The Return of the Living Dead (1985) Review
8/10
A new employee at a medical supply warehouse is told the story of an army accident that reanimated the dead, and shown the barrels it was sealed in. They’re in the basement. One of them is leaking.
The 8 is for a horror comedy that’s funny, frightening, and responsible for more of the modern zombie than any film except Night of the Living Dead. It runs ninety-one minutes and wastes none of them. From the first leaking barrel to the last shipment, this movie keeps me grinning. It’s mean, it’s fast, and I think it’s smarter about zombies than almost anything else from its decade. My complaints are real but small.
The deduction is for a cast of punks who are largely interchangeable and a middle stretch in the cemetery that circles while it waits for the plot to arrive. Half a dozen characters show up in the first ten minutes, and roughly two of them get anything an audience can hold onto before the rain starts and the cemetery next door empties into the streets. I gave up keeping track of which punk was which, and I suspect the film did too.
Everything Standard Started Here
Romero’s zombies don’t eat brains, don’t run, don’t speak, and can’t be killed by burning. This film introduces all four, and three of them became the genre default. Brains is the one everybody knows. The word wasn’t linked to zombies before this, and within a decade it was the only thing most people could tell you about them.
The running is the more consequential invention. A shambler is a problem you can walk away from and a runner is a problem you can’t, and every fast-zombie film from 28 Days Later onward is working in the tone this film opened.
Speech is the one nobody copied and it’s the most frightening. A half-destroyed corpse strapped to a table explains, articulately, that being dead hurts, and that eating brains makes the pain stop. That’s a considerably worse idea than hunger. The horror is that it can feel itself decaying. The corpse describes the sensation plainly, without self-pity, in the manner of somebody answering a reasonable question, and the two men asking it have nothing to say afterward.
Changing one rule of an established form is enough to build a whole work on. This film changes four and each one generates a different kind of scene. The discipline is to follow each change to its consequence. Speaking zombies mean the survivors can ask questions, and asking produces worse answers than silence would.
The best invention here’s the one that explains the appetite. Hunger is a mechanism and pain relief is a motive, and a motive makes a monster a character.
Note which inventions were copied. Running and brains spread everywhere and speech didn’t, because speech removes the reader’s ability to treat the monster as a force.
It Mocks the Film It Comes From
The opening conversation establishes that Night of the Living Dead was a real event, altered by the government for a film, and that the survivors in this story have seen that film and know it’s inaccurate.
That’s an extremely confident opening move and it pays off immediately. Everything the characters know is wrong, so shooting a corpse in the head does nothing, and the first attempt to follow the rules is the moment the film establishes it’s its own.
O’Bannon was also entitled to do it. He’d written Alien, had worked with Carpenter on Dark Star, and the rights to the follow-up came from the split between Romero and John Russo after the original, so this is a legitimate sequel taking the opposite road.
The origin is bureaucratic instead of cosmic. A chemical accident, a shipment error, barrels delivered to the wrong address and left in a basement for years because nobody wanted the paperwork.
That’s funnier and bleaker than a curse. The apocalypse happens because a form was filed incorrectly, and everybody involved is aware of it and nobody can do anything about it.
James Karen and Clu Gulager carry that half of the film, and Karen in particular is doing something very specific. Frank is a man who has just realized he’s destroyed everything and keeps talking cheerfully about it, and the performance stays funny while the character is visibly dying.
Karen is my favorite thing in the film. Very few actors could make a man dying of his own mistake this funny without letting me forget for a second that he’s dying, and I think his panic is what sells the whole comic premise.
The Escalation Is Perfect
The structure is a sequence of attempted solutions, each of which makes the situation worse in a way the audience can follow. Burn the corpse. The smoke rises and rains over the cemetery next door. Every body in the cemetery gets up. That chain is the film’s best piece of construction. Nobody is stupid, every decision is reasonable at the moment it’s made, and each one is catastrophic for reasons nobody could have predicted.
The paramedics sequence is where the tone locks. Two men arrive, are attacked, and a zombie uses their radio to request more paramedics, calmly, in a clear voice. It’s the funniest and worst moment in the film at once.
By the end the escalation has reached its logical destination, and the solution the authorities choose is the one that started the problem, which the film delivers as a punchline and a horror in the same shot.
The colonel taking the phone call is the best forty seconds in it. He’s asked to confirm an order that will kill a town, is entirely calm about it, and the film lets the audience watch somebody who has clearly made others make a decision of that size.
That phone call is the scene I’d show anyone who thinks horror comedy has to pick a side. I laugh, and a second later my stomach turns, and the film never tells me which reaction is the right one.
An escalation works when each step is a reasonable response to the previous problem. Stupidity breaks the chain, because the reader stops attributing the disaster to circumstance. Write the solution, then ask what it costs, and let that cost be the next problem. The military radio call is the model for comic horror. The joke and the dread are the same event, and neither is undercutting the other. End with the first mistake repeated at scale. The audience recognizes it immediately and doesn’t need to be told what happens next.
Tarman and the Effects
The zombie from the barrel is a design nobody has improved on. Liquefied, still moving, articulate in gesture, and built as a puppet with a performer inside it.
William Stout’s designs and the practical work throughout are the film’s other lasting contribution. The corpses are individual, in different states, and each one has been built as a specific body instead of as a generic monster.
The half-corpse on the table is the best of them. A torso, a head, no lower body, strapped down, delivering an entirely lucid explanation of its own condition. The puppetry has to sustain a long dialogue scene and it does. Linnea Quigley’s Trash is the other design people remember, for reasons largely unrelated to craft, and the character is doing something the film is quiet about. She describes her own worst death before anything has happened, in detail, and then gets it. That’s the argument for practical effects. These things are physically present, they interact with light and with the actors, and forty years later none of it looks like a period technique.
The Ending Has No Mercy
There’s no escape, no survivor, and no last-minute rescue. The military resolve the containment problem with a weapon, and everybody in the town dies. That’s already bleak and the film goes further. The rain that follows carries the contamination into the water table, the last shot is a new shipment of barrels being delivered, and it all begins again.
The tonal achievement is that the film is a comedy right up to that point and doesn’t soften on the way out.
It never turns solemn in the last ten minutes. It keeps its tone and simply arrives at a conclusion that isn’t funny. I think that ending is braver than the ones most horror comedies settle for, and it’s the part that pushes this up to an 8 for me.
The punk subculture material also dates it in a way that’s now useful. This is a 1985 artifact, with a soundtrack and a look to match, and the period has become part of what it offers. The soundtrack is good and was assembled from bands nobody had heard of, and that’s part of why the film still plays. It’s compiled instead of scored, so every track belongs to the world the characters are living in, and I’d happily listen to it on its own.
A comedy can end catastrophically without a change of tone. The tone stays constant and the events become worse, and the reader adjusts without being instructed to. The failure mode is a solemn final act. That tells the reader the joking was a phase. A cyclical ending is stronger than a final one when the subject is institutional failure. New barrels arrive, the paperwork is wrong again, and nobody has learned anything. Let the authorities solve it the wrong way. A resolution that’s also the cause is the sharpest structure available for a story about incompetence.
Should you watch Return of the Living Dead?
Yes, and watch it alongside Day of the Dead from the same year. This is where brains, running and speech came from, it’s very funny, and the last ten minutes kill everybody and then start it all over. An 8 from me, and a happy one. It gave the genre brains, speed and a voice, it’s funny as hell, and it has the nerve to kill everybody and start the whole mess over. If the punks had been sharper and the cemetery stretch tighter, I’d be arguing for a 9.
