DUCK@MIT-OZ (08/18/85)
From: Michael Eisenberg <DUCK%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA> THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD (film review) Nanoreview: C'mon, Dead! Microreview: Extremely good grotesque weird movie. Review: This is a Living Dead movie for all of us -- or at least all of us who can watch heads of corpses getting swatted off and people's brains being bitten out and so forth. None of that portentous self-important "you-think-this-is-a-cheap-horror- movie-but-it's-really-life" stuff that George Romero dishes out. This is Working Man's Dead at their most relentless. The movie, written and directed by Dan O'Bannon (I believe he wrote "Alien" and one of the eerier segments of the cartoon "Heavy Metal"), manages to walk the very fine line between gross-out humor and genuine horror. I won't spoil it by giving away the whole story; suffice it to say that what begins with a chemical accident ends with a cemetery full of zombies springing to life and terrorizing a medical-supplies house and a group of punks. Part of what makes the movie so successful at being both funny and scary is the surprisingly high quality of the acting: there is a minimum of mugging for laughs, and some of the characters have an almost tragic side to them. The young actors playing the punks are especially believable, and in one scene even the zombies themselves miraculously achieve a sort of poignancy. The special effects, while not remarkable, are effective enough, and there are images of dead creatures running rampant which can really knock your socks off through sheer cleverness, if not technical expertise. Anyway, I don't mean to make this sound like "The Bicycle Thief" or anything, but it really is one of the better horror films in recent memory. I give it a 7.5 out of 10. -- Mike Eisenberg (DUCK@MIT-OZ) -------