Review of The Return of the Living Dead (1985) by Ariel C — 23 Aug 2010

TOTALLY MACABRE.

TOTALLY AWESOME.

TOTALLY HEAD-CHEESE-EATING CORPSES!!!!!

RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD.

. . . I just saw the 1 hour and 47 minute Work Print of RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD this weekend and what a WONDERFUL FILM it is; there?s none of the Phony Punk Rock music that sounded like heavy metal which allowed me to pay more attention to the film.

Figure this, here in North America movies are still considered Cheap Entertainment and Low-Budget Horror movies are the cheap thrills that are generally scorned and shunned by Film Critics over here.

Return of the Living Dead is a stroke of GENIUS: there are only 3 sets (UNEEDA MEDICAL SUPPLY, Resurrection Cemetery, and The Mortuary) and most of the actors appear to have recently graduated college and are primarily unknowns which makes Return of the Living Dead All the more fun: in the work print all the scenes are longer and the kids get a lot more time to ad lib in their respective characters.

Return of the Living Dead was written by Dan O?Bannon for director Tobe Hooper yet Tobe Hopper was called-away for LIFE-FORCE and INVADERS FROM MARS as a result, Return of the Living Dead is very Macabre and INSANE like TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (replete with SPLIT DOGS, BONE SAWS, DISMEMBERED CORPSES, Headcheese-eating corpses, and the grotesque corpse on the morgue table saying how she could feel herself rotting when not eating brains) but then it has a ?staid? (subdued) tone to it because Dan O?Bannon is more of a Writer than a Director.

I honestly did not care much for RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD probably because THE MUSIC seemed ?pumped-up? and ?thrown-in? to ?Juice-up? the movie, to cover-up the ?subdued? quality of the overall film.

Also the work-print is sheered of all the off-beat editing in the Theatrical Cut (like where Suicide reaches back to choke Spider three times and the moment prior to the end-credits where the scene of the skeleton popping-up out of the grave is repeated).

Regarding the editing and the music choices, it feels that RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD was supposed to be like The Rocky Horror Picture Show where the filmmakers made the movie to be seen by an audience so WHACKED-OUT on booze and drugs that they really wouldn?t pay attention to the actual movies.

I imagine, under Tobe Hopper?s direction, the corpses would be Headcheese-eating corpses as opposed to Brain-eating corpses and we would see extreme close-ups of dead tissue spattering the characters when they saw the jaundice-corpse?s head-off . . .

TOTALLY MACABRE.

TOTALLY AWESOME.

TOTALLY HEAD-CHEESE-EATING CORPSES!!!!!