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Saturday Evening Movie Thread [moviegique]: The Return of the Living Dead

It was another good fortnight-and-a-half at 'casa 'gique, starting with the indie/arty/actorly Everything's Going To Be Great, where a theater kid born into a theater family struggles with convincing people he's heterosexual and ultimately learns he's not the center of the universe, and ending with the taut Persian thriller Tatami, about a Persian judoku who is doing well in a competition, so the Iranian government calls up and tells her to fake an injury—because she might have to go up against an Israeli and they have to boycott Zionists and since they can't, they have to pretend they're not, and, my God, what a bunch of whiny-ass bitches running that country.

We bookended this with two '90s(ish) movies, Shall we Dance? and In The Mood For Love from Japan and China respectively.

And what was between the bookends? The glorious year of 1984(ish). We started with Tsui Hark's Shanghai Blues, went to a double-feature of Return of the Living Dead and Repo Man, then followed up with the 40(ish) anniversary of This Is Spinal Tap.

With the exception of Tap, none of these '80s films are (generally) regarded as classics—more cult classics, than anything. Shanghai Blues strikes me as under-rated: It's a romcom, almost a screwball comedy with a kind of kung-fu sensibility to the physical humor (think a less frenetic, less violent Jackie Chan). It, like the other three movies, has a surprisingly light, almost casual regard for things which would be ponderously heavy today. These films touch lightly on promiscuity, homelessness, pedophilia, assault, sexual assault, dismemberment, PTSD, death—in ways you really can't anymore.

I gots things to say about all of 'em, but tonight, let's just talk about the movie Simon Pegg called "a piss take" on the zombie genre.

Standard first level opponents of an '80s side-scroller fighting game.

Back From The Dead—And Ready To Party

George Romero and John Russo had different ideas about how to proceed with their unexpectedly successful flick, Night of the Living Dead. They decided to go their separate ways, distinguishing their products with "...of the Dead" (Romero) and "...of the Living Dead" (Russo). Richard P. Rubinstein (Romero's producer on Dawn of the Dead) actually tried to get the "Living Dead" removed anyway but since Russo had co-written NotLD, the WGA sided with him.

Russo did the novelization of the '68 movie and wrote a follow-up novel called Return of the Living Dead which served as the basis for the first screenplay. He hired Dan O'Bannon (scriptwriter of Alien, Blue Thunder, Total Recall and many more) to write and direct, and O'Bannon rejected the original script for seeming too much like a continuation of Romero's work (the third installation of which would beat this to theaters by about a month in the summer of '85).

So, O'Bannon created a world where Night of the Living Dead had been a documentary—an exposé of an army snafu that had resulted in zombies, and Romero had been forced to make changes to various elements to cover up the truth.

This serves as a springboard for a lot of the movie's comedy.

And this is a funny movie.

Jewel Shepard (Casey) turned down the role of Trash, alleging she'd had enough of being naked. She also alleges that the movie would've gotten an X if she'd done the movie since Linnea Quigley had "nothing much sexual about her". (Quigley got her start in 1978's softcore "Fairy Tales", so Shepherd's opinion was not widely shared.)

Freddie goes to his new job at the UNEEDA Medical Supply company and his supervisor Frank is there to show him the ropes—possibly the dumbest categorization system ever—and Frank gets to talking about how NotLD was a real thing and he knows this because the barrels containing trioxin—the substance that animates the dead—is down in the basement.

The barrel contains the gas and a corpse (later nicknamed "Tarman") and wouldn't you know it, Frank smacks the barrel confidently only to release the gas and animate all the little bits and bobs in the warehouse. Including the pinned butterflies and bisected dogs.

They call their boss Burt for help, and a number of gags ensue where they try to follow the NotLD formula, only to discover it doesn't work. The zombies aren't slow, they aren't dumb, they're just dead—and hungry.

Burt gets the idea of going next door to Resurrection Mortuary and asking Ernie if they can borrow his ovens. (Yes, Burt and Ernie.) They destroy the animated bits and pieces by burning it.

And the ash goes into the air, rain comes down and floods the nearby cemetery with trioxin.

Burt (Clu Gulager), Frank (James Karen), and Freddie (Thom Mathews). Dan O'Bannon wanted Leslie Nielsen for Burt.

Stereotyping

Freddie's friends are hanging out in the cemetery waiting for him (because apparently he always knows where the party is), and they're a melange of '80s stereotypes: Freddie's girlfriend is (inexplicably) a preppy. There's a party girl, a suit guy, a death metal guy, a slutty punk girl, and so on. They're slight exaggerations of the types, perhaps, but in real life, they didn't hang out together, generally.

They're fodder, amusingly. The movie is powered by the three old guys.

Even as fodder, though, they have a more real feeling than most main characters in modern flicks. None of them like the death metal guy, Suicide, who bitches that they only call him when they need a ride. When Trash (slutty punk girl) is throwing herself at him in the cemetery, he throws her off saying "Have some respect for the dead."

This is after expressing her sexual frustration by stripping her clothes off and dancing naked on the tombstone, in an iconic scene for Linnea Quigley.

The tone is much like that of Evil Dead 2 in that it's very comical in parts, and very horrifying in others. There are a lot of subtle gags, too, like an eye chart that reads "Burt is a slave driver and a cheap son of a bitch who's going bald", or the pictures of Eva Braun and Hitler up in Ernie's mortuary. (How did Ernie get so good at running a crematorium oven?)

This is where we learn it hurts to be dead, and only the brains of the living helps.

Legacy and Nostalgia

RotLD is a very entertaining movie even today, but it didn't have much of an impact. The sequel, by Ken Wiederhorn (Meatballs Part II, Shock Waves) is an odd remake of the original, with members of the original cast back in new roles. Brian Yuzna (Society, Re-Animator) directed the third installment, and it has a cult following, but it's completely serious. Grim, even.

Zombies went back to their slow-moving unintelligent selves. I don't think this movie actually introduced the brain-eating-zombie trope but I can't prove it. (I also don't think "I'm here to kick ass and chew gum" was original to Roddy Piper but I can't prove that.) And, for the record, Messiah of Evil had running (well-dressed) undead years earlier.

So it just stands as a good, fun horror comedy.

We saw this, as mentioned, as a double-feature with Repo Man at Quentin Tarantino's New Beverly Theater which actually uses a project to project 35mm prints in all their glories (and flaws). Lately, I've been overwhelmed by how much better films look than digital—like, even a trashy older film shot on film creates an effect that is largely absent from digital.

But I didn't think showing them from a print on a projector was such a big deal. It struck me as the same pretentiousness seen in people who insist on playing vinyl records. (I'm not one of those "Nobody can hear the difference" because I wouldn't presume. I'm more "The people who are claiming to hear the different largely aren't.")

Well, color me pretentious, because I felt the projection on these (low-budget, throwaway!) old movies really added something to the viewing experience—scratches and all, because there are scratches on the RotLD print.

The New Beverly also leads with contemporary trailers and ads, which made the whole experience a lot like going to the theater 40 years ago. Down to the guy in front of me in the packed theater being a foot taller and having an enormous head!

I've never been a big nostalgia guy but, wow, what a time machine.

Do You Wanna Party?

In sum, old movies are better. Or they may not be better but they are definitely a safer bet, when you realize how cultural filters work.

But these '80s kids are punks and slackers. I worry for our future.

"Send more paramedics."