Understand, I'm not claiming to be a film critic or separating myself from the "normal" viewing audience. That said, I have seen a lot of horror movies. Part of the reason I liked City of the Walking Dead is that it's different from many other zombie movies. Most films in this subgenre treat their undead like brainless automatons, constantly in search (slow, slow search) of carnage to commit and human flesh to consume. It takes a skillful director (a man named Romero comes to mind) to make this kind of zombie scary. The most frightening thing about most Night of the Living Dead/Dawn of the Dead rip-offs would be how bad so many of them are, if only the top spot wasn't already taken by the fact that so many of these lousy clones exist.

All of which goes to explain, in a roundabout fashion, why City of the Walking Dead stands out, at least to me. Its zombies are active, energetic, and primal. They're much more akin to the suicidal raiders of John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 than they are to Romero's walking nightmares. Unfortunately, the movie's effectiveness is seriously undercut by marginal directing and scenes of completely gratuitous nudity. In the end, City is a film that doesn't have the, er, guts, to carry its own ideas through. (Oct 20, 2001)