This January, in support of the Toronto Rape Crisis Centre / Multicultural Women Against Rape, friends and family have raised over $1,500 (which, when matched by my employer, totals $3,000). As a result, I now have to watch and write about thirty-one horror movies: one each night. Any donors who contributed over $30 were given the option to choose one of the horror movies I must subject myself to. After each viewing, I will write some things about said movies on this website. Be forewarned that all such write-ups will contain spoilers, and many of them will refer to unpleasant and potentially triggering situations. Today’s film was selected by Coach House Books employee, talented comic writer (Ever After), and former Humber College student of mine, Ricky Lima: Dan O’Bannon’s horror-comedy Return of the Living Dead (1985). Return of the Living Dead was, improbably, rented when I visited Queen Video, so I had to rent this one via iTunes.
What happens:
”Do ya’ wanna’ paaaar-ty?!” the soundtrack to Return of the Living Dead, the (very) unofficial sequel to Night of the Living Dead asks. (1978’s Dawn of the Dead is the official sequel, obvs.) And that’s what Return of the Living Dead is: a big, goopy, profane party of a zombie movie, intended for the midnight movie crowd – and one that, for the most part, succeeds.
Our scene is set at Louisville, Kentucky’s Uneeda Medical Supply (ha ha), where supervisor Frank (James Karen) is showing the hopes to a new hire, punk youth Freddie (Thom Matthews). Freddie asks some basic questions – where the skeletons come from (India, apparently), how to ship things – before Frank shows him the spookiest room in the warehouse, the freezer where the cadavers are kept. The scene then cuts to Freddie’s friends, a motley assortment of punks, new wavers, and preppies, discussing where they might party tonight. But first, they’ll have to pick up Freddie after his work shift.
Back at the Uneeda warehouse, Frank scares Freddie with an anecdote: he claims that the events depicted in the 1968 film, Night of the Living Dead, are based on true events. Pittsburgh experienced a military chemical spill (“2-4-5 Trioxin”) that caused dead bodies to come alive, but the government covered it up. Furthermore, he knows this is true because the corpses, now in suspended animation in a chemical broth, were accidentally shipped to the very warehouse they now sit in. Freddie is terrified, but doesn’t totally believe Frank. So Frank takes him downstairs to look at the zombie storage vats, and wipes the glass top clean with an entire roll of paper towels (like a psycho). Frank is just attesting to the American-made durability of the vats when a gentle kick breaks one open, releasing a toxic gas into the basement. Frank and Freddie collapse, choking, as the opening credits run.
After the credits, the story moves across the country, to San Diego, where an army colonel returns home after his workday to an opulent mansion that looks more fitting for Elvis Presley than a military man. Not much happens here, save the colonel is dismissive of his wife and emphasizes that he needs to always be on call, which is why they have military communications equipment in his study.
Back in Louisville, a new punk, Suicide (Mark Venturini), who has a chain link strung between his ear and nose and a big ‘X’ shaved into the back of his head, drives way too many of Freddie’s friends (seven of them in one convertible!) toward the Uneeda Warehouse. Realizing Freddie won’t be done work for a couple hours, they park the car and break into the nearby Resurrection Cemetery to kill some time. Freddie and Frank regain consciousness on the floor of the basement, still feeling strong after-effects of whatever gas was in that vat. Worse than their health problems, the body seems to be missing from the vat. Frank isn’t worried, though, assuming the body “must have melted.” (You know, the way they do.)
Aside from their burning throats and eyes, there appear to have been no ill effects of the corpse container breach, but then they hear faint barking – barking that emanates from a half-dog that had been mounted to a stand (for anatomy lessons). Frank, realizing the half-dog is somehow alive, freaks out and smashes it with a nearby crutch. Then the door to the cadaver freezer begins to bang. If you were paying any attention to the title of this movie, you know that the corpse inside has most certainly come alive. Not knowing what to do, Freddie says they should call the cops, but Frank, feeling the situation can still be kept quiet, says they can’t let people know the vat opened. Instead, they call their boss, Uneeda owner, Burt (Clu Gulager).
Back in the cemetery, rag-doll aesthetic punk Trash (Linnea Quigley) waxes unpoetic about death with Spider (Miguel A. Nuñez Jr), who is certainly styled after Rick James. Trash confesses she thinks the worst way to die is to be surrounded by a bunch of old men who would tear her apart. Then she decides to take of all her clothes and start doing a punk strip tease on top of a tomb while her friends jump around in a circle, lighting the scene with road flares. (Keep in mind it’s barely after 7 PM). Trash will remain entirely or mostly nude for the remainder of the film.
Burt arrives at the warehouse, wearing a sweet Members-Only jacket. The three men discuss what they’re going to do about the angry corpse in the freezer, and – basing their premise on zombie movies – figure they have to destroy the brain. Frank gets a fire axe, Freddie takes the door, and Burt supervises. The following scene is Three Stooges level slapstick, with a jaundiced, naked male corpse running around the warehouse after three bumbling medical supply staffers. Eventually they hold him down, but he doesn’t die when Burt brings the axe down on the back of his head. Burt then improvises, using a coping saw to sever the head from the body, but the headless body just jumps up and starts bumping into shelves and boxes.
Eventually, they tie the headless, yellow body down, but they’re faced with a real sticky wicket: no matter what they do or how they chop up the body, the zombie remains alive. That’s when Burt remembers his old friend, Ernie (Don Calfa) who works at the mortuary. (Yes. They’re Burt and Ernie.) There’s an incinerator there; maybe they could make use of the crematorium if he’s still working this late. Ernie is working this late, bopping to German military marches on his headphones while “breaking out the rigor mortis” from a body. Burt, Frank, and Freddie show him a bunch of small, wriggling garbage bags, which Burt claims are “rabid weasels” that need to be burned alive. Despite their long friendship, Ernie finds this difficult to believe.
Burt is forced to show Ernie what’s really inside the garbage bags, unwrapping a severed arm that promptly tears part of Ernie’s pants. The sweaty new wave guy Chuck (John Philbin) and party girl Casey (Jewel Shepard) realize it must be Freddie’s quittin’ time, so the group goes to retrieve him. But there’s no answer at the warehouse, as Freddie’s at the crematorium. At that crematorium, Ernie has agreed to burn the body parts in return for a to-be-defined-later big favour. He incinerates it all – even the heart, which is apparently the hardest part to burn – but the music that accompanies the smoke billowing out of the crematorium’s chimney tells us things are only going to get worse.
A storm breaks and the corpse smoke comes down as a sort of acid rain, covering our punk heroes, who take refuge in Suicide’s car. Burt shouts with glee, thinking their problems are solved, but then realizes Frank and Freddie, who have been looking progressively sicker each moment of the film, now look like death warmed over. Ernie calls the paramedics. Meanwhile, preppy girl Tina (Beverly Randolph) attempts to break into the Uneeda warehouse to look for he boyfriend, Freddie. She somehow manages to bust in and finds the broken vat in the basement. Unfortunately, she also finds the real star of Return of the Living Dead: the Tarman (Allan Trautman).
The Tarman, looking like a wobbly skeleton covered in melting tar, is the animated corpse of the zombie that was in the vat, and it’s a real feat of special effects. (Even just the way he sways is the stuff of nightmares.) Tarman demands brains and chases after Tina, who runs up the stairs (which collapse under her), then hides in a metal cabinet. But these zombies are anything but brain-dead. Tarman sets up a chain pulley system and wraps it around the doors of the cabinet to break it open. But before his zombie MacGyver solution can work, the rest of the gang shows up. Not suspecting a giant tar zombie, Suicide is killed by a nasty bite to the skull, and then has his brains gobbled. Spider tosses a paint can at the zombie, giving the rest time to retrieve Tina and escape.
Paramedics finally arrive and run a few tests on Frank and Freddie, and are irritated by how little Burt will tell them about what gas they were exposed to. But their tests show that the two men have no vital signs at all. They aren’t, technically, alive. Freddie’s youthful friends run into the cemetery and quickly find the Tarman was only the tip of the dead iceberg. Corpses begin to rise up from the ooze and muck, and Trash (still naked) encounters her worst nightmare, as she’s swarmed by a gang of old-man zombies. However, Tina, Spider, and Scuzz (Brian Peck) manage to make it to the crematorium. Even though Burt is sure they’re on PCP, they let the punk youths in. But – despite having seen at least one zombie already and two men rapidly turning into zombies in the next room – Ernie and Burt can’t believe their story of the dead rising from the grave outside.
Chuck and Casey, our other surviving youth, have decided to hole up in the besieged warehouse, even if Tarman is trapped in the basement. Meanwhile, the paramedics go their ambulance and are ambushed by a ton of zombies. Ernie takes his Walther P38 and goes to check on them and finds zombies feasting on their brains. He fires the pistol at a partially rotted zombie, to no effect, and retreats to the crematorium. From here on in, it’s an all-out siege at the crematorium, with the survivors boarding up windows and arming themselves with sledgehammers and lead pipes. The zombies outside get on the CB radio and request more and more paramedics and police officers, who are routinely eaten once they arrive.
Things take a turn for the worse when some zombies begin to break through one of their boarded windows – “How many windows you got in this fuckin’ place?” Spider asks – and pulls Scuzz outside, biting into his brain and spurting blood everywhere. As Spider and Ernie drag Scuzz back inside, they bring with him the torso of an emaciated female zombie. Ernie, curious about the reanimated dead, transports the half-zombie to his operating table and puts it in restraints. He then interrogates the zombie – what does it want? (Brains) Why do they eat brains? (To offset the pain of being dead.) It’s like this movie was written by Camus.
Next we see Trash – her storyline’s not over just yet – she’s turned into a punk zombie queen, still strolling around naked. (I guess since more of her skin was exposed, she turned to a zombie after dying?) She emerges from the fog to kill a homeless man pushing a shopping cart. Back at the crematorium, the gang decides to lock Frank and Freddie in the chapel to protect themselves from their zombie transformation, but Tina refuses to leave and wants to remain in the chapel with them. The other survivors realize they’re surrounded, and no matter how many cops or paramedics arrive to help, they’re overwhelmed by the zombie hordes. How will they escape?
Zombie transformation is an agonizing process, and Freddie and Frank roll around on the chapel carpet, vomit spilling out of their mouths. Freddie finally turns full zombie, demanding brains, and turns on Tina. But Burt, Spider, and Ernie break into the chapel just in time, roughing Freddie up with a pipe and throwing nitric acid in his face. Ernie, however, injures his foot a short time later, and becomes a lot less mobile. Burt and Spider devise a desperate plan to make a break for the abandoned police cruiser outside and drive it back beside the crematorium to pick everyone else up.
The plan goes well at first, as Spider and Burt beat their way through a zombie horde and get inside the car, but they can’t seem to drive anywhere close to the building without bringing a pile of zombies with them. They instead drive out of the cemetery, only to find way more zombies on the street outside. But they do manage to make it to the Uneeda warehouse, where they join our two other survivors (who I’d pretty much forgotten about). Freddie, who has been gruesomely blinded with acid, breaks out of the chapel and is running wild. Ernie and Tina, the only two non-zombies alive in the crematorium scurry into the attic to hide. Frank, meanwhile, drags his sorry, zombifying self to the incinerator, prays for forgiveness, and throws himself in.
Between shots of riot police being overrun by zombies, we see Burt, Spider, Chuck, and Casey in the Uneeda warehouse. They need to get to the phone in the basement, but that’s also where the Tarman is. Burt cockily picks up a baseball bat and tells Spider to unlock the door. He handily takes off the Tarman’s head with one swing, and they call the police. The police, however, are a bit tied up, having their brains eaten. Our heroes have one last-ditch effort: call the emergency number on the side of the corpse containers.
The call is transferred to Colonel Glover in San Diego (remember him?), who takes a number of detailed notes, then contacts some other military personnel about Louisville, Kentucky. Back in the crematorium, Freddie is banging on the attic entrance while Ernie cocks his pistol and seems prepared to mercy-kill Tina and himself. At the Uneeda warehouse, Burt and the gang seem relieved the military has some sort of contingency plan. And across the country, a nuclear weapon is armed and launched, eventually destroying twenty blocks of Louisville, Kentucky.
The contingency plan is a resounding success (presumably killing all our protagonists), though apparently some people in nearby areas are complaining about the rain burning their skin.
Takeaway points:
- Return of the Living Dead is usually billed as a “horror comedy.” And while there are funny elements – the slapstick of the headless zombie, the incredible comedic performance of James Karen as Frank – it’s more a crowd-pleasing, midnight movie. Every five minutes, you can count on a scene to make you puke, laugh, or simply ask, “WTF?” How many other zombie movies feature a character entirely naked for the duration of the film? Return of the Living Dead is essentially a shade away from a Troma movie, and that was intentional on the part of director Dan O’Bannon (writer of Alien and Lifeforce), who wanted to distance the film from the more earnestly scary Dawn of the Dead.
- Comedy and gross-outs aside, there is an sincere (if ham-fisted) attempt at social criticism in Return of the Living Dead. After all, the zombifying military chemical is called 2-4-5 Trioxin, which is not far off from 2-4-5 dioxin (also known as <a href=“https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange”>Agent Orange</a>). And the film takes place, lest we forget, on the eve of the Fourth of July. Top that off with a pile of useless police and paramedics and the U.S. military launching a nuclear strike on its own populace and you have a film that parallels the traditional punk ethos when it comes to governmental authority and the military industrial complex.
- I do love disaster and monster movies where the heroes are not cops or scientists or experts in anything – just regular joes and janes. In this fashion, Return of the Living Dead reminded me somewhat of movies like The Host or A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, where motley assemblages of screw-ups – in this case, warehouse workers, a mortician, and some punk youths – have to fight off evil because the authorities are even more useless. (Police do nothing but die in this movie.) I will also note that five horror movies in, we encounter the first Black character of any significance in Spider, which is a pretty sad state of affairs. (There was a Black server in Cat People, but she didn’t have much to do.)
- The one joke that falls flat in Return of the Living Dead is the intimations that Ernie Kaltenbrunner is a former Nazi hiding out in Kentucky. He shares a name with an SS leader. Portraits of Eva Braun adorn his office, he carries a traditional German military pistol and listens to German military anthems. So, it’s supposed to be funny that he runs the crematorium. (Ugh.) This is not particularly unusual in 1980s movies of this ilk – Blood Diner features a Hitler-themed band, for instance – and nearly every Troma movie has swastikas splashed all over the place to be “subversive.” More troubling is that Ernie becomes downright heroic over the course of the movie, and you start to cheer him as he subdues zombie after zombie. I’m all for recognizing the multiple facets of people, but it’s hard in today’s current climate, with visible neo-Nazism on the rise, to stomach rooting for the middle-aged Nazi.
Truly terrifying or truly terrible?: A movie like Return of the Living Dead is essentially critic-proof. It’s a midnight movie made to entertain, delight, shock – it’s big, dumb fun with a lot of gore and . There is one honestly scary part – the movements and presence of the Tarman is uncanny-valley-level upsetting – but otherwise it’s candy-coloured punk fun.
Best outfit: It’s a crowded field in Return of the Living Dead, which is more style than substance. New waver Chuck wears the outfit I’d most wear myself, and there’s something to be said for Ernie’s all-maroon work uniform (especially once his pant-length becomes uneven), but Freddie’s suspenders and Visage shirt are the ultimate victor.
Best line: It’s a tie:
“He got a job?! What a dick!” – Scuzz, on Freddie’s newfound employment
“You think this is a fuckin’ costume?! This is a way of life.” – Suicide, on his punk outfit
Best kill: The Tarman chowing down on Suicide’s cranium is the swiftest, most brutal kill.
Unexpected cameo: No real surprises here, but Miguel A. Nuñez Jr, who plays Spider, might be familiar to video game fans for portraying Dee-Jay in the Street Fighter movie. (IMDB trivia also notes that he was homeless (!) when cast in this movie.)
Unexpected lesson learned: Believe it or not, I learned a little chemistry in Return of the Living Dead. For instance, aqua regia (a mixture of nitric and hydrolchloric acids) is a very strong acid. Do not drink!
Most suitable band name derived from the movie: 2-4-5 Trioxin.
Next up: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).