Nightmare City (1980)

There's a moment in Nightmare City where a plane lands unannounced at a military airfield, the doors swing open, and out pour dozens of radiation-scarred ghouls armed with knives, guns, and what appears to be pure, unbridled murderous intent. No preamble. No build-up. Just carnage, immediately, with the subtlety of a brick through a window. And honestly? That's the film in a nutshell. Umberto Lenzi's 1980 Italian exploitation horror doesn't ease you in. It grabs you by the collar, screams in your face, and never really stops.

The premise borrows freely from George Romero's The Crazies, swapping out chemical contamination for radiation and replacing Romero's grim social critique with something far more chaotic and considerably less interested in making a coherent point. The infected here aren't shambling undead. They run, they plan (loosely), they use weapons, and they tear through airports, military bases, and television studios with the kind of frantic energy that makes you wonder if Lenzi just pointed a camera at a riot and called it a shoot. It's messy, loud, and borderline incoherent. It's also, against most reasonable odds, a lot of fun.

Our hero is a square-jawed journalist who spends the film rushing about with the urgency of a man who's left the gas on rather than someone navigating the collapse of civilisation. The acting across the board ranges from earnestly wooden to full-on theatrical, and the English dubbing adds its own layer of surreal distance, lines landing slightly out of sync with the emotion onscreen, which gives the whole thing a dreamlike, off-kilter quality. Whether that's a flaw or a feature probably depends on your tolerance for Euro-cult cinema's particular brand of accidental poetry.

Visually, Nightmare City is a mess, but it's an entertaining mess. The infected look more silly than frightening, all lumpy latex and dried porridge prosthetics, but there are enough of them, moving fast enough, that the action sequences carry a genuine scrappy frenzy. Lenzi stages set pieces with more ambition than precision, but every now and again the sheer volume of chaos produces something that genuinely feels like societal collapse: raw, ugly, and completely out of control. Those moments are fleeting, but they're there.

The script lurches between pseudo-scientific exposition, earnest melodrama, and the kind of monologuing that suggests someone on set thought they were making a serious film about the dangers of nuclear contamination. They weren't, clearly, but the conviction with which certain scenes are played adds an unintentional weight that's oddly endearing. Nobody here is winking at the camera. They're all in, even when "in" means delivering a speech about radiation poisoning while people are being stabbed in the background.

It's worth being honest about what this film is and isn't. It isn't good in any conventional sense. The pacing is erratic, the logic is essentially non-existent, and the ending is the kind of move that either reads as inspired or deeply frustrating depending on your mood. It rips off better films, cuts corners constantly, and never once pauses to ask whether any of it holds together. But it's got the mad, combustible energy that defines Italian genre filmmaking at its most unrestrained, a quality that something like [REC] later channelled into something genuinely terrifying. Nightmare City never gets there, but it's aiming in the same general direction, just while tripping over its own feet.

Two and a half stars. Watch it with snacks, low expectations, and ideally someone to laugh with. That's not a criticism so much as instructions for getting the most out of it.

Rating: ★★½  | Year: 1980  | Watched: 2026-05-14

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