Nerds That Geek Movie Review: 'The Return of the Living Dead'

Written by John Edward Betancourt

Sometimes there are films that leave you with incredible internal conflict. You may like the film, yet hate it all at the same time and that strange back and forth somehow keeps you coming back for more. Despite your best efforts to take a side, you simply cannot, because there is so much that leaves you on the fence.  

There is a horror film that does this for me. Every single time I watch it I grin ear to ear at some scenes, and grimace with disgust at others. Because I have such a great love for the zombie genre, yet I simply cannot stand fast moving corpses. Which means there is only one movie that can create this kind of grand conflict for me...The Return of the Living Dead.  

The Uneeda Medical Facility is harboring an incredible secret. Sitting in its basement beneath its life saving medical inventory are metallic canisters that contain an abomination; corpses that once appeared to be alive, thanks to a chemical experiment gone wrong from so many years ago. But this secret is about to reveal something far worse. Because when two employees accidentally release the contents of the tank, they discover that the chemical within does more than just make dead bodies appear to live...it actually resurrects the dead, and the corpses this chemical reanimates, hunger for fresh human brains.  

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When this movie was released in the summer of 1985, it did something incredible...it beat the King of the Living Dead, George A. Romero, at his own game by outperforming Day of the Dead in theaters and its success was completely warranted. After all, this was an absolutely fresh take on the zombie genre, one that mixed in the punk culture of the 80's while at the same time adding some over the top slapstick to a genre that is normally quite serious. Yet while there are plenty of laughs to be found in The Return of the Living Dead, it never strays from its roots, providing the audience with some solid scares and there is plenty of gore to be found here as well.   

However, we do need to discuss my main gripe with the story. Only because this is the film that in many ways was the genesis of the fast-moving zombie. I mean, there are some scenes where these suckers move, and just from a logical standpoint, I don’t understand how the hell can a corpse move that quick. To top it all off, this film goes ahead and takes such a wild notion one step further...by giving these corpses the ability to talk. It's a strange decision that still takes me by surprise to this day because it’s definitely off putting to hear a corpse speak in a zombie film, and at times, it is a tad silly.  

But perhaps that is the point of The Return of the Living Dead, to be the anti-thinking zombie film. To allow us to just kick back and enjoy the ride while these crazy creatures dig in to feast on brains while metal and punk music rain down upon us. It's worth seeing, and it has grown into a cult phenomenon as the years have progressed. In fact, it managed to spawn four sequels in the franchise, but this one stands out as the best of them all.  

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