For all the zombie movies I’ve seen, including the worst of George Romero’s output, I never got around to Dan O’Bannon’s Return of the Living Dead for one reason or another. Considering I wrote a senior-year high school paper on the original Night of the Living Dead, I knew of the existence of co-writer John Russo’s offshoot to the seminal zombie flick but never had much interest. But when one come across a pristine Blu-ray special edition to a highly-regarded film, what choice does one really have?
Considering the interesting anecdote of Romero and his producers losing the copyright of the original Night, it’s strange that legal wrangling over the title seems in part responsible to the composition of Return of the Living Dead. Romero’s zombies were silent stalkers and hungry for flesh, while Return’s zombies are focused on brains, far more athletic, and can even talk and carry on conversations. With that the output of zombie fiction over the past 30-some years has shared more DNA with Romero’s films, you would think Return was a nothing blip in the zombie genre.
But discounting the four sequels (these can’t be any good, right?), Return brought quite a bit into the zombie lexicon for better or worse. Even though Romero’s zombies only devoured flesh, “brains” is the pop-culture war cry for zombies, whether said aloud or not. Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake propelled the idea of fast zombies but would that have been the case without this film? Of his many screenwriting credits, O’Bannon’s legacy may be a toss-up between this film and Ridley Scott’s Alien.*
Return feels like a mixture of the semi-comedic horror films of the 80s like A Werewolf in London and the done-to-death-at-the-time slasher formula with some reanimated corpses tossed in. Warehouse shlubs Frank and Freddy accidentally unleash a secret government weapon on themselves and later a nearby cemetery which manage to reanimate the dead. We are told this is directly related to Romero’s original film which more true-to-life than it seemed. With a cast of punks and weirdos loitering in the nearby burial grounds, it isn’t long before some are eaten, some are zombie-fied and the rest are trapped in a structure or two keeping the ghouls out.
Since the characters are aware of Romero’s film, this feels like a prototype meta horror film like Scream, including the main characters who are smarter than they otherwise would be. Clu Gulager’s Burt takes charge when the dead rise but finds all the normal solutions don’t work. Destroying the brain, cutting off the head, and even dismemberment are tried to stop the reanimated to no avail. With no practical way of fighting the foes themselves, Burt, his warehouse crew, and the misfit teens must simply survive until they can figure out what the hell to do next.
Having never seen this film but been subjected to its effects, Return has a lot to offer that isn’t typical in other films. Sure, the group of punks hanging out at the cemetery was a bit contrived to begin with but quite a lot of them hold their own rather than quickly succumbing to the threat. Burt and his funeral attendant friend (from Weekend at Bernie’s!) are quite wise in dealing with the threat, even trapping one to learn what it wants. And the zombies themselves are quite effective with the aforementioned quote requesting more victims and simply hiding out while passersby stumble upon the horror show.
Return also shines in the practical effects department as all the featured zombies are grotesque and scary while not being too cartoonish while shouting out for brains. O’Bannon does a fine job corralling the living characters in a reasonable way while not minimizing the zombie threat. The movie is a short 90 minutes or so and it breezes by as the survivors are picked off one by one and the zombie horde grows. At a certain point, I wondered how the threat would be resolved to preserve the status-quo for the next inevitable sequel and, quite simply, I was surprised at the ballsy ending it took. Suffice to say, there isn’t a happy ending for any of our cast or even the world at large. Which I guess is why Peter Coyote had some sequels to be in twenty years later.
While the title itself suggests Return of the Living Dead is some cheap knock-off to Romero’s series, I found myself way more entertained as it does introduce its own ideas that have manifested into pop-culture. That said, I doubt Return of the Living Dead Part II is as good as Dawn of the Dead.
*Much to Ridley Scott’s dismay, Alien hasn’t been relevant in years. Zombies on the other hand…
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