Freddy's 31 Days of Horror Day 28: Dan O'Bannon's Return of the Living Dead 
Dan O'Bannon's career is pretty crazy awesome with whom he's written for. His first gig was writing and starring in John Carpenter's first flick, Dark Star. Then most famously he wrote Ridley Scott's Alien which is one of the most revered science fiction films of all time. Then of course the horrifying Dead and Buried and the crazed acid trip that is Heavy Metal. Needless to say this guy can scare the hell out of you as well as throw really weird random insane at you. What does he do for his first directing gig? He gives us a riff on the zombie genre with a bunch of punk rock kids called Return of the Living Dead!
Freddy is working late night at a storage facility for medical supplies which includes dead bodies and a secret in the basement. The old timer working with Freddy, Frank, tells Freddy that the story from Night of the Living Dead was partially true. A chemical called 245-Trioxin, which was made to spray on Marijuana apparently, leaked out in a hospital in the morgue and all the bodies began to come to life! Due to a "typical army f#ck up" the bodies were transported in barrels to the medical storage facility they work at on accident. Well Frank wanting to creep Freddy out, shows him the bodies and accidentally cracks open the barrels, letting out a horrible gas that hits our boys straight in the face and unleashes the zombies as well as bringing to life other corpses in the facility. Their boss, Burt (Clu Gulager) wanting to cover everything up decides to take the bodies next door to the crematorium and burn them. Bad idea because the smoke from the burned bodies rises up into the clouds and brings an acid rain down onto the cemetery which brings the whole cemetery to life! Unbeknownst to Freddy, his loving girlfriend and all their punk rock friends are hanging out in the cemetery waiting for him when the undead attack! 
The old timers that hang out with Freddy are goofy as hell and reminiscent of the old bumbling cops in the old school Grindhouse movies as they stupidly keep messing up to cover their own asses when they should've called the police in the first place. Then we got the gang of teenagers hanging out in the cemetery. Super eighties awesome. They are decked out head to toe in leather, torn jeans, buttons, piercings, and sweet hair. Carrying a boom box blasting some rocking punk tunes swearing at the top of their lungs and trying to lay each other. The epitome of eighties teen. The stand out of all of them is of course, Trash. The queen of the horror party herself, Linea Quigley of Night of the Demons, gives another memorable performance for the ages. Trash is a death obsessed goth/punk sexually charged hellion who gives no damn about what anyone thinks and cares only about her time she's having. She straight up talks about fantasizing about dying and thinking of the worst ways to die. Of course as she's talking about this, she strips completely naked and dances on top of the tombstones. Which later plays into her own demise and resurrection in the film. 
If you are fighting zombies in Return of the Living Dead, you are screwed beyond belief. The characters constantly try to remember how they fought the zombies in the Romero movies to survive, but none of the info in the Romero movies apply here. Take out the brain? Keeps going. Chop them up into pieces? You have multiple body parts trying to kill you. These bastards are also really fast and hungry. They don't just want flesh, they especially crave brains! As the most beloved zombie of the film, Muck Man, constantly chases our heroes around screaming, "Braaaainns!!!" At one point they strap one of the zombies down and interrogate it and we discover they crave brains because it's the only thing that can take away the pain of being dead.
O'Bannon has made an amalgam of all the things he loved about zombie movies, taking from the early films where they crave brains, using some of the tropes from the at the time current Romero films and in the end in O'Bannon fashion gives us super charged unkillable monsters and characters we can laugh our asses off at, with a nice twilight zone like ending dealing with the government as our Cherry on top! This flick is pure comedy gold from beginning to end with some crazy looking zombie FX! Three more days til' Halloween Halloween! Three more days til' Halloween! Silver Shamrock!
