The Return of the Living Dead (1985) Review

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, which are in the basement. One of them is leaking.

The 8 is for a horror comedy that is genuinely funny, genuinely 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.

The deduction is for a cast of punks who are largely interchangeable and a middle stretch in a cemetery that circles while waiting for the plot to arrive. Half a dozen characters are introduced in the first ten minutes and roughly two of them are given anything an audience can get hold of before the rain starts falling and the cemetery next door starts emptying itself out into the surrounding streets one grave at a time steadily for the whole of the rest of that night.

Everything Standard Started Here

Romero’s zombies do not eat brains specifically, do not run, do not speak, and cannot 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 was not associated with 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 cannot, and every fast-zombie film from 28 Days Later onward is working in the register this film opened.

Speech is the one nobody copied and it is 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 is a considerably worse idea than hunger.

The specific 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.

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 is inaccurate.

That is 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 has its own.

O’Bannon was also entitled to do it. He had 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 is 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 has destroyed everything and keeps talking cheerfully about it, and the performance stays funny while the character is visibly dying.

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 is 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 is 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 is asked to confirm an order that will kill a town, is entirely calm about it, and the film lets the audience watch a decision of that size being made by somebody who has clearly made others.

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 is 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 is 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 is 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 the whole thing begins again.

The tonal achievement is that the film is a comedy right up to that point and does not soften on the way out. It does not become serious in the last ten minutes, it simply arrives at a conclusion that is not funny.

The punk subculture material also dates it in a way that is now useful. This is a specific 1985 artifact, with a specific soundtrack and a specific look, and the period has become part of what it offers.

The soundtrack is genuinely good and was assembled from bands nobody had heard of, which is part of why the film still plays. It is not scored, it is compiled, and every track belongs to the world the characters are living in.

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 is very funny, and the last ten minutes kill everybody and then start the whole thing over.

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