Macabre...ish Horror Review: Return of the Living Dead
Return of the Living Dead, 1985/ 91 min. A medical supply warehouse, run by foreman, Frank, just got a new employee, Freddy. Frank decides to impress Freddy by showing off some military owned vats, stored in the basement. During which, Frank accidentally breaches one of the drums and toxic gas is unleashed.
Unfortunately, these tanks are remnants of past experiments and the gas that’s been released is about to kill off the living and wake the dead. All of the dead! Skeletons, body parts, preserved bodies and the act of cremation only makes it worse as the smoke is released into the air and rain disperses it into the ground. And that’s how all this madness begins and spreads so quickly.
Frank and Freddy leave the basement to discover the dead and once still, human and animal remains are now very active. And they have to deal with it, stop it and dispose of this problem even though they are both ill from breathing toxic gas. In the interim, some of Freddie’s friends, who are waiting for him, arrive and are attacked by the zombie that’s in the basement that crawled out of one of the military tanks.
After hacking up an ambulatory corpse, whose parts are still moving, by the way, with the warehouse owner, Burt (Clu Gulager), Frank and Freddy go next door, to a mortuary, to have them cremated. After convincing the mortician, Ernie (Don Calfa). Now they really have a problem.
The rain has introduced the gas via cremation smoke into the local graveyard and now all the deceased are crawling from their graves and seeking the brains of the living.
Soon the town is overrun within hours. Why do the undead need brains? Because they are in constant pain and brains are a temporary salve. Unfortunately, every living person attacked for their brains, create new zombies.
Meanwhile, Frank and Freddy are experiencing all the symptoms of death while they are alive, suffering rigor mortis.
Until they finally succumb and become zombies themselves. Frank commits suicide by cremation and Freddy tries to eat his girlfriend’s brain. The rest of Freddie’s friends,
were attacked in the graveyard they were hanging out in, by corpses that dig themselves out of their own graves. In the end, the US military bomb the area, it’d become so overrun by zombies.
I love this movie! Classic 80s comedy horror, graphic, violent and creepy. The zombies are relentless and there’s a lot of different kinds (zombie little person too!), it’s fast moving and engaging the entire time. Also there are 4 sequels!
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