Review: Return of the Living Dead (1985)

Stars: Thom Matthews, Linnea Quigley, Don Calfa

Director: Ken Weiderhorn

Budget: $4million

By far one of my favourite zombie films of all time. I think though I actually saw the second one first, then the third then this one. I was quite young watching these though but thankfully this was comedy enough to not totally freak me like Demons did.

So this apparently has some loose connection to the Romero night of the living dead, in that the canisters in their basement contain some of the zombies from that movie.

Thom Matthews plays Freddy a young guy who just got a job in a medical warehouse. The kind where they store things for biology and medical classes in schools, colleges and universities.
Frank his older coworker does the usual schlock you do with a new guy, try to freak him out with weird stuff. So like i said he shows him these canisters down in the basement, they are old and rusted but Frank believing in sturdy american ingenuity bops one releasing a noxious green gas into the air.

This gas unknowingly to Frank and Freddy infects them and everything 'dead' in the warehouse. They slowly turn into zombies over the course of the film. Now i don't want to spoil to much about this film as it's a damn classic that needs to be watched by anyone who is a zombie fan. This is because it introduces so many zombie norms that people take for granted these days, more so even than night, dawn or day of the dead ever did.
Number one being the need for brains, most if not all zombie films before this series zombies just ate you, all of you. Totally almost totally invulnerable zombies, i mean even beheading bullet to the brain etc does not kill a RotLD zombie. That ones rarely used anymore especially in film. Even running and faster zombies were in this, pretty much dependent on how decayed they are. There's also the

There's only one thing that i don't like about this film and that's it's ending, a typical type of 80's ending that i wont spoil. Linnea Quigley scream queen also stars in this, she is nude for a large amount of the film and gets killed quite gruesomely too.

So yes i love this film series, this is probably my second favorite out of the whole lot of them, i will get around to reviewing them all, even the abysmal 4+5. THN gives this film a strong a 5 out of 5 stars.