Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979)

Lucio Fulci's Zombi 2 arrives on the ledger under at least three titles, and this is a film assembled as an unofficial sequel to Dawn of the Dead because Italian copyright law permitted such things. A boat drifts into New York Harbor. A harbor patrolman is killed. A journalist and a captain's daughter sail for a Caribbean island where the dead will not stay down. The screenplay began life as Nightmare Island and was optioned, retooled, and renamed. What we have is a small-budget exploitation picture that recouped its costs several times over and was later classified in Britain as a video nasty, which is a marketing position more than a moral one.

The cast is a company of white European actors, led by Tisa Farrow, Ian McCulloch, and Richard Johnson, performing on soundstages in Latina and locations in Santo Domingo. The Caribbean setting functions as exotic wallpaper. Voodoo is a mechanism for raising corpses, not a subject for study, and the film has no interest in the people whose islands it borrows. A woman survives the ordeal, screams on cue, and is never asked to carry an argument about her place in the world. Two men share a boat and a mission and nothing else. The register here is gore, nudity, and shock. A zombie wrestles a shark. A splinter of wood finds an eyeball. That is the whole transaction.

There is no instruction on offer. No sermon, no lesson, no corrective to the audience's attitudes about anything. The film wants to distress the viewer and then release them, and it does so with a certain crude efficiency. Subsequent scholars have read colonial anxiety into the proceedings, which is their prerogative and not the film's intention. We classify what is on the screen. The screen is bare of social instruction.