The opening on the abandoned boat in New York is great. The two unwitting coastguard officers bumble around until a zombie attacks one of them. The surviving officer shots the zombie and it falls off the boat. The dead officer is taken to the morgue, setting up the awesome ending this movie delivers. They could have just made a movie about the dead officer coming back as a zombie and spreading the zombie plague, but the makers of this movie wanted to go in a different direction.

Just before our main characters end up on the zombie island with Doctor Menard there is a scene that this movie is somewhat famous for. The scene involves an underwater fight between a shark and a zombie. I think the only reason that director Lucio Fulci even filmed this scene is because it reeks of awesomeness. It has almost no bearing whatsoever on the plot, but it’s just a lot of fun to see a shark and a zombie battling. Considering that this scene was shot in 1979, long before there was any major CGI, makes the fight all the more visually impressive.

Another scene that this movie is famous for is the death scene of Doctor’s Menard’s wife. Everything about the scene is routine until it ends. We see Menard’s wife running from a zombie and trying to find somewhere safe to hide in her house. However, just when you think she’s made it and is safe for a while, the zombie breaks through the door, reaching in with its decaying hand and grabbing Menard’s wife by her hair. As she struggles, the zombie hand pulls her closer and closer to a sharp piece of the broken door.

In most movies it would have faded to black just before there was contact between her eye and the large splinter of wood. However, we get to watch as the wood penetrates the eyeball. It has to be one of the most gruesome scenes I’ve ever seen in a horror movie. Fulci is known for his stomach turning gore, and he more than delivers the bloody goods in Zombie. Just one final note about the scene I’ve described above. Never do we see anymore of the zombie than its hands during the entire chase and eventual brutal killing. This effect only adds to the scene, and helps make it, in my opinion, one of the most memorable death scenes ever in a horror movie.

Zombie is actually called Zombi 2 in parts of Europe because it was supposed to be a sequel to Dawn of the Dead (known as Zombi in the same parts of Europe). This numbering has caused some confusion with zombie fans in North America. Plus the story of Zombie would make it more of a prequel than a sequel, so that only adds to the confusion. Personally, I don’t have any issue with this type of problem, but some people might.

With a director named Fulci, you would guess right that this movie wasn’t originally made in English. Zombie is actually an Italian horror movie, so that means the English dialogue is dubbed over the Italian. Some people might have issues with this, but I personally didn’t find it to affect my enjoyment of the movie at all.

There’s one point in the movie when the characters come across a Spanish Conquistadors’ graveyard. Are we supposed to believe that some of the zombies in the movie are 400 years old? Would there be anything left of a person that was buried for that long? Of course, here I am arguing about the physicals of corpse decay in a movie about dead people coming back to life, so you would be right if you guessed that I don’t find that there’s a whole lot to complain about in Zombie.