Nightmare City
Nightmare City is a 1980 film from Italy, Spain and Mexico, directed by Umberto Lenzi, running 88 minutes. reelscum files it under zombie.
- Year
- 1980 · 1980s films
- Runtime
- 88 min
- Director
- Umberto Lenzi
- Updated
- 29 Oct 2026
- Obscurity
- cult (44/100)
- Also known as
- Invasion of the Atomic Zombies · City of the Walking Dead
- Banned in
- UK
Defined in the glossary: Zombie
Umberto Lenzi's irradiated-ghoul film, listed under Section 3 as liable to seizure.
Zombies that run and use guns, decades early. Incompetent in enjoyable ways.
Zombies that run, use weapons and think, decades before that became fashionable. A chemical leak produces irradiated ghouls who pour off a plane and overrun a city, and Umberto Lenzi stages it as breathless, incompetent, hugely entertaining chaos.
The gore effects are cheap and the logic is nonexistent, but the relentless pace and the sheer wrongness of fast, tool-using zombies give it a real energy. The ending is a cheat that the film absolutely earns.
Trash of a very enjoyable kind, and quietly influential.
Trailer
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Where to watch
Legal options in USA
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Written about
- Gut-munchers: the Italian zombie boom, 1979 to 1983
There was no first one. Argento recut Romero, Fulci forged the sequel, and Italy spent four years feeding the British censors.
Filed alongside
Cannibal Apocalypse
Vietnam veterans as cannibals. Sillier and kinder than the jungle cycle.
Zombie Holocaust
Cannibals and zombies at once, reusing the Zombi 2 sets and cast.
Burial Ground
Incoherent even by the standards of the cycle. The Peter subplot is unforgivable.
Return of the Evil Dead
Blind Dead again, this time besieging a whole village. The best of the four.
Shock Waves
Underwater Nazi zombies rise off a tropical island. Peter Cushing, John Carradine, and real dread.
The Ghost Galleon
The Blind Dead put to sea on a model boat in a visible fish tank. The runt of the four.
A Virgin Among the Living Dead
Franco at his dreamiest. Distributors added zombies later without telling him.
The Living Dead Girl
Rollin's best late film. Melancholy where the Italians were loud.
Night of the Seagulls
The Blind Dead ride out one last time. A quiet, sad closer to Spain's best monster series.
Hell of the Living Dead
Bruno Mattei rips off Dawn of the Dead with a Goblin score he also stole. Gloriously shameless.
The Grapes of Death
Rollin does an outbreak. A pesticide turns wine-country villagers into oozing killers.
Messiah of Evil
Made by the couple who then wrote American Graffiti. A nightmare that never explains itself.