro-zombie art thus far conceived. For me, this sublimely savage, nefariously nihilistic, delirious doomsday shocker elevates Umberto Lenzi to that of a genre god! Lenzi Lives!