"It's no use. It's a waste of time to lock the doors. They'll be here soon... to destroy us all."

If you ever wanted to see a zombie and a shark fight it out, this is the movie for you. Lucio Fulci's entry to zombie cinema starts with this 1979 film. Originally released as Zombi 2 in Italy, it was distributed as Zombie in the UK and Zombie Flesh Eaters in America.

The way Italian copyright worked at the time, any film could be marketed as a sequel to any other film. So when Dawn of the Dead was released as Zombi in Italy and was a smash hit, it was inevitable that it would be exploited. Incidentally, director Lucio Fulci had no idea what the title would be and hated it when he found out. He'd go on to start directing Zombi 3, the first of several films that share the title.

Anyway, regardless of the name, the key takeaway is that you're going to see some zombies. An abandoned boat is found adrift approaching New York, and a zombie is discovered when it eats a cop. The boat owner's daughter teams up with an investigative journalist and track its origin to the island of Matool. Meanwhile, a doctor is trying to discover the origins of a deadly epidemic sweeping the island.

Maybe it's because I have the benefit of seeing (more than) my share of zombie movies, but it's hard to watch this one and not think the survivors are the dumbest people alive - although I guess they won't be for much longer. Most of the encounters with zombies are marked by at least one person freezing up - possibly screaming - while the dead slowly advance to murder them. The indoor usage of molotov cocktails raises an eyebrow, but you can probably chalk that one up to desperation.

Brian takes the cake for me though. Just about every zombie movie has the obligatory scene where a zombie is shown not to mind getting shot in the torso, and this one isn't an exception. It's basically a requirement to establish the "shoot them in the head" rule. Brian is shown several times that you have to hit them in the brain and that body shots don't work, but god love him he keeps trying anyway.

The zombies here follow most of the rules. Zombies are dead people that eat living people, if you are bitten by a zombie you'll become a zombie yourself, and the only way to stop one is to destroy the brain. Any corpse can become a zombie including 16th century conquistadors.

The original zombies in the film are said to be the product of voodoo, although this is a matter of some debate in the script. It's never confirmed, and we don't see any voodoo rites in the film, but we do hear drums in the jungle before the dead start climbing out of the ground. The viewer is invited to draw their own conclusions.

Whether you seek answers in voodoo or science, you're still left with questions. If there's a scientific explanation, then how does a 400 year old corpse get up and walk? If there's a religious explanation, then why does shooting them in the head kill them again? The answer: nobody knows.

Dancing around how the zombies work is one of the main themes of the film. Dr Menard spends the duration of the film trying to understand zombies and fails to do so. He applies the principles of bacteriology, virology, and even radiolagy and comes up short. He still insists there must be a scientific explanation because voodoo is ridiculous. Island native Lucas insists it's voodoo because it's obvious: the dead are walking around eating people, what else could it be?

Exploring these opposing views leads to the meaning of the film. Dr Menard clings to science as his religion. He's a transplant to the island and thinks little of the local culture and therefore rejects the evidence before him because it doesn't fit his model of the world. When scientists refuse evidence they become unscientific. But whether the answer lies in science or religion the truth is the "why" of it all really doesn't matter when you're getting your face chewed off.

Looking for meaning in a zombie movie isn't the main draw here though: we want spectacle and the film delivers. The aforementioned shark-wrangling zombie should be a sign not to take things so seriously - although in fairness this scene was shot without the director's approval. There's no shortage of zombies, gratuitous violence, and it's a Lucio Fulci movie so you know something horrible is going to happen to someone's eyeball.

If Dawn of the Dead was going for a comic-book horror vibe, then Zombie Flesh Eaters is reaching for shock beyond what realism might afford. Many of the zombies are rotting corpses, with worms crawling on their empty eye sockets and flesh that sloughs off when you grab it. There are buckets of blood that come out of people, and the colour of it all is disgusting.

The score was composed by Fabio Frizzi, a frequent Fulci collaborator. This would be the first time the two worked together on a horror movie. The most well known entry is probably Sequence #6 (better known for playing during the eyeball scene), which Frizzi says was inspired by the Beatles.

Zombie Flesh Eaters is available to stream on Shudder and the Internet Archive