Ahhh...now this is a great flick! I remember the first time I saw this. I was 13 and I was staying over at a friends house. We had just gone upstairs late one night to hunt for food and we turned on the TV in the kitchen and watched Return of the Living Dead which was airing on our local Fox affiliate, WDRB-41. It was creepy and funny all at the same time. In the end, we were freaked out at the knowledge that the movie was supposed to take place in our hometown of Louisville, KY. What ensued were several hours of ribs and playful jabs about zombies taking over the town and generally a great time.
Return of the Living Dead was a vehicle of writer/director Dan O'Bannon. This is O'bannon's feature directorial debut, having been known as a screenwriter before then. He was best known at the time for having penned the script to the blockbuster Sci-Fi classic "Alien"(1979) which had earned him a ton of cred in Hollywood circles. The script for ROTLD was based on a script written by James Russo in 1978. Producer Tom Fox purchased the script and gave it to O'Bannon who thought it was too serious and tried too hard to be a sequel to George A. Romero's "Night of the Living Dead"(1968) and O'bannon set forth to "dumb it down" and make it more of a dark comedy. What they were left with was a very creative spoof of Zombie movies that maintained the balance between horror and comedy perfectly.
The story is simple: two employees at a medical supply warehouse inadvertently unleash gas from a goverment container that had been delivered to the warehouse by mistake several years earlier. What follows is the gas regenerating the bodies of the dead cadavers int he supply warehouse which are chopped up and put into black plastic garbage bags. In a fit of paranoia, the employees and the owners drag the wriggling remains next door to the mortuary where the mortician disposes of the body parts in his crematorium. The pieces that are burned up produce a gas out of the chimney and mixes with the rain clouds above bringing the gas down in the form of an an acid-like rain that eventually gets to the cemetary (which is conveniently just across the street from the supply warehouse) and then all hell breaks loose - literally, as the dead begin to crawl out of their graves and attack anyone in close proximity of them - trying to satisfy their hunger for "brains" . ROTLD is credited with coupling the hunger for human brains with zombies as, before this film, most movie zombies just had cannabilistic tendencies, but never for a specific body part or organ.
ROTLD is a great movie and although severely dated by most of the fashion in the film as well as the lingo, still finds a way to be incredibly fun and entertaining as well as endearing itself to a whole new generation of horror fan. What this film lacks in plot development it more than makes up for in sheer hillarity and horrific goofiness - not to mention full-frontal nudity from b-movie scream queen Linnea Quigley.
4 1/2 out of 5 stars "You need to see this now"
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