If pressed to provide a ploy synopsis of City of the Living Dead (1980) I don't think I could do it. The plot is some loose, not quite coherent, meandering thread between a lot of scenes of horror. It has something to do with a priest's suicide being a catalyst for a gate to Hell opening beneath the town of Dunwich, which was also apparently the original Salem, and yet just outside of New York City. Characters come and go with no real story purpose, as do concepts. Yet, this movie was compelling to watch anyway. You'll see rotting corpses (with really poor make-up) a hanging priest who appears and vanishes repeatedly, people having their brains squeezed out of their skulls, people bleeding from their eyes, a woman vomiting up her internal organs, a blizzard of maggots, and a number of other horrors, but not an ability to make sense of what it's all about. I found it difficult enough to determine the geography of the movie, let alone the plot. I don't feel that horror movies should explain everything, in fact I think there is a tendency to over explain these days, but movies like Phantasm and Suspiria, which just seemed to throw what ever they could think of on the screen felt like they were leading somewhere, and they were. I'm not sure where City of the Living Dead was going. I just observed it from the passenger seat and took in the scenery as it came along.
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