October Horror Challenge 2018 #37: "Nightmare City"

As you can see, this movie has had a lot if titles and a lot of cool poster art over the years. Like a lot of Italian horror movies, it was released under many different titles, and it's hard for me to believe I made it this many years without seeing it before, especially since I love Italian horror movies so much. Well, I used to anyway. I guess I still do, but some of their quirks (cheesy music, bad dubbing, stage-like overacting) got under my skin for awhile there, so I took a break from watching Italian horror. I've come back to it in recent years though, and this movie is a good example of Italian horror done right.

So this movie is about a  nuclear spill of some kind that gets investigated by the government and a prominent scientist. The group returns on a plane, and there's a press conference planned to discuss the matter and propose a solution, but when the plane lands, surprise! The scientist and soldiers have turned into bloodthirsty creatures who emerge from the plane and start eating people (and attacking them with hatchets! Where the hell did they get hatchets?!) The media is at the press conference, but when a local reporter tries to cover the story, the government shuts him down. They want to keep the story under wraps, but of course it's too late, because the creatures keep biting people, which seems to infect them and make more creatures, and soon they've taken over the whole city.

I wound up liking the main characters more than I expected to. The reporter is kind of arrogant, but his wife seems nicer, and they both manage to avoid a lot of the stupid mistakes that get people killed in these movies. Some of the creatures are more obviously decayed (they kind of look like someone sculpted a toxic avenger mask out of play doh and stuck it to their faces) but some of them just look like regular people. I'm sure this is because the budget couldn't afford much in the way of special effects, but it kind of works for me. The creatures look scarier to me when they just look like regular people raging and killing and eating people.

If I could point to a problem with this movie, it would definitely be the ending. I get what they were trying to do, but it just annoyed me. Don't suddenly decide you want to be all artful and ironic all of a sudden after being a fun splatter flick up until that point. The movie was fun in spite of this, though, for most of its running time at least.