The Gates of Hell (aka City of the Living Dead) (1983)
Here is another Lucio Fulci-directed piece of refuse that causes a pain in the head due to its incomprehensiblity and does all it can to make the viewer throw up. The Gates of Hell is just about worthless.
In the small New England village of Dunwich, a local priest has hung himself which somehow opens the gates of Hell! In New York City a psychic (Katriona MacColl) has seen a vision of this tragedy and immediatlely drops dead from fright. If this promising beginning indicates that an actual story might be forming, then it's purely by accident. Enter bad movie regular Christopher George (Graduation Day, Mortuary) as a reporter who is...I dunno...looking for a scoop about the psychic's death, and luckily, he just happens to be at the cemetery where she is to be buried. From here on out, let the idiocy reign.
You see, it's quittin' time for the gravediggers so they leave her plot only partially filled in, which allows for MacColl to wake up in the coffin because she was buried by accident! Which begs the question of how she made it through the embalming process intact, but never mind. George hears her screaming from inside the coffin and instead of, you know, just opening it and letting her out, he grabs a pickaxe and begins slamming it into the coffin with gleeful abandon in order to get her out, nearly impaling her head in the process. Anyway, she's alive and they head to Dunwich.
So, what happens in Dunwich? Just random carnage. Characters are introduced just to be massacred in various ways. The ghostly image of the priest pops in and out at different times as, I suppose, a harbinger of death, maybe? One girl is smothered by a handful of maggot-infested gore by a disembodied hand, a man has his head drilled clean through in nasty close-up, various people have the backs of their heads squeezed so hard their brains squirt out and, in the film's most infamous and stomach-turning scene, a woman regurgitates her internal organs. In this sequence, the camera stays in a tight shot on her mouth as organ after organ is puked out, and it feels like it takes an enternity of screen-time to finish.
There is no logic or pattern to the story; it just is. Things happen because they can and that's all Fulci requires. Random things happen to everyone until the finale in a crypt and the priest is defeated...I think? Most everyone dies and something is set aflame and then the credits roll. Oh, another bit of strangeness is the alternate title of The Gates of Hell. Released in Europe and on DVD, it's better known as City of the Living Dead, but since it all takes place in the tiny hamlet of Dunwich, its title doesn't even make sense.
The Gates of Hell, or City of the Living Dead, or whatever other title it might be found under is just a nauseating waste of space. The only use it has is as an endurance test to see who can keep their popcorn down the longest.