So... onto the gruesome stuff. To get this out of the way (though perhaps it goes without saying) Lucio Fulci's Zombi 2 is not a sequel. They just wanted to market it as a follow up to George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead in Italy where it was titled Zombi. It's a laughably cheap marketing ploy, but you have to admire them for it. As for the film itself, while it has a certain video nasty status this is by no means as bad as its reputation suggests when it comes to the violence.
You get the usual biting and flesh eating stuff of course and obviously the infamous splinter in-the-eye sequence is memorable for a reason. But while it's certainly a hair raising moment it's hardly realistic looking by anyone's standards so I don't see what the big problem is. I guess it could just a product of being so desensitized in the modern era, but even by the standards of '70s and '80s horror cinema it's not that excessive. On the plus side it's often as hammy as you might expect.
The movie itself has a certain amount of atmosphere and like a lot of these Italian horror releases there's a nice electronic score included. The slow pacing early on mostly works and the tropical locations are fairly eye pleasing. They do also have the ridiculous shark versus zombie scene. It offers creepy shock value only, with zero social commentary. But what you actually get works, unlike some of the other viewings here.
In a similar case of misleading titles, Fulci's City of the Living Dead is ... not a zombie movie. I guess they just did whatever sounded cool. While there are certainly a few scenes of the dead rising up and a finale set inside a crypt, they don't ever feature that much and the plot itself is more suited to the alternate title The Gates of Hell. In fact the undead generally appear out of nowhere like ghosts and there are a lot of weird supernatural scenes of eyes bleeding and maggots flying through open windows. It's a weird movie.
The story opens with a seance in which it is discovered (somehow) that the suicide of a priest will open the gate to hell on All Souls Day (some reason). His motives is unknown if the exist at all. Which is the big problem here, it's all very incoherent and there are many unexplained moments including the silly shock ending. Certain releases from Italy like Dario Argento's Inferno do have a certain waking nightmare feeling that doesn't follow a standard narrative, but here it suffers more for it because the mystery elements and subplots are never explained or sometimes get introduced and are quickly forgotten.
Speaking of Argento... Phenomena explains a lot but still makes very little sense. But it's a fascinating mix of apparently random ideas thrown together. For your money you get a murder mystery, a plot about a girl (Jennifer Connelly) talking to insects at a Swiss boarding school, a bunch of weird sleepwalking scenes, and a sub plot about a wheelchair bound entomologist (Donald Pleasence) who lives with his chimpanzee assistant. Once the killer is revealed it gets even crazier but overall most of this manages to be strangely entertaining.
The real problem is actually the choice of music this time, and while there is a great original theme by Claudio Simonetti (without band Goblin), several sequences have music from Iron Maiden playing over them. The result is just awkwardly out of place. Do you really need rock music over a body being carried to an ambulance? Are you sure about that? The rationale behind all of this is a mystery. Perhaps it was all just to have some cool sounding band names on the poster art. But I guess they just couldn't decide what to leave out ... and just decided to go with everything.
As for things that are too confusing for their own good, Demons 2 replays several moments from the original but never provides any new material that is very interesting. While the first movie had the whole movie in a movie setup and a demonic curse storyline, this time the residents of a tower block are watching what seems to be the sequel to that story (the film Demons not the film inside it) on television. So they're watching the sequel to the first film... inside the world of the sequel. And some the same actors show up... who even knows. Answers on a self addressed envelope please.
Logic aside they just don't have enough wacky elements like that whole motorcycle showdown this time around. Which is strange when Lamberto Bava is directing again, with Dario Argento still producing. There are some very neat physical effects including a decayed body regenerating itself into demon form, but the idea of people trapped in an apartment complex feels too pedestrian and it comes off as being kind of stale overall. There are some fun monster moments but it's not zany enough to recommend and it side steps ever explaining the first film since that is effectively fiction in this story. It will make your head spin at least.
PART 1 - PART 3
