Film Summary CDLXIII (The Return of the Living Dead )


The Return of the Living Dead is this weird homage / comedy film that border lines on being a spoof sometimes.
It's got some amazing visual effects for the zombies it's got some wonderful rock metal music and overall it's just an entertaining movie. I'd recommend watching it over reading anything I write here.
Or you can watch red letter Media review of the film. They're the reason I know this thing exists. Although I haven't actually seen their video yet. So now I'm hoping that whatever my opinions are don't sound exactly the same to theirs. Otherwise everyone's going to be claiming that I just stole their thoughts. Like some sort of rain wizard.


I'm surprised I had never heard of this movie before. I love the Romero series of zombie flicks and up to a point I was a pretty big fan of zombies in general. So how this wonderfully camp amusingly vulgar horror movie; with Inspirations to the granddaddy of zombie movies had somehow Fallen under my radar is just weird.

It's the story of two idiots in a warehouse accidentally opening a container of toxic gas  that both destroys and reinvigorates anything it comes in contact with turning all living things and formerly living things into a zombified state.
And it's really weird because once these things are reanimated, that's it. You can't kill them again. You can't get rid of them.
Oh you can set the things on fire. And burn their asses to a crisp thus eliminating the one creature permanently. But if you do that all the residual smoke and steam from their bodies will raise into the atmosphere and create a new Thriller video.

Then on top of them being near invincible they're also intelligent. These aren't really brain dead zombies.
Most of them seem to be representations of the people they once were. In some cases you might argue they are the people they were, but now they're infected by this weird chemical which makes them want to eat brains. And as the film points out. They eat brains to stop the pain. I'm actually surprised at the amount of detail to give to the backstory of the little zombies, given how indifferent most franchises are to the original outbreak or the actual cause.
Or at least that's how the explanation goes. We're told by one zombie because they can literally talk to you. That they want to eat our brains to subdue the pain of their Rotting Flesh. But there's this other zombie in the bottom of the basement where the outbreak began and he doesn't seem to care about pain. Maybe all of his nerve endings to finally shut down you just can't feel anything anymore. But it's clear that he's some sort of original zombie that's been around for a while because he's the Kate more so than just about anyone else. I also thought that the story was going to go in a weird angle with him where they killed that zombie all the other zombies would die or revert back to their humans state or something else equally ridiculous. I guess that's me trying to look for the Hollywood Silver Lining everything's going to be okay if we can just deal this one little thing.

The story is your paint-by-number Zombie Adventure. A group of people are involved in an incident with zombies and they all hide together in the end. Holding up in random storehouses, basements, warehouses, addicts, anywhere they can get away from the zombies and hope that somebody will rescue them.
Then the rest of the movie is either them waiting out the clock until the inevitable comes or trying to escape to a form of civilisation for safety and to inform everyone that the outbreak has actually occurred.
In the case of this movie everything they do is kind of fruitless. No matter what you do to these darn zombies they just keep coming back. Which makes them the most devastating zombie Force out of any other franchise I can think of.

The punk kids are a lot of fun to follow initially. As they're just roaming around being a nuisance harassing each other and then deciding to hang around in a graveyard, waiting for one of their friends to get off work at the factory. And there are a lot of fun right up until the zombie start getting involved. Then their main guy dies and the whole chemistry with their group goes down the toilet.

I really like James Karen and Don Calfa in this movie. They both play these incredibly Oddball guys who run really weird businesses and they seem to be the only people that can kind of keep their head while dealing with the zombie crisis. And there's a whole angle with blank having some connection to the Nazis that's never picked up on.
It's just one of those interesting little character quarks.
Then finally there's Clu Gulager who gets to play this nervous wreck of a man. He's kind of responsible for the whole outbreak to begin with. And he gets this particularly brutal and yet oddly heartwarming scene at the end when he's finally turning into a zombie.
He throws himself into a crematorium after taking his wedding ring off and begging forgiveness for having to kill himself so that he doesn't become like all the other Undead.

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