Return of the Living Dead, The |
  • USA • 1985 • 91m •   • Directed by: Dan O'Bannon. • Starring: Clu Gulager, James Karen, Don Calfa, Thom Mathews, Beverly Randolph, John Philbin, Jewel Shepard, Miguel A. Núñez Jr., Brian Peck, Linnea Quigley, Mark Venturini, Jonathan Terry, Cathleen Cordell. • Music by: Matt Clifford.      When a bumbling pair of employees at a medical supply warehouse accidentally release a deadly gas into the air, the vapors cause the dead to re-animate as they go on a rampage through Louisville, Kentucky seeking their favorite food, brains.
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Freddy (Thom Mathews) starts a job at the Uneeda Medical Products warehouse. On his first night, he is shown the ropes by warehouse manager Frank (James Karen). During the tour, Frank tells Freddy that the events in the zombie classic "Night of the Living Dead" were true -- the corpses were reanimated by an experimental military gas called 245 Trioxin, and after they were collected they were stuffed into barrels and sent to the Uneeda Warehouse by mistake. Frank shows the barrels to a skeptical Freddie. When Freddy asks if the barrels are secure, Frank smacks one on the side -- and the barrel erupts with a cloud of poison gas, knocking both of them out.
Meanwhile, Freddy's girlfriend, Tina, has arrived to pick him up from work. She's accompanied by an oddly-assorted pack of friends, in a car driven by the large and scary Suicide, who wonders why the gang only calls him when they need a ride someplace ("Because", one of the gang explains patiently, "you are one spooky motherfcker, man.") Although the punks are a fabulous addition to the film -- and Scream Queen Linnea Quigley, as the rapturously sleazy Trash, vaulted immediately into the boyhood mythos of every adolescent male who saw the film when she stripped off her clothes and pranced starkers on top of a tombstone -- they are also a jarring note. Freddy is a regular Joe in a trucker cap, and Tina is the type who wears jelly sandals that coordinate with her plastic hoop earrings; how is it that they hang out with people who talk about sex and death and smoke pot and dance naked in cemeteries?
Freddy and Frank regain consciousness to discover that all of the dead things in the warehouse have come to life -- including the corpse in the freezer, which hurls itself angrily against the walls in an attempt to reach their brains. Frantic, they chop it to pieces but the pieces refuse to die ("Well, it worked in the movie!"). They call the warehouse owner, Burt (Clu Gulager) who, in a panic, asks his friend Ernie (Don Calfa) at the mortuary next door to cremate them for him.
The three men bundle the dismembered corpse into a sack and carry it, thrashing and squealing, to mortician Ernie who, not unreasonably, wants to know what the hell they are asking him to burn (Burt, thinking on his feet, replies "Uh...rabid weasels.") After Ernie refuses to cremate live weasels ("Christ, Burt, they're alive! Even if the damn things are rabid, I can't burn them alive!"), they break down and tell him the story; shown the wriggling body parts, a stunned Ernie agrees and puts the bag into the oven. As the smoke rises, a thunderstorm disperses the particles...and soaks them into the ground of the cemetery next door, where Tina and her punk friends are gamboling happily among the (currently quiet) dead. But not for long!
From this point on, the movie becomes a startlingly intelligent gore-fest, featuring zombies who can run and think (and use a radio to order up cops and paramedics like Chinese food) and punctuated by the obvious deterioration of Frank and Freddy. Having inhaled the gas, the two of them are turning into Zombies before the astonished eyes of their friends (at least, the remaining friends who manage to reach the warehouse after zombies begin popping up like weeds in the cemetery; Trash is last seen shrieking her lungs out as zombies close in on her naked body). As Freddy slips from humanity into zombiehood, he serenades Tina with the most gruesome love soliloquy in the history of cinema -- "I love you, and that's why you have to let me eat your braaaaaaaaaains!!" Amid all of the blood and gore and screaming, Frank's death in the crematorium is the one scene I found almost unwatchable in its pathos. After Freddy loses his mind and starts screaming for brains, Frank realizes what is in store for him and sadly consigns himself to the flames, removing his wedding ring before he cranks the conveyor into oblivion.
There are those who don't like the end of this movie and I can sympathize -- I think maybe the filmmaker took the cowards way out -- but I'm not sure it could have ended any other way. In any case, this is one of the greatest zombie movies ever made and I recommend it highly.
Review by sjrobb99-997-836393 from the Internet Movie Database.
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