Though it didn’t seem it at the time, The Return of the Living Dead has proved to be a seminal zombie film, arguable reinventing the genre in the most dramatic way since the original Night of the Living Dead. This is, after all, the film that broke several established rules – the zombies here not only run, but also talk and are not killed by the trusty bullet-in-the-head method – but also the movie that first established the now-classic zombie trope that the living dead are hungry for brains. It’s also notable that the film was a big hit in the same year that Romero’s Day of the Dead crashed and burned at the box office – if anything seemed to symbolise the demise of serious horror in favour of the trivial and safe, this was it.

Yet I’m not here to dismiss Return… at the time of release, I enjoyed the film without thinking it anything special, and that’s pretty much my opinion today. Dan O’Bannon’s movie is a light-hearted, lightweight, fairly throwaway effort that nonetheless is a lot of fun – and very much of its time. How much you think that is a good thing will depend on how you remember the 1980s.

Set in a world where Night of the Living Dead was based on a true story, Return… smartly sets up its story with blundering medical supply warehousemen Frank (James Karen) and Freddy (Thom Mathews) accidentally unleashing the military chemical responsible for the earlier zombie outbreak. Soon, they are teaming up with boss Burt (Clu Gulager) and mortician Ernie (Don Calfa) to try and bring the situation under control, while Freddy’s teenage punk friends (as convincing as any Hollywood punks of the 1980s – i.e. not very) find themselves fighting for survival as toxic rainfall begins to resurrect the hungry inhabitants of the local cemetery.

Return… has a sharp soundtrack (here in the original version for the first time in years, with The Cramps, Roky Erickson, The Damned and others)), messy gore, some great zombies that have yet to be bettered, and a fabulous, entirely gratuitous and iconic striptease scene from Linnea Quigley – for whom this was the start of a long, if not entirely illustrious career as a Scream Queen. It also has that oddly cheap look that seems to uniquely afflict films of the Eighties. The screenplay (an original work after John Russo’s original idea was rejected – read his awful Return of the Living Dead novel if you want to see how much of a bullet was dodged there) has some smart gags, and overall, the film manages a solid balance of horror and comedy. I’m still unconvinced that the film has any real artistic value, but that’s not to say it isn’t a lot of fun to watch.

Fans – and there are lots of them – won’t care what I say about the film anyway. But for them, the most important thing here – apart from the restored original soundtrack – will be the extensive extras. There’s a pretty exhaustive, well put together two-hour documentary about the film, More Brains! A Return to the Living Dead. This comes with extensive additional content – almost another hour’s worth of coverage of Pt 2 and Pt 3 (the latter unquestionably the best film in the franchise, and a highly underrated body horror classic), interview outtakes, Dan O’Bannon’s final interview and other more trivial bits. There is also an interview with Russo and a look at the SFX of the film. Oddly, the pre-existing commentary track from O’Bannon isn’t included, making the release just that little bit less definitive. But it’s a great package – the documentary alone being worth the price of purchase.

DAVID FLINT

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