ZOMBIE FILMS TO WATCH BEFORE YOU DIE #3: "THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD"!

I hope whoever reads this had a truly happy Thanksgiving! :) Now, on with our next installment of ZOMBIE FILMS TO WATCH BEFORE YOU DIE!



"THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD" (1985)


TAGLINE: "They're back from the grave and ready to party!"


ENTIRE STORY IN AS FEW WORDS AS POSSIBLE:
Uh, I can't come up with anything that tops that tagline! :P


COOL, GEORGE ROMERO MADE ANOTHER ZOMBIE FLICK?
Er, actually, Romero made "Day of the Dead" in 1985, not this film! There was some understandable confusion about this movie and its ties to Romero's zombie films until folks knew the whole score. The original story and concept for "Return" came from John Russo, who co-wrote "Night of the Living Dead" with Romero. Russo retained the rights to any films with the words 'Living Dead', and sought to make "Return of the Living Dead" into a movie. After some negotiations, the late Dan O'Bannon -- he also co-wrote "Alien", "Heavy Metal" and "Total Recall" -- rewrote and directed the film to have a very different tone from Romero's works. How different? Think a horror movie with the undead infused with liberal amounts of comedy!


With a faux advisory that includes "The events portrayed in this film are all true.", the story opens in a medical supply company, where a long-time worker is schooling a knucklehead new hire. It's a place where all manner of medical equipment and supplies, including cadavers, are sold...it's definitely the kind of environment where employees need to make their own fun. The older guy runs the newbie through the basics, but then starts spinning a strange yarn: the film "Night of the Living Dead" was based on true incidents...and he should know, since they're keeping the once-reanimated dead in the basement! One thing leads to another, and we quickly discover that idiocy knows no age when they accidentally prompt a leak of mysterious, toxic gas from one of the containers holding the former zombies. And, unfortunately, the place isn't far away from a cemetary...


More fresh meat is added to the mix when the young knucklehead's girl and a gaggle of colorful, punk-infused buddies (hey, the film was made in 1985) go to see him and par-tay! And where do these tearaway kids decide to do it? In the nearby cemetary...and the situation quickly descends into a chaotic party of the damned as newly-awakened zombies start hunting for them. And anybody else who still has a pulse!


SO IS IT GOOD?
This flick will catch you off your guard with how good it is, zombie-lovers. If you have seen it, then you need no explanation. For those of you who do, think of ways to cause a laugh -- not just a nervous giggle -- when horrorshow bloodshed is going on. It's not easy, with the only previous successful example of horror-comedy being Joe Dante's 1984 classic "Gremlins". Dan O'Bannon succeeds too, and in ways that I guarantee you won't expect. Even the conventions that Romero himself originated are turned on their ear!


Case in point: when the gas escapes and brings a dead body in cold storage to life, the knuckleheads responsible call the owner of the company, Burt (Clu Gulager), to fix things. A zombie is a big thing to fix, and they figure they can just destroy its brain Romero-style, and that's that. WRONGO! In a morbid comedy of errors, the zombie nearly gets away, then it WON'T die after it's given a good sharp pickaxe to the skull! And then the pieces won't die after Burt and the knuckleheads cut the body up as everybody's on the verge of pure panic...you get the idea! :P


Special mention must be made that this film isn't made for kids, unlike "Gremlins". Exhibit A being the character of Trash, immortalized by Linnea Quigley, who made her name as a scream queen in "Return". For most of the time she's in the movie she's got her clothes off, and even does an erotic dance in the cemetary. And she still has her clothes off after she's transformed into a zombie princess with a taste for brains!


OKAY, BUT WAS THERE PLENTY OF BLOOD AND GORE?
Uh, I believe I said this film isn't for kids. ;) I guess telling you about a zombie getting a pickaxe in his noggin didn't send the message. Rest assured, there's that and more gory stuff besides.


BOTTOM LINE, DID ANYONE GET OUT ALIVE?
Well, not to spoil things, but a low-yield nuclear blast is involved...!


THE MORAL OF THIS STORY:
The road to Hell is paved with good intentions...and by idiots. Nude zombie women give new meaning to the expression 'dead-sexy'. Finally, true love just can't compare to the sweet, sweet taste of brains!

ZOMBIE FILMS TO WATCH BEFORE YOU DIE #2: "DAWN OF THE DEAD" (1978)!

"DAWN OF THE DEAD" (1978)

TAGLINE: One of the best..."When there is no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the Earth."

ENTIRE STORY IN AS FEW WORDS AS POSSIBLE:
The living turn a shopping mall into Heaven, but naughty living and zombies give them Hell!

THIS IS 'THE ONE', HUH?
And for many good reasons...fans the world over call this THE zombie film against which all others must be measured. George Romero followed up "Night of the Living Dead" with a sequel that was the horrorshow equivalent of knocking it out of the park with the bases loaded. Jaw-droppingly ambitious in spite of its budget at the time, "Dawn of the Dead" serves as a cautionary tale of how both zombies and living-kind tend of make American society a mess.

IS IT GOOD OR BAD?
Uh, hello? Don't just take every other zombiephile's word for it, take MY word that this movie deserves to be called classic. It's a rare thing to see a horror film not only give the gore-starved their buckets of blood, but also some real thoughtful commentary on the way things are to chew on.

The film opens sometime after the events of "Night of the Living Dead", and America is finally catching up to the fact that the undead are back and hungry. The only order of the day is disorder: people are leaving a television station like passengers jumping off a sinking ship as a harried government official tries to tell the skeptical host of a news program and his audience about the zombie threat. One of those working in the studio, Francine (Gaylen Ross), doesn't need much convincing before the arrival of her boyfriend, Stephen (David Emge), who offers to take them both out of the city by a stolen helicopter. At the same time, the police launch a raid of a housing project to destroy zombies being kept there by their loved ones. The situation goes bad even before zombies are given a chance to attack some cops...emphasizing that zombies are pretty stupid to go after prey carrying guns. Two of the SWAT members, Peter and Roger (Ken Foree and Scott H. Reiniger), decide to get out while they haven't been bitten. Roger, it turns out, knows a buddy who knows how to fly a helicopter...

One thing leads to another, and the four come together to fly to ANYWHERE that doesn't have zombies running rapshod over everything. At one point, they fly over a party of hundreds of rednecks backed by the military as they set out to do some zombie-huntin in a moment that watchers of "Night of the Living Dead" will appreciate. You might be a redneck if you carry a can of beer in one hand and a big bore rifle in the other..."Zombies are good shootin, yessir!" :D (I might be a redneck saying this, but I'd join one of those anti-undead posses!) As the copter's gas starts to run low, the four come across a shopping mall, and none of them sound like they've even seen one before. (They were relatively new on the landscape at the time, by the way!) They touch down, take one look at the bounty that the mall offers, and decide to make the place into their haven from an increasingly apocalyptic world. They seal off the mall and manage to dispose of every undead inside, but not before losing one of their own. They then begin to enjoy an existence where they make use of any and every resource and piece of merchandise the mall's many stores have to offer to create a new life for themselves, but realize almost too late how empty and, well, lifeless that life is. It's Francine more than the others who understands that latching on to the mall as a home and all of the commerical possessions it has to offer would make them no better than the zombies that doggedly want to swarm upon the mall just because it was important to their consumer-obsessed previous lives. But just as hope springs, a small army of living raiders storm the mall...they let in the zombies at the same time, and all you-know-what breaks loose...

OKAY, BUT WAS THERE PLENTY OF BLOOD AND GORE?
Hell, yes! This film was legendary for its gore, and those under 18 at the time of its release were expressly forbidden from watching it. (Like that honestly would have stopped any minors!) Tom Savini proved to be equal to the monumental task, yet Romero wished that the makeup and effects were tailored to give "Dawn of the Dead" a semi-comic book style. Zombies often had a too-blue pallor to their skin, and blood when spilled was distinctly bright and not necessarily realistic. It still didn't ease the movie's adults-only status, or how gruesome things got in the film. Bites are ripped from flesh, limbs are literally pulled off, one poor bandit gets piled on by zombies and has his guts ripped out as he's screaming...and in a jaw-dropping moment, a crazed cop blows someone's head apart! By the way, there has been some confusion about what version out there is Romero's definitive vision for the film, since there's a few edits of it out there. Rest assured that the version known as the U.S. Theatrical Cut is the one he wanted everyone to see. There you go!

BOTTOM LINE, DID ANYBODY GET OUT ALIVE?
Only two, and only barely...see the movie to know more!

THE MORAL OF THIS STORY:
Defining yourself by what you can buy and consume means losing touch with the things that really matter, even life as we know it, along with all the good and bad that comes with life. Or as Tyler Durden said in "Fight Club", you are not your fucking khakis. Plus, if zombies weren't bad enough, there's always living assholes to worry about.

ZOMBIE FILMS TO WATCH BEFORE YOU DIE #1: "NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD"!

I know. What can be said? Life interrupts again and again. :/ In this case, though, Facebook is also having trouble with groups for some reason. I wanted to create a group devoted to those who like zombies as much as I do, but that won't happen right away. I'm not claiming to be an 'authority', just a fan! Still, I can do something close by listing here the top seven modern zombie (aka Romero Zombie) films ever made and my thoughts on them. I'll be paying homage to Ruthless Reviews by using the template they commonly work with in movie reviews. I'm not being paid for this and I'm giving Ruthless Reviews the proper respect, so I'm not ripping them off. Don't dare claim otherwise!

My first of the ZOMBIE FILMS TO WATCH BEFORE YOU DIE! is as follows.... :)


NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968)


TAGLINE: "They won't stay dead!"

ENTIRE STORY IN AS FEW WORDS AS POSSIBLE:
Flesh-hungry undead rise as the living have a problem just getting along.

SO THIS WAS THE FIRST ZOMBIE MOVIE?
Insofar as the first film to feature the undead as a nightmare threat out to consume anyone who still had a pulse, yep! There were movies with zombies before, but the old-fashioned hoodoo-incurred kind dating back to Bela Lugosi's "White Zombie" in 1932. So call it strictly speaking, the first modern zombie movie, with rules and hallmarks of the subgenre established accordingly from launch by the great George A. Romero. The undead in such films have also been called in tribute to their originator Romero Zombies.

IS IT GOOD OR BAD?
Sometimes gold can be mined from low-budget filmmaking, and "Night of the Living Dead" is golden. The entire theme of the story is how a group of very different people react to a nightmare situation, specifically getting stuck in a house surrounded by flesh-hungry undead...and its got a haunting realism to it all, in spite of the extraordinary circumstances. The film starts out in a graveyard where a brother and sister (the brother looks like Buddy Holly with driving gloves) go to visit their dearly departed dad. They're typical siblings, the brother is giving his sister shit, and she's telling him to grow up. Then a tall guy shows up with a strange shuffle-step to his walk...he's an odd duck with a vacant stare, and then he attacks! The brother fights Tall and Creepy, cracks his head on a tombstone, and dies. Maybe. We don't know for sure until the sister finds her courage to try to help her brother somehow...just kidding, she leaves her bro to lie on the ground as she runs off! This girl, Barbra, may very well be The Most Useless Horror Film Character Ever. All she does after she finds refuge in a seemingly empty house with a stranger named Ben (Duane Jones) is look catatonic when she doesn't launch into hysterics over every little friggin thing.

Ben, even though we don't get to know much about him, proves to be more practical and thoughtful than she is by far. We can tell his heroism and utility are tempered by his own nervousness about the situation, especially when he hears over a radio -- as he methodically tries to seal every window and door from the increasing numbers of undead outside -- that mass murder and cannibalism is happening everywhere, as if an epidemic is spreading. He scores bonus points finding a rifle and ammo, but then finds out there are more folks hiding in the cellar! Two of them are a mother and father worried for their daughter, who got bit by one of the undead and has gotten sick. All together now: UH-oh!

The characters eventually discover from the authorities on TV that the recently deceased have somehow come back to life to prey on the living. No one knows how, although one brainiac thinks radiation from a destroyed space probe had something to do with it. But no one knows for sure why this is happening, and the living holed up in the house have to fend for themselves until whenever help arrives. That's where things go from bad to worse, because in order to survive they have to work together, and that doesn't work out. When the World Trade Center was taken down on 9-11, all of New York City and the entire country came together to help one another through the tragedy. "Night of the Living Dead" argues that when disaster happens, humans may either be too dumb, selfish, or fearful to work together for their common good. There is real-life precendent for that viewpoint, unfortunately, which helps make this film stand any test of time.

OKAY, BUT WAS THERE PLENTY OF BLOOD AND GORE?
More than enough blood was spilled for Romero's landmark first "Dead" film, my friends, but you'll have to get past the fact it's in black and white. Also of note is that zombies in this movie look pretty much like everyone else! Outside of being messy eaters, they don't have decomp or anything to mar their appearances. Blame the low budget. However, being recently dead, it looked like some were being prepared for burial in one kind of formal dress and another, or got out a morgue in their skivvies or less; we see at least one butt-nekkid undead shuffling around! Since this is the first modern/Romero Zombie movie, it's the first time living folks had to learn one must shoot the undead in the head or at least take enough swings with a blunt weapon to their skulls to put them down for the count. Although a humble movie, it'll still catch the uninitiated off guard with some grisly moments. At one point, two of the living get to a pickup truck to escape, but it goes bad...so bad the pickup truck explodes and burns the couple to oblivion! But as bad as that was, the undead converge on the cooling wreck and start snacking on the medium-rare remains; the camera lingers on their eating the cooked flesh of a couple of characters who were alive not long before, which is pretty disturbing. But that's nowhere near as disturbing as when a little girl among the group dies from her infected bite, turns into a zombie, and kills her mother in a slow, brutal stabbing. The fact the zombie-girl used a weapon to kill her mother should be noted, as no zombie before or since ever showed that much intelligence. Afterward, the fact zombies were as stupid as they were hungry would become a benchmark to the sub-genre.

BOTTOM LINE, DID ANYBODY GET OUT ALIVE?
In this inaugural case, only the movie-goer is left to remember the tale.

THE MORAL OF THIS STORY:
Definitely stuff for those who see the glass as half-empty...the living will always have a problem relating to or even trusting one another, especially when things go to shit. If you see a loved one shuffling with a pack of zombies, don't give them a hug, RUN! Beware of gun-toting rednecks. And last but FAR from least: shoot em in the head!