What You Should See This Month: Italian zombie movies at MAD

What is the appeal of zombies? I don't mean to imply that there is none - on the contrary, nothing could be more certain. I'm just wondering what it is. As we know all too well, vampires subsist on a strange kind of icy sex appeal that makes them both threatening and alluringly unavailable. Sort of like Anna Wintour. They have "KINKY" stamped on their pasty foreheads. Werewolves, too, are an easily understandable phenomenon: they're kept around for comparison's sake. In the Twilight universe, that means comparison shopping.

Zombies shamble. Do we like that they shamble? I don't know. Something tells me that the history of zombie films is built on the herky-jerky not-quite-rightness of their movements--the comportment that betrays a lack of free will, an empty head, a hunger for heads, an inhuman vacancy. Then again, part of the appeal must be that we can't think of them as individuals. People hated how in "28 Weeks Later," Robert Carlyle's character became a Rage Virus-infected creature who had the foresight, the will, and the emotional presence to play Creepy Stalker with his kids. We were denied the hollowness we have come to expect from zombies - the hollowness that gives them the capacity to be both terrifying and hilarious, depending the way they've been lit. 

Maybe we like them because they replace death, our biggest fear, with something fantastically worse.

Whatever. Here's one thing we can count on: there are few better ways to gauge a culture--its ideological scaffolding, its guiding aesthetic principles, its craziness--than to see how it riffs on zombies. They're like the pop-culture version of rice. So check out "Zombo Italiano: The Italian Zombie Film Movement, 1972-1985" at the Museum of Arts and Design to see how Italy tackled the persistent philosophical quandary of the undead. Or, rather, how they went nuts with it, because orgasmically elaborate violence has been the secret or not-so-secret fetish of Italian filmmakers since the 40s.

In particular, be sure not to miss Lucio Fulci's "Zombi II," which was marketed as a sequel to George A. Romero's superclassic "Dawn of the Dead" but really doesn't have anything to do with it. In the film, a zombie fights a shark. In real life, a man in zombie makeup fights an actual shark. Now there's your fuckin' Neorealism.

"Zombo Italiano: The Italian Zombie Film Movement, 1972-1985" will be playing from July 8-29 at the Museum of Arts and Design (2 Columbus Circle). Tickets are $10 regular admission, $7 with student ID. For the complete schedule, visit http://www.madmuseum.org/DO/public%20programs/zombies.aspx