RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD (1985)

A ZOMBIE MOVIE THAT PLAYS GORE FOR LAUGHS

Philadelphia Daily News (PA) - August 19, 1985

Author: JOE BALTAKE, Daily News Movie Reviewer

"The Return of the Living Dead." A comedy-thriller starring Clu Gulager, James Karen, Thom Mathews and Don Calfa. Written and directed by Dan O'Bannon. Based on a story by Rudy Ricci, John Russo and Russell Streiner. Photographed by Jules Brenner. Edited by Robert Gordes. Music by Matt Clifford. Running time: 90 minutes. An Orion release. In area theaters.

Unlike the George A. Romero movies that its spoofing, Dan O'Bannon's "The Return of the Living Dead" is not a horror film that becomes an endurance ordeal.

On the contrary, "The Return of the Living Dead" is malicious fun, using Romero's flesh-eating zombies as far-out symbols of modern man's insatiable appetite for control. What Romero has forgotten, O'Bannon (one of the authors of the movie "Alien") remembers: Anything eerie has to be contrasted against humor for maximum effect.

Whereas Romeo's last zombie movie, the recent "Day of the Dead," suffered
from being too unendurably gory and somber, "The Return of the Living Dead" is uncommonly witty. It is hardly a parasite living off George Romero's undead menaces; it comes with its own brand of unwholesomeness and nastiness.

O'Bannon's best contribution to the material, the one element that gives his movie its neat twist, is his pitting the walking dead against what he views as their live counterparts - punks. With dark circles painted under their eyes, their green lips, and hair that looks like coagulated blood, these modern rebels-without-a-cause should identify, if anything, with O'Bannon's oozing zombies. There should be a meeting of the minds, but there isn't. They should be ready to party with their blood brothers. Instead, they panic.

The dirctor has set his movie in a macabre cul-de-sac consisting of a medical-supply warehouse (which houses preserved corpses for experimentation), a funeral parlor and a cemetery. The first half-hour or so is a jokey explanation of what's to follow: One of the pickled corpses is nuked by some military-invented "animating" dust and, after it comes to life, it is cremated at the neighboring mortuary.

Just as smoke begins to fill the air, it starts to rain, and the nearby graves are doused with the revitalizing, but lethal, particles. All hell breaks loose. Cops and medics arrive, only to be eaten alive; the zombies take control of the fog-covered patrol cars and ambulances, using their radios to order more cops and medics.

Meanwhile, the warehouse lunks (Clu Gulager, James Karen and Thom Mathews), the mortician (Don Calfa) and the traumatized punks race back and forth among the three locations, creating a murkbath effect. Somehow, there's a certain insidious charm to all of this.

Horrormongers should have a ball at "The Return of the Living Dead." The rest of us should find some humor in the assorted half-life running amok on screen.

I know I did.

Parental Guide: Rated R for its sick humor and gore.
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FILM: HORROR IN 'THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD'

Philadelphia Inquirer, The (PA) - August 19, 1985

Author: Desmond Ryan, Inquirer Movie Critic

In The Return of the Living Dead, the zombies subsist on the brains of live humans. They won't find anything to eat in theaters showing Dan O'Bannon's dreadful movie.

The acting is so bad that it's hard in most scenes to tell the walking dead
from the supposedly living, and as an attempt to mingle horror with humor, O'Bannon's film is as hilarious as an autopsy.

As the title indicates, The Return of the Living Dead is a salute to George Romero's 1968 cult horror movie, Night of the Living Dead - a film that contains its own streak of black humor. Romero recently released Day of the Dead - the third film in the zombie series - and it was hard to imagine anyone coming up with a worse film this year.

O'Bannon, a scriptwriter making his directing bow, picks up Romero's shovel, walks into the cemetery and obliges. A glance at his writing credits - which include the visceral, terrifying Alien - is enough to show that O'Bannon knows the dynamics of horror films. Alien was a very slick exercise in tension that moved at a clip that allowed one to forget that the characters often chose the dumbest course of action.

I can't think of anything dumber than what O'Bannon seems to have tried in The Return of the Living Dead. I say seems because his intentions are not easily divined in this slapdash mess that hinges on the idea of Romero's zombies getting a new lease on life through the accidental release of a chemical at a medical-supply warehouse run by Clu Gulager.

O'Bannon's apparent purpose is to provoke laughter and nausea. The latter comes easily enough because The Return of the Living Dead indulges in tasteful scenes of beheading, blood-slinging and zombies biting chunks out of people's skulls. O'Bannon stops just short of Romero, who is the screen's leading gorenographer.

Anyone who has been in an airplane in bad weather knows that nervous laughter is a common response to fear. Eliciting that response in a horror context is extremely difficult and certainly beyond the grasp of O'Bannon. Arguably, it hasn't been brought off successfully since Mel Brooks made Young Frankenstein 10 years ago.

Brooks had something to parody: the most popular myth in all of horror film and literature. O'Bannon has Romero, and it's no contest.

The Return of the Living Dead has a hopelessly crude plot that essentially repeats the typical Romero premise. The dead come scrambling out of their graves and surround the living in an enclosed space. In this case, it's a crematorium, which is where O'Bannon's defiantly witless script belongs.

There are, for reasons that are presumably clear to O'Bannon if no one else, scenes of a punk party in a cemetery complete with a striptease. While the kids are dancing on the graves, the dead rise up to protest the loud music by dining on the partygoers.

By the time this aimless digression arrives, the film has done enough to render the average moviegoer brain-dead. That surely was the condition of the studio executives who gave O'Bannon the money for this appalling and stupid exercise.

THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD *

Produced by Tom Fox, directed and written by Dan O'Bannon, photography by Jules Brenner, music by Matt Clifford, distributed by Orion Pictures.

Running time: 1 hour, 31 minutes.

Burt - Clu Gulager

Frank - James Karen

Ernie - Don Calfa

Freddy - Thom Mathews

Parent's guide: R (extremely violent)
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BRAIN-EATING ZOMBIES: IT'S GREAT STUFF, BUT WHY?

SACRAMENTO BEE - August 16, 1985

Author: George Williams Bee Reviewer

WHAT MAKES a good horror movie? Obviously, the Frankenstein and King Kong stories are established classics. Most of the rest produced by Hollywood have been mediocre, but 'The Night of the Living Dead' and its sequels are exceptions.

These are stories about zombies created through screwball experiments by the U.S. Army. The army develops a gas that transforms corpses into living creatures who are forced to relieve the pain of being dead by eating the brains of normal humans.

Apart from being monumentally gruesome, the movies have built a growing fandom creating crowds whenever 'Living Dead' films are scheduled at midnight cult screenings from coast to coast and overseas.

The series was originated by George Romero, an inventive director and writer from Pittsburgh. He wrote the first of the series with Jack Russo. Russo, following the success of the first film, rewrote the story in the form of a novel with the same title. The rights to the title were purchased by Hollywood screenwriter Dan O'Bannon ('Alien,' 'Blue Thunder').

So now 'The Return of the Living Dead,' written and directed by O'Bannon, is being released in competition with Romero's second sequel, 'Day of the Dead,' soon to be released.

O'Bannon's film is a slickly made thriller, a first-rate example of the horror genre.

Clu Gulager stars as the proprietor of a medical-supply business in Louisville who discovers a number of the zombies, encased in airtight drums, have been shipped to him by mistake and are stored in his basement. A couple of his night workers open a drum by mistake, allowing the gas to escape. And there is a cemetery across the street.

Along comes a band of punkers who decide to use the cemetery as a meeting place just as all those graves start producing signs of life, or, I should state, living dead. And then there's a mortuary nearby that becomes the main target of the zombies because there are a bunch of humans inside.

It'll probably be a fast-food stop for the zombies. I mean, if you've got brains, what are you doing hanging around a mortuary next to a graveyard where the corpses are emerging from their graves?

Gulager waits until his two employees start changing into zombies before he figures out it might be a good idea to call the 800 number printed on the sides of those drums. As he'll find out, the army has a contingency plan for such emergencies, a plan just as imaginative as the one responsible for those zombies in the first place.

The movie is filled with shocks and thrills - a good entertainment. I don't know why. Who can explain why a movie about living corpses who eat human brains as a form of aspirin can draw a crowd? Especially one in which the zombies are made to look so real (by specialist Bill Munns, who studied the mummies of Guanjuanato, a small Mexican village where the bodies of local people have been kept in various stages of deterioration ranging from two to 100 years).

I sure can't. I only know it's made well by a group of filmmakers out to show you a good time at the movies.

THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD Cast: Clu Gulager, James Karen, Don Calfa, Thom Mathews, Beverly Randolph, John Philbin, Jewel Shepard. Writer-director: Dan O'Bannon. Producer: Tom Fox. Photography: Jules Brenner. Special makeup effects: Bill Munns. Production design: William Stout. Music: Matt Clifford. Distributor: Orion.

Arden, Sunrise.

Rating: R, for violence, nudity
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A ROMP WITH ROMERO'S ZOMBIES

The Record (New Jersey) - August 16, 1985

Author: By Lou Lumenick, Movie Critic: The Record

MOVIE REVIEW THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD: Directed and written by Dan O'Bannon. Story by Rudy Ricci, John Russo, and Russell Streiner. Music, Matt Clifford. Photography, Jules Brenner. Editor, Robert Gordon. With Clu Gulager (Burt), James Karen (Frank), Don Calfa (Ernie), Thom Mathews (Freddy), Beverly Randolph (Tina), and others. Produced by Tom Fox. A Hemdale presentation released by Orion Pictures. Opens locally today. Running time: 91 minutes. Rated R: nudity, violence, strong lang uage, gore.

To say that "Return of the Living Dead" is more entertaining than "Day of the Dead" is like stating you'd prefer death by firing squad to death by hanging. Either way, it's a pretty nasty experience.

"Day of the Dead," George Romero's recent, second sequel to his 1968 cult classic, "Night of the Living Dead," was mostly an excuse to demonstrate some state of the art, stomach-churning special effects. "Return of the Living Dead," a sort of pseudo- sequel, is more playful and a bit easier to sit through.

The premise of "Return" is that Romero's original film was inspired by a real-life incident at a veterans hospital in Pittsburgh. Fourteen years later, the chemicals that turned corpses into walking, flesh-eating zombies are sitting in the basement of a medical supply house in Louisville. It's all because of an army paperwork error.

Screenwriter Dan O'Bannon ("Alien," "Lifeforce"), who is also making his directorial debut, contrives for the chemicals to reanimate the population of a nearby cemetery. The ghouls mix it up with a band of punk rockers, a pair of medical-supply employees (Clu Gulager, James Karen), and a nervous mortician (Don Calfa).

Though he strives to parody Romero's brand of claustrophobic horror , O'Bannon ends up with the kind of cheerful cheapie that Roger Corman used to slap together in a couple of days. The acting is deliberately broad, the special effects are cheesy, and the humor runs to jokes about rigor mortis. The effect is deadening.