Review of The Return of the Living Dead (1985) by Terrence E — 13 May 2010

'Do you wanna party?' asks the horrorpunk theme song to Return of the Living Dead. If you're watching a movie called Return of the Living Dead I'm going to assume your answer is 'yes', or 'hell yes' depending upon the substance or the circumstance. Originally intended as an unofficial sequel to George Romero's Living Dead series, Return of the Living Dead was made into something far more interesting in Romero's absence: a comedy. Twenty years before Shaun of the Dead, this is the first zombie comedy, or ZomCom as they tend to be called. And while you might not catch yourself shivering from fright (or disgust) or lost in contemplative meditation on Romero-esque societal themes, you'll probably be laughing too hard to notice.

Military blundering and ill-placed curiosity lead to the dead returning to life and seeking the brains of the living. It's important that I emphasize the brains. Writer/director Dan O'Bannon goes out of his way to highlight that these zombies are not content with just any old body part; it's the brains that they're after. How do we know? Because they tell us. Make no mistake; these are the most intelligent and resourceful zombies I've ever seen. Unlike Romero's shambling undead troglodytes, these ghouls talk, run, set traps, and crack wise. We know we're not in traditional territory after a pair of policeman are lynched and eaten by a mob of undead, and one zombie picks up the radio mic to tell dispatch to send more cops.

The action is set primarily in a medical supply warehouse, a mortuary, and the adjacent graveyard. Freddy (Thom Matthews) has just started his new job at Uneeda Medical Supply when Frank (James Karen, appropriately hamming it up) tells him the story of how Night of the Living Dead was actually based on a true story, and that the military had shipped a chemical known for reanimating dead corpses *gasp* right there to that very warehouse. Intrigued, as I imagine anyone would be, Freddy asks to see it and since we're watching a zombie movie, do I really have to tell you that the chemical is indeed there and subsequently leaks out and dead people start a-shakin'?

In the cemetery across the street, a group of Freddy's friends -- a gaggle of deliberately obnoxious punks with names like Trash and Suicide -- barge in to wait and party over graves while Freddy works. What they don't know is that Freddy and Frank are running around frantically trying to figure out how to deal with the cadaver in the freezer that has suddenly started banging on the door, in addition to the butterfly specimens and split dogs that have suddenly come alive. They decide to call the boss, Burt (Clu Gulager, at his exasperated best), who manages to somehow stay calm through most of this nonsense and figures, incorrectly, that the best way to handle the screaming dead man in the freezer is to follow the Romero movie's rules and brain it with a pick axe. The movie's funniest moments are probably when the three of them discover how ineffective smashing a dead thing in the brain is.

"I thought you said if we destroyed the brain, it'd die?".

"It worked in the movie!".

"Well, it ain't workin' now, Frank!".

"You mean the movie lied?".

It doesn't give anything away to let you know, dear reader, that Burt's next solution is to take the chopped up and still-squirming bits of the cadaver over to his friend Ernie's (Don Calfa) mortuary and convince him to burn it. After a lot of sharp dialogue and very funny hand-wringing, Ernie complies and unwittingly sends toxic fumes into the clouds, which, of course, rain back down into the cemetery and Freddy's partying punk friends are given a rude awakening when the corpses underneath them start crawling out of the dirt to do some partying of their own.

Return of the Living Dead is an unusually sharp horror movie, even for a comedic one. The whole thing is powered by O'Bannon's dialogue, not by the monsters, the characters, or the effects, although those work just fine. Take, for example, the scene where a painfully ill Frank and Freddy are attended by paramedics, who are unable to reconcile the fact that these two men have no heartbeat and are cold to the touch.

"You have no pulse, your blood pressure's zero-over-zero, you have no pupillary response, no reflexes and your temperature is 70 degrees.".

"Well, what does that mean?".

"Well, it's a puzzle because, technically, you're not alive. Except you're conscious, so we don't know what it means.".

"Are you saying we're dead?".

"Well, let's not jump to conclusions.".

It's obvious while watching Return of the Living Dead that O'Bannon is drawing heavily on his own inspirations from EC Comics, the defunct publishing house of the 50's that gave us Tales From the Crypt and inspired Romero's own Creepshow. These zombies are stylized and cartoonish, more alive than dead, and horror as fun is the order of the day. This is a movie that, like Shaun of the Dead and last year's Fido, was made with fans of horror, rather than at them. If you can hear names like Tom Savini without smiling just a little bit, then this movie probably isn't for you. The movie was produced by Jack Russo, who helped conceive the original Night of the Living Dead, though O'Bannon was wise to let Romero be Romero and instead bring his own satirical edge to an overly heavy subgenre. There aren't any statements here, beyond that sometimes we need to party like the dead.

Amen to that.

SCORE: 10 / 10.