True confession time: even though I don’t mind zombies in print, I think they might scare me the most out of all the various popular movie monsters. The central idea, that they represent disease, worries me since COVID told me how much of a germophobe I am. Likewise, zombie can be anyone unlucky enough to get bitten, and unlike even other “contagious” monsters like vampires and werewolves, there is nothing left of the individual with the zombie. They just shuffle along, decay, and eat people.
The point is, even though I know it’s more of a comedy, I was somewhat reluctant to watch The Return of the Living Dead.
The Return of the Living Dead should not for a minute be taken seriously, despite the fact that it, not Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, invented a few bits of the best-known zombie lore. In point of fact, Romero’s movie is a work of fiction within the world of Return of the Living Dead, a movie that was actually a dramatization of real events according to hapless medical supply employee Frank (James Karen) to new co-worker Freddy (Thom Mathews). There was a gas of some kind that reanimated the dead, and after the zombies were stopped, the military stored the stuff within the warehouse where Frank and Freddy now work. Of course, they accidentally release the gas, animating a corpse or two, starting with a half-a-dog that seems rather happy to see everyone and looks like it should be made out of plastic. It’s the human zombies that are causing problems, and their boss Burt (character actor Clu Gulager) soon shows up to help them dispose of the one zombie that showed up and wouldn’t stay dead with some help from Burt’s pal Ernie (Don Calfa), a local mortician with his own cremation oven.
I don’t know what sets the tone for this movie more in certain respects: that middle-aged Clu Gulager is basically the closest this movie has to a hero, or that we have two guys named Burt and Ernie running around.
Regardless, in a nearby cemetery, Freddy’s girlfriend Tina (Beverly Randolph) and their punk rocker friends are just hanging around. Why does one woman feel the need to take off all her clothes and dance around? Well, so we can have 80s scream queen Linnea Quigley play a nearly naked zombie later, obviously. These things don’t have to make sense. But then the dead start to rise, and all they want is to eat brains. These zombies can somewhat talk, but mostly they just ask for brains. If anything, as the survivor groups starts to get smaller and smaller, the running gag seems to be the local authorities keep sending people in to investigate and those folks don’t come out again.
So, in many ways, this was mostly just a dumb comedy. The zombie effects are rather impressive, particularly the “Tarman” puppet that is mostly skeleton and dripping in black goo. The characters aren’t very well-developed, and while there is a lot of fun to be had, it mostly wasn’t for me. It’s not even all that scary in the grand scheme of things. Considering how this movie ends, it is a bit bleak, but it might be bleaker if the characters were people that the audience might care about. I don’t think it matters much. Writer/director Dan O’Bannon has a lot of impressive work on his resume, including Alien and Total Recall, but also Dark Star and Lifeforce, and those latter two seem to be closer in spirit to The Return of the Living Dead. Still, this is the movie that came up with the idea that zombies just want to eat brains, and a single bite it all it takes. Romero’s zombies were interested in eating anything alive, and while a bite could cause a transformation, it was mostly that anyone who died of anything came back, and the zombie bite just caused a bad infection like a lot of real world bite attacks do. I’m not sure I would recommend this one to most people, but if you’re big on zombies, you’ll probably like this one more than I did.
Grade: B-
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