Return of the Living Dead review

I apologize, as this one may be a little long:

I think its surprising that not a whole lot of people are aware of classic horror movies. And I'm not talking about the Universal Monster movies from the 1930s, although those are practically obscure now. I'm talking about recent classics. As much as there is a culture surrounding horror films, not a whole lot of people know what Return of the Living Dead is, or even the original Night of the Living Dead.

Maybe that's why I don't feel bad when I review "the usual suspect" horror films, the ones that always appear on top 25 lists of horror movies you need to watch before you die. I've wanted this blog to be a place where an average person could go and perhaps gain an interest in new horror movies.

With that said, I had a Halloween party the other night and for our movie, I chose to watch Return of the Living Dead. ROTLD came out in 1985, the same year Romero's Day of the Dead came out, and despite the reputation that George carries with his name alone, ROTLD knocked Romero's DAY out of the water. And it really should, its a fantastic horror film.

However, when faced with the scrutiny of modern film goers, ones who aren't massive horror film geeks like myself, how does this movie hold up? Well, I was hoping that everyone was enjoying it, but I feel like they enjoyed it for the wrong reasons. They laughed a little too much for my taste, and all at the wrong moments.

Don't get me wrong, laughter is good. The movie is a horror comedy after all. However, comedy is only half of it. The other half of it is surprisingly tense, and scary. But all in the name of fun.

When I first watched the movie I was very aware of how funny the movie was. However, it's also very horrifying. These are characters you absolutely fall in love with, and then you get to see them lose control of an already volatile situation, and as much as you want them to live, you know there is a chance that they wont make it. So as the movie goes on and things continue to get worse and worse, the movie raises the tension because of it.

I guess I can't forget to plot it out for you before I talk about it more. The movie concerns two groups: Bert, Frank, and Freddy, who work at the Uneeda Medical Supply in Louisville, Kentucky (Kentucky represent) and a group of Freddy's teenage friends who are busy trying to party hardy.. When Freddy, the new guy at the job, inquires about the scariest thing that Frank has ever seen at the Supply Warehouse, Frank shows him these strange canisters filled with Trioxin, which is a reanimating agent. The two hapless heroes accidentally unleash the toxin all over the warehouse, reviving a body that was stored in the Warehouse freezer.

Okay, relatively simple situation. There's only one dead body running around, right? Well, Frank and Freddy are scared stiff by the thing, and decide to call in their boss Bert, who tries to cover his and his company's ass for the rest of the film. The trio discover that the body cannot be killed in the usual zombie fashion of head bludgeoning, so they ship the body to Bert's friend, Ernie, who runs a mortuary/crematorium, with the intention of using Ernie's crematorium to completely burn the body.

So you're thinking to yourself, how in the hell could four guys completely mess up this situation and make everything worse? Well, when they cremate the body they aren't aware that the smoke from the fire and the ashes of the body mix to form an entire new batch of Trioxin, which in turn transforms into acid rain and rains down on the nearby cemetary, thereby reanimating the dead. Whoops.

The rest of the film concerns the two groups of characters trying to survive the onslaught of the living dead.

If you're not aware, these zombies are not your typical Romero zombies. They run, they talk, and they tackle. And they cannot die. So you can imagine how the already terrible situation has the potential to get much worse.

The reason this film works for me is that instead of being a zombie action kill movie, its a movie about a zombie siege. It directly follows Night of the Living Dead's winning formula of putting a group of different individuals into a location together and have them try to survive against an army of the living dead. So characters don't unrealistically become zombie killing badasses and they don't come out of a Juno movie.

No, instead they do their best and die trying. And as the situation gets worse, everything becomes more hopeless. THAT is tension building, because you really end up liking the four guys Bert, Ernie, Frank, and Freddy and you don't want anything to happen to them. I also love that one guy who yelled "Get in here honky!"

Naturally, the scares are supposed to eventually override the fun funny stuff, but I don't think my friends really got into it that much to allow themselves to give in to the suspense and the terror. Plus, it was made in 1985, so by modern audiences the movie is dated. However, the movie has that great 80s atmosphere that modern horror films significantly lack. My favorite shot of the entire film is during the opening credits when you see the trioxin revive the dead body for the first time, and the camera pans in as you see the body shake.

Please watch this film. I'm terribly sorry I talked about it in great length, but I don't think I've spoiled too much. Its an A+ film, and I cannot recommend it enough. Watch this film and know just how you're supposed to do a zombie comedy.