City of the Living Dead

OooooOOOOoo!!! It’s the special edition! Happy watching!

City of the Living Dead

Short Film: Capitol of Conformity. Prepare to be creeped out.

For some reason I have never posted a Fulci film.  I don’t know why, it just turned out that way.  I am solving that issue tonight.  I chose City of the Living Dead for a couple of reasons:

  1. It doesn’t get seen as much as Zombi.
  2. It is part of a trilogy of similar zombie films done by Fulci, which focus on religious aspects of the dead rising (i.e., priest commits suicide, the dead rise.) The other films in this series are the excellent The Beyond and House by the Cemetery. I do recommend watching The Beyond if you have never seen it.  A link to the full film on Tubi is above.  Make it a double feature night!
  3. Really great cinematography* and special effects. Fulci put so much fog in the latter part of the film that a dude nearly ran his nice convertible into a tree. Yeah, that scene is in this copy.
  4. Plot?  What plot?  I thought we were touring a Halloween haunted house.

So #4 gets brought up a lot with Fulci films.  Either you get into it, or you don’t.  This came out in 1980. It had serious gore, zombies, and it was a solid entry in the field of zombie films.  Fulci is absolutely guilty of mangling plot lines to some degree here.  I forgive him, he is Italian.  Also this is a zombie film. What do you want, MacBeth? This isn’t going to be Shakespeare.

We get to watch the special edition of the film tonight!  That means no scenes cut out.  For example, there was a drill scene that was cut from one version that was commonly at rental stores.  Even if you have seen this movie in the past it is worth watching to see what new things you don’t remember.

So watch!  Or don’t! Everything is voluntary until the dead walk the earth in search of brains! Oh wait, that already happened… Well, anyway, next week we watch another classic, The Raven  with Vincent Price, Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff!

*Does that mean the film copy is clear as a sunny winter’s day?  Heck no!  This was shot in the late 1970s by a coked up film crew.  As all films from that time period were.  Get out the fuzz-o-vision goggles!  I will say that the Tubi copy of The Beyond is absolutely pristine and well-focused. Well done, whatever company transferred that.

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After you click the link for the weekly movie, hit the Play button on the movie and you should get the screen shown below. The guest option may require scrolling up to see. Click the circled guest option to watch the film.

(h/t: The Hyperbole)

About The Author

R.J.

Hello. My name is R.J. I am a Tulpa with extra cheese and sour cream.

141 Comments

  1. DEG

    We get to watch the special edition of the film tonight! That means no scenes cut out. For example, there was a drill scene that was cut from one version that was commonly at rental stores. Even if you have seen this movie in the past it is worth watching to see what new things you don’t remember.

    But are there boobs?

    • R.J.

      Can’t recall, oddly.
      There will be boobs in Lady Frankenstein, which is coming up after The Raven. Lady Frankenstein is also an uncensored copy.

      • Chafed

        Bow-chicka-bow-bow?

      • DEG

        There is a blowup doll, which doesn’t count.

    • Brochettaward

      Asking if there are boobs is always an acceptable form of Firstinng.

  2. DEG

    Dunwich. Lovecraft fans. Nice.

  3. Common Tater

    *hits play*

  4. Common Tater

    “The Raven with Vincent Price, Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff!”

    YAY!

    • DEG

      🙂

    • Ted S.

      Bloated, death-warmed-over Peter Lorre, no less.

      • R.J.

        Price was the only one of the three looking good.

    • The Hyperbole

      “Karloff? Sidekick? Fuck You! Karloff does not deserve to smell my shit!”

      • rhywun

        A classic “fuck you” worth an Academy award.

        • The Hyperbole

          If I made movies* I’d make a “This Old House” Half-mockumentary just so I could have Norm Abram say ‘Vila? Sidekick? Vila does not deserve to smell my shit”

          *obligatory

          • Mojeaux

            I would watch that.

  5. Common Tater

    Dunwich? Lovecraft reference?

    • R.J.

      Yes, it absolutely is.

  6. R.J.

    Fun fact, somebody put maggots in Fulci’s tobacco pouch during filming. Not sure hilarity ensued.

  7. DEG

    She had Daddy Issues.

  8. DEG

    And he’s a cuckold.

  9. R.J.

    “I’ll take vomiting up intestines for $200, Alex.”

    • UnCivilServant

      Yours or someone else’s?

  10. DEG

    Is this one of those films where only the slutty people get killed?

    • R.J.

      I am fairly certain this is one of those films where Italian people get killed.

      • Common Tater

        It must be some great dubbing because it looks like they are speaking English.

        • R.J.

          These are the jokes!

  11. R.J.

    Those old Chevy wagons looked beat up even when new.

  12. Aloysious

    I can’t wait to get off work. And watch this. And drink beer.

  13. Aloysious

    Next week is The Raven?

    That is so cool.

    • R.J.

      You peeps seem to be liking the classics. Halloween week will be different. Something special.

      • Aloysious

        I borrowed some culture and class.

        • R.J.

          I had to give mine back. Something about “stolen land.”

          • rhywun

            You know, you can just twitch your lips and give a Land Acknowledgement.

            • R.J.

              <==points to avatar
              Lips don’t move.

              • rhywun

                OK, Shakira.

  14. Dr. Fronkensteen

    Macbeth has witches
    Hamlet is the one with a ghost
    You’re right Shakespeare never did anything with zombies.

    • R.J.

      Replace “zombies” with “bitches” and you have a Burma-Shave jingle.

    • The Hyperbole

      I was told that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were dead.

      • UnCivilServant

        No, just in England. Pretty much the same thing.

    • Zwak says the real is not governable, but self-governing.

      Yorick, you forgot Yorick.

      So, skeletons, at least.

      • slumbrew

        He was just a skull – that doesn’t count as a full skeleton.

        • UnCivilServant

          I seem to recall he had just been dug up, so his bones were there, but Hamlet just didn’t pick up the rest of them.

  15. R.J.

    Mrs. Holden’s whole job in this film is laying around and sleeping.

    • rhywun

      Jelly.

      • R.J.

        You know it.

        • rhywun

          I woke up with a fucking leg cramp at 5am.

          Bit pissy about the whole “sleep” thing today.

          • pistoffnick

            Stretching.
            Maybe some potassium. Eat a banana.

            • rhywun

              Yeah, I need to up my banana intake – like by infinity percent.

              I get them once or twice a year. Sucks balls.

              • Gender Traitor

                Lesson learned on trip up to MI UP/WI/MN: the best hotel breakfasts include bananas.

                Sadly, none of them had bacon. 😞

              • Common Tater

                No bacon? That’s a violation of the Geneva Convention.

                You should have dispensed mad lead on those ass clowns.

              • dbleagle

                Eat an Apple Banana instead of a standard banana. They have a much better taste and texture.

                I grow them and most folks out here won’t touch a standard banana.

                Athena can back me up.

              • Lackadaisical

                ‘I need to up my banana intake’

                *raises eyebrow*

                That is what I tell my wife too.

    • R.J.

      “We have vegan, vegetarian and lactose-free options, and I’m also working on gluten-free varieties,”

      No. I assume this means you don’t have normal empanadas.

      • Chafed

        Slow down there R.J. That man is speaking my language.

    • UnCivilServant

      When your menu gets too big, it implies that you don’t do anything particularly well.

      • rhywun

        Yup. Gordon Ramsey makes a big, correct deal out of that.

        Maybe if they have all those ingredients fresh but I doubt it.

    • Ted S.

      Six possible fillings that you can put in or not. 2^6 = 64 types of empanada. 🙂

      • Common Tater

        You can put 37 different things in a burrito. How many is that?

        • Ted S.

          128 Gigaburritos?

          • UnCivilServant

            Is that a food truck, or a pop single?

  16. DEG

    I know my convertible is parked when I hit the tree.

    • R.J.

      Right? WTF was going on there?

      • R.J.

        And earlier, the blue Chevy wagon totally side swiped another car. In a later scene it had a paint kiss on the door. How much drinking happened during the filming?

        • slumbrew

          All of it. All the drinking.

  17. DEG

    I gotta drop off for the night and get some sleep. I’ll finish this in tomorrow.

    Thanks RJ!

    • R.J.

      Thanks for coming!

  18. R.J.

    That lathe will never be right again.

      • R.J.

        I like the “Salt Wars Freedom Edition.”

  19. Common Tater

    This sherbet is good shit.

    • R.J.

      That’s what John-John said.

      • Common Tater

        He was baked when he crashed that plane?

  20. Ted S.

    Ross Tucker is smart enough to know deep dish is not pizza. Ian Eagle, not so much.

  21. R.J.

    Awesome. I hope you enjoy tonight’s film, and I hope you weren’t disappointing that John John….
    Right. No spoilers.
    After this Tubi started “Hell of the Living Dead,” which is one of the two movies used to make “Corona Zombies.”

    • R.J.

      My text to speech function is balls.

      • Common Tater

        It also lets big tech know everything you say.

        • R.J.

          Everything I say, translated incorrectly. I got that going for me. I just got lazy and didn’t want to type on the phone keyboard.

    • Gender Traitor

      “Corona Zombies” should be a drink.

    • rhywun

      Campus Crusade for Meat Grinders

      I feel like I’m living in a looking glass.

      • The Bearded Hobbit

        I was a Democrat in the 70’s because they opposed the Vietnam War.

        My, how things have changed.

        • kinnath

          Fucking kids

          I remember kids burning draft cards.

        • rhywun

          It’s bananas.

    • Brochettaward

      We should not admit Ukraine to NATO evokes the deep, well thought out response of…why not.

      • Brochettaward

        And the little ginger shit asking the question would be the first one in line to flee to Canada if we went to war with Russia.

        • Derpetologist

          My own sister gave me the white feather treatment when I told her I had no plans of going to fight in Ukraine, something which Biden himself has cautioned Americans against doing. She’s also hardcore for Team Blue. According to her, Hunter Biden’s shenanigans with Burisma are fake news.

          ***
          At the start of World War I, Admiral Charles Fitzgerald, who was a strong advocate of conscription, wanted to increase the number of those enlisting in the armed forces. Therefore he organized on 30 August 1914 a group of thirty women in his home town of Folkestone to hand out white feathers to any men that were not in uniform. Fitzgerald believed using women to shame the men into enlisting would be the most effective method of encouraging enlistment.[5][6] The group that he founded (with prominent members being Emma Orczy and the prominent author Mary Augusta Ward) was known as the White Feather Brigade or the Order of the White Feather.[7]

          While the true effectiveness of the campaign is impossible to judge, it spread throughout several other nations in the empire. In Britain, it started to cause problems for the government when public servants and men in essential occupations came under pressure to enlist. That prompted Home Secretary Reginald McKenna to issue employees in state industries with lapel badges reading “King and Country” to indicate that they were serving the war effort. Likewise, the Silver War Badge, which was given to service personnel who had been honourably discharged by wounds or sickness, was first issued in September 1916 to prevent veterans from being challenged for not wearing uniform.[7] Anecdotes from the time indicate that the campaign was unpopular among soldiers, not least because soldiers who were home on leave could find themselves presented with feathers.
          ***

          Christ, what a bunch of assholes.

          • Lackadaisical

            ‘ Fitzgerald believed using women to shame the men into enlisting would be the most effective method of encouraging enlistment.[5][6] The group that he founded (with prominent members being Emma Orczy and the prominent author Mary Augusta Ward) was known as the White Feather Brigade or the Order of the White Feather.[7]’
            Sorry to hear about your sister. I’m lucky enough that my sister is libertarian and my brother is disenchanted with any politics.

            Channeling Jordan Peterson: Nothing more terrifying than your ideal mate* telling you that you aren’t worthy, more terrifying than death.

            *All eligible women get idealized until men actually meet them, which is why so much sticking it in happens to crazy

    • Gustave Lytton

      Wow. My basic training initial “portrait” is better than that.

    • Lackadaisical

      Expecting soldiers to be well groomed is ableist.

  22. LCDR_Fish

    I’ve read a lot of reviews and seen clips from a lot of Italo zombie flicks, but I don’t think I’ve actually watched any other than the epic “Dellamorte Dellamore” aka “Cemetery Man”. With that exception, they haven’t sounded particularly appealing aesthetically. DD is gorgeous and has some amazing sequences – had to import a blu-ray though.

  23. Aloysious

    Capitol of Conformity was suitably dystopian. Did remind me of Brave New World.

    +1

    • slumbrew

      It was great. Love the BioShock esthetic.

    • Lackadaisical

      Neat! How many lasers do you think that took though?

      Also, it is from 3 years ago, any idea if this still works, is green the best color for this?

  24. Derpetologist

    The other killer cyborg named Terminator:

    ***
    Fellow Spaceknights, including comrades Starshine and Terminator, adopted the same oath and left Galador.[15] Terminator ultimately went insane, killing Starshine and attempting to kill Rom and his human friends, as he thought all had been “contaminated”.
    ***

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rom_the_Space_Knight

    I wonder if this is where James Cameron got the idea for the 1984 Terminator movie. I know Harlan Ellison sued him because of its similarities to sci fi stories Ellison had written.

  25. Lackadaisical

    I’ll be doing some backwoods camping (sorta*) with my wife and son this weekend. Please send prayers.

    *There are no amenities, just a patch of dirt, which makes it legit backwoods, but there is a paved bike path nearby… which is weird.

  26. Beau Knott

    Good morning all! Today’s music selections are from Talk Talk.

    First up, It’s My Life.

    Then the eponymous Talk, Talk.

    Share and enjoy!

    • Gender Traitor

      Good morning, Beau, Lack, and Sean!

      Last work day before a three-day weekend! Thank goodness the Federal Reserve hasn’t “cancelled” Columbus Day (or whatever they’re calling it now.)

      • Lackadaisical

        I have ‘staff development day’ instead of a holiday, and my son doesn’t have it off at all, but the week after is a ‘non school day’

        I guess calling it a holiday or even ‘day off’ is non-inclusive. People are getting out of hand with euphemisms.

        • Gender Traitor

          We never got the day off from school for C’bus Day, and when the credit union I worked for was the school employees’ CU, we didn’t get it off because the Board was comprised of old retired teachers who didn’t recognize it as a holiday for that reason. Branch staff had to do transactions offline, I believe, because of the Fed being closed.

          That reminds me – I understand there’s a big football game tomorrow in Indigenous Peoples, Ohio.

          • UnCivilServant

            Is that the Delhi Indians versus the Boston Beefeaters?

            • Gender Traitor

              Delhi should field a team – I don’t care which sport – called the Delhi Dots.

              “Beefeaters” is good, but I find it irresistibly tempting to suggest “Beaneaters” instead.

              • Gender Traitor

                I stand corrected!

                Boston’s most notable landmark is St Botolph’s Church, colloquially referred to as ‘The Stump’, the largest parish church in England,[

                Now I want to go there! I might even break my commercial flight “fast” for the chance to see that landmark!

              • Ghostpatzer

                Beaneaters is the team from Juarez, it is known.

              • UnCivilServant

                Really? I herd it was the Juarez Wallonians.

        • Gender Traitor

          Italian lobby?

        • rhywun

          Not for lack of lots of radicals trying to change it. But the large number of New Yorkers of Eyetalian extraction aren’t having it.

          • UnCivilServant

            Since when did the Party care what the People think?

            • Gender Traitor

              “Nice state ya got there. Shame if anything should happen to it…”

            • rhywun

              Well, the last time it came up was under Cuomo. So yeah, it might be more a case that he wasn’t having it.

      • Ghostpatzer

        Mornin’

        According to our HR department, the final arbiters of pronouns, holiday names, and sundry other contentious subjects, Monday is Indigenous People’s Day. The science is settled.

        • UnCivilServant

          Sounds like your HR department needs reeducation.

        • rhywun

          I’ve never dived into this part of the culture war to decide if C.C. was in fact the monster they claim, or it’s just the left spinning another fantasy.

          • UnCivilServant

            Other than his poor sense of scale, he was unremarkable.

    • rhywun

      I never dug beyond the greatest hits album but that collection is remarkable in that all the hits are, in fact, great.

      • Beau Knott

        Yup. Sadly under-rated band.

    • Stinky Wizzleteats

      Don’t the Glibertarians Terms of Service include something about no Kid Rock links? If you’re trying to get hyped to kick some ass Master of Puppets is the only acceptable song.

      • rhywun

        I approve this message.

  27. Ghostpatzer

    Mornin’, reprobates!

    What’s a Kid Rock?

    • Gender Traitor

      Good morning, ‘patzie! Continuing to feel better, I hope?

      A Kid Rock is like a Pet Rock, but you’re legally obliged to support it for at least eighteen years.

      • Ghostpatzer

        Best eighteen twenty-five years of my life!

    • UnCivilServant

      So, how was your flight?

    • Gender Traitor

      Awwwww! It’s just a widdle baby otter!! 🥰🦦

      • UnCivilServant

        Yeah, in what manner did it “Terrorize: the flight? Was the picture taken after someone took away its bomb vest?

        • Gender Traitor

          “Awwwwww! It’s such a cute widdle bomb vest!!”🥰💣

    • Ghostpatzer

      “A subsequent police search of the vessel also located a box containing 28 live turtles, a snake, one marmot, two otters and two other rodents of unknown species among the luggage upon landing in Taipei.”

      Cat lady liberated from toxic speciesism, proudly lets freak flag fly.

  28. Ghostpatzer

    This reads like a script from a 1950’s farce. “Some like it hot”, 21st century style.

    https://nypost.com/2023/10/05/men-claim-to-be-nonbinary-to-crash-womens-job-fair/

    Anchal Katyalm, a software developer at Amazon, aired her grievances on LinkedIn: “It saddens me to see all those cis men attending #GHC23 and misrepresenting their gender.”

    I wonder how xe knows they are cis men.

    • rhywun

      I love this story.