Zombie Vs. Shark: The Ultimate Conflict

There’s a stretch, about a third of the way through the 1979 gorefest Zombie, that may be the greatest 10 minutes of exploitation filmmaking of all time.

We begin on a boat somewhere in the Caribbean en route to the mysterious island of Matool, which seems to be the origin of strange reports of the dead coming back to life. It’s a beautiful day on the open water, and the wife of the captain tells him to stop so that she can go scuba diving — an activity, it turns out, that she prefers to perform topless. And director Lucio Fulci, who definitely knows which side his bread is buttered on, treats us to an extended sequence of the woman slipping into a thong, arranging the straps of her tank under her breasts and between her legs, and swimming amidst the tropical fish.

After a few minutes of this, however, a shark appears! The woman is too far away from the boat to outrun the beast, so she ducks behind a coral outcropping... only to have her wrist grabbed by a zombie lurking in the same place! She wrests herself free from the zombie’s undead grasp and swims away... leaving the zombie to battle the shark! The movie doesn’t cheat, either — you really do get to see a guy in full zombie makeup, underwater, battling what really does appear to be an actual shark. He takes a nice big bite out of it, too.

Boobs! Sharks! Zombies! Where does a film go from there? Amazingly, though, when Metro Cinema screens Zombie this Saturday (a fundraising event for the local horror festival known as DEDfest), that might not be the scene that gets the biggest reaction. Fulci, it turns out, has another trick up his sleeve: I hate to give anything away, but let’s just say that if you’ve ever had nightmares in which your eye gets impaled on a 14-inch-long shard of wood, you might want to look away from the screen.

Zombie (also known as Zombie Flesh Eaters, Zombie Island, Zombi 2, and Woodoo) is absolutely indefensible as art, but as an exercise in old-school, down-and-dirty, entrail-munching grindhouse cinema, it’s hard to beat. Fulci uses his makeup effects sparingly but he gets the most mileage he can out of every single one of them. These zombies don’t just bite people; they rip their flesh right off the bone. Worms spill from mouths and eye sockets, skulls explode in a shower of brain matter, blood pours down zombie chins... and wandering through it all is, of all people, Tisa Farrow, whose physical and vocal resemblance to her older sister Mia makes the film occasionally seem like a berserk cousin to Hannah and Her Sisters.

It’s a movie only a gorehound could love, but it should be noted that the production values are better than expected (especially the underwater photography in the zombie vs. shark scene), the primitive synth score achieves a certain cumulative, mournful power, and the plot (which begins in New York before moving to the Caribbean) is surprisingly ambitious. It’s also a key film in the development of the genre in that it combines the island setting of old-fashioned voodoo stories like I Walked With a Zombie with the ultra-violent, flesh-eating, unstoppable monster armies that you get in zombie movies from the post-Night of the Living Dead era.

Plus there’s the shark. Some 30 years have passed, and nobody’s ever topped the bit with the shark.