This is an article I wrote and originally published for trulydisturbing.com. You can head there for plenty of horror related content from myself and others.

Just a warning to everyone, while I will try my best to avoid them through most of this, there may be spoilers in this review. Although I’m of the opinion that if a movie has been out for 35 years and you haven’t seen it yet, you shouldn’t get mad at someone for spoiling it for you.

It’s been a long while since we’ve done anything horror related, but becoming writers over at trulydisturbing.com should give us a good reason to write more! More than that, seeing as how it’s the middle of summer and all I think I know the perfect film. I’m talking, of course, about the 1985 classic Return of the Living Dead! What? You thought I was going somewhere else with that? You had an entirely different movie in mind? Oh well, maybe some other time, although we’ve already mentioned how we feel about it.

You see, this is a film that’s been near and dear to me since I first saw it as a young teenage punk rocker, and even though I’ve never counted, I’ve probably watched it more times than any other horror movie ever made. Also it’s set on the 3rd and 4th of July, which is when I’m writing this.

First, A History Lesson

This series is supposed to be an alternative sequel to Night of the Living Dead

While it’s easy to just write this film off as an attempt to cash in on both 80s punk culture and the Night of the Living Dead franchise George A. Romero was building at the time. The actual history of this film is a bit more interesting. Made by John Russo aka The Other Guy That Wrote Night of the Living Dead, this film (and its 4 sequels) actually has a legitimate claim as a sequel series to Night of the Living Dead. You see, Russo and Romero parted ways after Night of the Living Dead due to creative differences over which direction the series should be taken in, with Russo retaining the rights to the “Living Dead” title. That’s why Romero started using “of the Dead” for his movies. The series even establishes itself as a sequel by explaining that Night of the Living Dead was a movie based off of true events, but all of the real details were changed in an attempt by the government to cover things up, which explains why the zombies are so different in these movies. I’ll get into that more later.

Now That That’s Out Of The Way

So as for the review. I figure I’ll break this down into a few subcategories. Plot, Visuals, Soundtrack, Acting, and Overall Enjoyment. If you don’t like doing a lot of reading and are just looking for a general suggestion I’d say skip down to the Overall Enjoyment section. Let me just say though, this film is sort of all over the place quality-wise, which brings me to…

The Plot… Here’s Be The “Spoilers”

Depending on who you ask, the plot of this film is either nothing special, or a revolutionary take on the zombie genre. On the surface level it’s a meat and potatoes story about some teenage punks who happen to get caught in the middle of a graveyard during a zombie apocalypse caused by bungling warehouse workers. If you look a bit deeper though, it takes this basic plot to some interesting places. Mainly it establishes a zombie lore that is far removed from what everyone else was doing at the time.

I may be wrong, but this movie might have the first depiction of undead zombies that can talk.

Before ROTLD zombie films were very much about either people being mind controlled, or mindless re-animated corpses that would slowly and aimlessly amble around looking for some human flesh to munch on. The zombies here, though, are one of, if not the first examples of fast moving zombies in film. Also they’re a lot sturdier than the zombies in other films, nothing short of total incineration will stop them. Not only that, but they still retain much of their human intelligence. In fact, two of the newly-made zombies in the film don’t even know they’re dead until some paramedics tell them. Even the zombies made from older corpses can speak in full sentences, plan out traps, figure out how to get into locked and barricaded places… they even operate a police radio to call in more backup for them to eat. They’re also the first zombies I can think of that exclusively eat brains (as opposed to just any old human flesh like most other zombies) and on top of that they even have an established motive: Apparently they can feel their bodies rotting away and eating brains is the only way to temporarily relieve the excruciating pain. Another slight difference (although it has been used many times since then) is that it’s not just humans that are coming back from the dead, but any and all other animals. In the film we specifically get some zombie half-dogs and zombie butterflies… yeah, you heard me.

Really though, why are animals almost never affected?

Another interesting aspect of this film is that it very delicately skirts the line of being self aware, without actually acknowledging it. They knew they weren’t making an art film, so you can tell they really tried to have fun with it. From the cheesy dialogue of some of the characters, to the way the zombies talk, to having a skeleton just hilariously erupt out of the ground as 45 Grave’s song Partytime starts playing (at my house we refer to that skeleton as The Party Skull) this film embodies the philosophy of entertainment over art.

NSFW warning on this as one of the characters is basically nude through the whole film.

Visuals

Honestly the visuals of this film are another strange mix. While the film has a distinctive style that it’s going for, the special effects don’t try too hard to go above and beyond. This proves to be more of a strength than a weakness though, it’s more like the effects crew knew their limits and worked within them, rather than trying too hard and ending up with anything that looks cheesy and half-baked, as many other 80s horror films did. So while there’s nothing special in the effects department, there’s nothing heinous about the film’s looks either. There’s some pretty good gory bits, the zombies look pretty cool, and everything looks like it fits in with the film’s overall punk-influenced style. No complaints here.

Soundtrack

This may be one of my favorite things about the film. The soundtrack features a slew of 80s hardcore punk and death rock bands, which compliments the film’s visual style and subject matter perfectly. There are a slew of bands most punk fans would recognize. We’re talking T.S.O.L., The Flesh Eaters, The Damned, The Cramps, and more! Even better, the tracks are all pretty well placed within the film. The soundtrack gets a 10/10 from me personally.

Acting

What a mixed bag the acting in this film is! The performances range from hammy, such as Linnea Quigley as the perpetually nude “Trash” and Mark Venturini as the overly edgy “Suicide” (then again their dialogue works against them a lot), to work-rate performances like the ones we see from most of the rest of the cast, to actually good performances from Thomas Matthews (aka Tommy Jarvis from Friday the 13th Part 6) and Miguel A. Nuñez Jr. (another Friday the 13th alumni who’s had an extensive career both in and out of horror since then).

My friends and I have gotten far too much use out of the “costume” line, and you can too!

As I mentioned I do think much of the bad acting stemmed from the poor dialogue written for some of these characters, but it kind of works if you’ve known the types. Trash and Suicide are the overly-edgy members of the group, and while at first you might write it off as the writers not knowing how to write good dialogue for “alternative teens” you can tell from the way the rest of the group treats these two that it’s more like “No, these are just who these two are supposed to be. We think they’re nuts too, but we hang out to them because we pretty much have to.”

It’s pretty bad when a dude named Spider is giving you the “Dial it down” look

The characters themselves are an interesting and eclectic bunch, which I really like because it always seems like punks in 80s movies would only get lumped in with bikers and other sorts of unsavory characters. Here we see them depicted more the way my crew always was, a mismatched group of misfits that seem to only hang out together because nobody else would hang out with them. It was one of the only times I actually saw teens in one of these films and thought “Hey I could hang out with these guys!” Personally I think Spider, Freddy, Scuz, and Casey were pretty close to the types of people I always hung out with, Trash was one of the nutjobs we’d be forced to hang out with because they just always seemed to turn up, Suicide was the edgy asshole we’d mainly hang out with because he had a car. We even had a nerdy guy like Chuck who hung out with us even though he didn’t fit in at all because he thought it would get him some action. So it gets points for accuracy.

Overall Enjoyment

Overall I think this movie is great. It’s very entertaining, the visuals are decent, the acting is more or less fine, and even the cheesiest bits of it are more endearing than annoying. It provides a very unique take on everyone’s favorite shambling, half decayed movie monsters… and does it with style! As I mentioned earlier, nobody’s gonna call this film a work of high art or terrifying horror, but it’ll put a smile on your face the entire time you’re watching it.

This is evident from the fact that unlike most horror films at the time, Return of the Living Dead was actually met with favorable reviews from critics at the time of its release, and achieved moderate success at the box office. It made over $14 million domestically on a $4 million budget, it holds a 91% approval rating on RottenTomatoes, and it was nominated for numerous awards… all in a time when most folks would look down their noses at horror films. Although most critics agree, it’s more of a comedy satire than an outright horror film.

Well that about does it for this review, I hope those of you looking for a new-old film to watch will check this one out, and for those of you who have seen it, I hope you might have learned something new! I’ll leave you guys with the film’s trailer to watch.