City of the Living Dead: Lucio Fulci

I'm willing to bet that most of Europe's zombie problems could be fixed by actually burying their dead in coffins and not just covering up their corpses with half an inch of topsoil. Take Lucio Fulci's City of the Living Dead. After a Dunwich priest commits suicide in a cemetery, the Gates of Hell are opened and the undead begin to walk the earth. Of course, they don't have to work very hard to get out of the cemetery. They basically just have to dust off a thin layer of dirt and mulch and they're ready to go. I understand that this was probably a stylistic choice on Fulci's part. After all, Fulci was always one of the most cerebral gore-oriented horror directors. So in the context of the film, it doesn't matter how they get out of their graves, just that they do. But I digress. City of the Living Dead is a film that relies on imagery and atmosphere to engage the audience. However, he wouldn't perfect this technique until 1981's The Beyond. So City of the Living Dead is unevenly paced and at times borders on the ridiculous. Take the scene where the re-animated priest uses psychic powers to make a female victim throw up her internal organs. The film never establishes that the zombies have psychic powers, instead only hinting at it in the final scenes. As a result, the aforementioned scene seems silly and inexplicable when it should have been terrifying. And what's with Fulci's belief that the human skull can be popped like a zit with just a hand squeezing it? I know that zombies are supposed to have supernatural strength, but there's a difference between something being plausible and something being physically impossible. 

6/10