- Director: Lucio Fulci
- Writers: Lucio Fulci, Dardano Sacchetti
- Stars: Christopher George, Catriona MacColl, Carlo De Mejo
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 33 Minutes
Synopsis
Credits roll as we see a red-eyed priest wandering a cemetery in Dunwich.
We cut to a group of women doing a séance. They are watching the priest string up a noose and kill himself. Nearby, in the same cemetery, the dead start to rise. Mary, the psychic, goes into convulsions as the evil muttering continues. They call an ambulance, but Mary’s dead.
The detective doesn’t believe the psychics’ story. The woman witch explains about the Book of Enoch, when suddenly there are flashes of fire in the next room. She warns the detective that in some other town, now, horrendous things are happening. The detective still thinks it’s a trick.
A young man goes into a building and finds the rotten corpse of a baby, dripping with worms and rot.
Peter Bell, a reporter, comes to town. Meanwhile, a small bar scares off its patrons when the mirror explodes and a big crack appears in the wall. Supposedly, most of the town has descended from historical witch-burners.
Bell watches as the cemetery caretakers lower Mary into the ground, and we see that her eyes open just as they finish piling dirt in the hole. Bell halfway hears her knocking as he walks away. He grabs a pick and breaks the coffin open. Mary tells Bell about the City of the Dead that she saw in her vision. It’s a place called Dunwich. If the gates of Hell remain open, it could be the end of the world. It’s only a few days until All Saint’s Day. Bell must reclose those gates!
Emily goes home to care for Bob, who was the young man we saw with the baby’s corpse. Bob runs off, and Father Thomas smears worms on her face. A couple is making out in their car and get a glimpse of Father Thomas hanging by his neck. Then her vanishes and reappears next to their car. He makes the girl puke up her internal organs while the boyfriend watches in terror. Father Thomas then pulls the boy’s brain out.
They find Emily’s body, and her father blames Bob. Gerry is there and he doesn’t argue.
Bell admits that two years ago, a psychic told him he’d find a girl buried alive. Mary explains that by hanging himself, Father Thomas opened the gates of Hell. Little John-John, Emily’s brother, sees Emily’s rotting face outside his window.
Sandra, one of Gerry’s patients, calls him because she’s seen something crazy. “See for yourself. It’s in the kitchen.” The dead woman from the mortuary is laying on her floor. They hear a growling, and the old woman is gone. A window explodes, and the wall starts bleeding.
Mr. Ross catches Bob sleeping in his garage and drills a hole through his head.
Mary and Bell go to the cemetery to find Father Thomas’s grave. Gerry and Sandra are there as well to talk to the undertaker about the old woman. The four share what they know, but the window blasts open, and they are all nearly buried in maggots. John-John calls Gerry and says that Emily just killed and ate her parents. The group goes back to the funeral home and fins the undertaker. They figure out pretty quickly that he wasn’t behind this. Emily squishes Sandra’s Brian out as John-John watches. Gerry faces off with Emily.
The gang returns to the cemetery. The clock strikes, and now it’s All Saint’s Day. Zombies are teleporting all over town. They find and open Father Thomas’s tomb. There’s a big hole in the backside. Someone broke in the others side; or something broke out. Bell is killed. Lots of the dead show up, led by Father Thomas himself.
Gerry stabs Thomas with a cross, and he burns. The other dead burn with him, collapsing to the ground.
Commentary
The gore is excellent here. I don’t quite know how they did the bleeding eyeballs. The organ-vomiting scene is appropriately… meaty. The drill-through-the-head-trick was done very convincingly as well. Why we were hearing jungle noises, complete with howler monkeys, in downtown Dunwich is a little beyond me. There are a few too many characters that only exist to die off, but all the deaths are cool. There’s a long stretch toward the end that has no dialogue, but it’s pretty straightforward what happened.