cinema history class: city of the living dead

I am not a Lucio Fulci fan. I guess that's my takeaway from Thursday's film class at Keith's. Before the class, I'd seen one of his movies. To the best of my knowledge. That one movie was The House by the Cemetery, which I saw this past August as part of the all-night horror film festival at the Cinema Arts Center. I wrote about that movie as part of my post here. The relevant paragraph?

A family moves to New England and finds themselves haunted by the house's former owner. The story is well-constructed and interesting, and this is done very well. But it relies on a lot of blood and guts and gross-out visuals as well as jump scares, and I'm not into that. If you are, then you may find this to be a really good movie.

 Except for the first sentence, which described the plot, that paragraph could apply to City of the Living Dead, the Fulci film that Keith showed us.

The camerawork was very good, and the music was compelling. But, dang, how many times can I watch someone get his or her scalp pulled off? And the other grossities? A woman literally pukes her guts out. A guy gets his face drilled on a lathe. And lots of other stuff I'm not into.

This was an interesting film for the visuals. And I'm still trying to figure out the whole gimmick of zombies that can appear and disappear at will Maybe "demons" is a better word than "zombies." And, in a sense I can kind of see this as part of the transition of the horror film industry into the realm of slasher movies.

Fulci was talented. But not my cup of tea.