Review: The Return of the Living Dead (1985)

The Return of the Living Dead (1985)

Rated R

Score: 4 out of 5

The Return of the Living Dead is not a film that you watch for things like coherent plotting, a good story, or interesting characters who you want to see make it. It has none of those things. It frequently jumps from place to place, leaving characters behind for long stretches such that you wonder what their role in the story is. None of the characters are more than stereotypes, and several of them are flat-out annoying. There are structural problems in this film that would cripple your typical zombie horror flick. And yet none of them really stopped this, because this isn't your typical zombie horror flick. It's a gonzo, punk-rock horror-comedy that at times feels more like a music video than anything, propelled by an excellent soundtrack, spectacular makeup effects, snappy one-liners, a nihilistic tone, and a meta, self-aware take on the zombie genre over a decade before Scream pulled the same trick with slashers. It's an experience that must be seen to be believed, and I was lucky enough to catch a screening of it at the Savor Cinema in Fort Lauderdale courtesy of the Popcorn Frights Film Festival (which is how I also saw Found Footage 3D a couple of years ago), complete with a Q&A session with one of the film's stars, the famed '80s scream queen Linnea Quigley. And that really is the best place to watch this, in a packed house with an enormous crowd of people.

The basic setup of this film is that Night of the Living Dead, George A. Romero's seminal 1968 horror classic that invented the zombie film as we know it, was in fact based on a true story. Specifically, it was made after a military experiment in Pittsburgh went horribly wrong and caused the dead to return from the grave, with the details changed in Romero's film as part of the cover-up. We learn this from Frank, the foreman of a medical supply warehouse in Louisville who's telling this story to his new employee Freddy; when Freddy proves understandably skeptical, Frank shows him proof in the form of the barrels of the 2-4-5 Trioxin chemical from that experiment, which got shipped to his warehouse due to a mix-up and which he's kept hidden in the basement ever since. Frank's overconfidence in the barrels' sturdiness causes one of them to leak and spray them both in the face with the zombie chemicals, just in time for Freddy's friends, a motley crew of punk rockers, to arrive in order to pick him up for a party. Throw in Frank's boss Burt, a mortician named Ernie, and a graveyard next to the warehouse, and you've got the makings of a zombie apocalypse.

Look, like I said, this isn't a movie that's very concerned with narrative grace. It's a while before we see our first zombie in action, and longer than that before we get to the full-on zombie hordes. Most of the characters have only a single defining character trait, if that; Tina is in love with Freddy, Suicide is a violent brute, Trash is the hot chick who spends most of the movie buck naked because fuck you, that's why, Chuck and Casey are the lone preppy couple amidst the punks they're friends with, Ernie is strongly implied (between his Walther P38 pistol and his love of classical German music) to be an ex-Nazi, and so on and so forth. The script for this film is merely a vehicle to get to the real meat, and I don't really have to explain what that might be. This is a film that's about atmosphere, but not in the sense of building creeping dread or a haunting mood; no, if there's one word to describe the sort of atmosphere this movie builds, it's energy. From start to finish, this is a movie that makes you feel like you just wandered into MTV's studio circa 1985, whereupon you got sucked into a feature-length punk version of Michael Jackson's seminal "Thriller" video. Even in scenes where little is happening, the film never feels like it's slowing down; it is always pressing forward and rocking out to the beat of its own drum, packing an in-your-face attitude with every step. It's hard to describe just how much the soundtrack makes this movie without seeing it for yourself, such that, when it was mentioned during the Q&A session that the initial home releases of this film with altered music (licensing issues) just didn't feel right, I totally believed it.

That said, this film has plenty of merits beyond just the music-video atmosphere. To start with, as hokey as a lot of the cast is, the same infectious energy propelling everything else in this film was clearly also running through their veins, as everybody involved seemed like they were having a ton of fun with their characters. They may all be broad, two-dimensional archetypes, but nearly all of them, between their outlandish fashions and their attitudes, left an impression. The writing was often hysterical, this being as much a comedy and a sendup of the zombie genre as it is a straight example. It's a world where everybody's seen zombie movies and thinks they know how to kick zombie ass; Frank and Freddy, for instance, immediately recall that Romero's zombies were killed by removing the head or destroying the brain, and pull that on the first zombie they encounter. Unfortunately, 2-4-5 Trioxin doesn't just revive corpses, it can even revive inanimate body parts, as witnessed in a memorable early scene where the sliced-open dog cadavers and pinned butterflies in the medical supply warehouse are brought back to life by the chemical gas. As it turns out, even dismembering them still leaves you with quivering arms and legs; you've got to incinerate these zombies to get the job done, which only creates more problems if you don't know what you're doing. The zombies in this film are some of the most creative and funny I've ever seen, and not just in terms of the special effects on particular zombies like the "Tar Man" or the decomposed half-woman (even if the effects team did great work here). These zombies retain enough of their intelligence to speak and think, most notably when they lay and spring traps for the paramedics and police officers reacting to the zombie outbreak (providing one of the best zombie movie one-liners in the process), or when they're moaning for a certain iconic undead delicacy. Yes, this is the movie that invented the trope of zombies eating brains, a rule that is both ruthlessly exploited for grisly gore shots and which could only really work with this movie's ruleset for how its zombies work (after all, if zombies eat brains but destroying the brain kills a zombie, then how does the zombie plague spread?).

The Bottom Line

This is a movie where describing it doesn't do it justice. It's probably the ultimate midnight movie, working as both a joyride of a mood piece and a fun sendup of its genre that still works as a straight example, and far better than the sum of its parts. I imagine it being a bit of an acquired taste due to its structural problems being pretty hard to ignore, but this movie's throw-everything-at-the-wall approach to overcoming those problems ultimately turns out a winner, one that's still unlike any other zombie movie I've ever seen.