Nightmare City (1980) - Umberto Lenzi

Miller, a news reporter, has just been sent to the airport to interview one of the nation's top nuclear scientists.  On his arrival, a mysterious plane arrives at the airport, seeking emergency landing clearance.  After the intial panic, the plane lands safely, but that is only the beginning of a much larger nightmare, as the plane was full of murderous, toxic, blood-sucking zombies who need human blood to stay alive.  Highly contageous, these monstrous creatures send the military into a panic, as they fight a losing war of attrition against the ever-increasing zombie threat.  Umberto Lenzi's Nightmare City is a highly stylized, gleefully ultraviolent, zombie apocalypse movie that deserves recognition if for nothing else than the constant chaotic atmoshpere it brings to the table.  From the opening frame of Nightmare City the film doesn't let up, throwing the viewer into this chaotic world of zombies who have grown nearly indestructable due to their atomic orgins.  Moving at a brisk pace, Nightmare CIty isn't concerned too much in thinking, completely satified in playing in the macabre.  Nightmare City is a big, dumb b-movie that shows no reluctance in embracing its absurdity, but what the film does have to say about technology and science is surprisingly poignant, if not earth-shattering.  With the zombies in the film being indirectly created by being explosed to nuclear radioactivity, Nightmare City delivers a heavy-handed commentary on the inevitable tragedy that is bound to occur when man attempts to play god, focusing on mankinds ability to craft such a destructive force as a nuclear weapon.  The film doesn't spend too much time dissecting this ideal, but it's present, almost mentioned half-hashardly, a moment of thought in-between the mindless violence and chaos of the rest of the film.  Featuring some of the best blood-splattering headshots in cinematic history, Umberto Lenzi's Nightmare CIty is film that fits right at home in the Italian horror films of the 70s and 80s, being a cheezy, low-thought, fun excursion into the zombie genre

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