Bad Zombies vs. Worse Zombies

I rose from the recliner in my friends' living room and said goodnight. Before I left, Cal handed me a copy of Return of the Living Dead. For a beat I studied the back of the DVD. Zombies devouring teenagers seemed likely. “Resurrection Cemetery” struck me as a conspicuous name for a burial site. I faked a frown and pointed to a tiny graphic at the bottom corner of the case.

“I don't know if I should watch this one. It's rated-R.”

“Hell, it should be NC-17,” Cal chuckled.

Somehow, his wife and couch-partner Ophelia managed to nod in agreement and shake her head ruefully in the same gesture.

“We watched it with our daughter. I had to cover her eyes for roughly a third of the movie.”

Feeling satisfied, I nodded and brought the case to my forehead and flicked it to mime a salute.

“Still glad I've never reproduced,” I said. “Bye.”

###

Released in 1984, it's a wonder Return of the Living Dead dodged that NC-17 rating. In addition to so much gory brain-eating (for the Returned zombies gorge not human flesh, instead they hunger only for the pink goo inside our skulls), a redheaded vixen strips bare at Resurrection Cemetery, gyrates and poses atop a concrete crypt, and remains nude throughout most of her remaining scenes—most notably after she returns as a zombie hellbent on destroying a cart-toting hobo. Her name is Trash. Her boyfriend's name is Suicide.

Here's the deal with Trash: she's trashy (except when terrified and/or getting killed). The deal with Suicide is that he's suicidal (and he's a whiny jerk about it).

Other mayhem worth relaying includes a bevy of cops getting tricked, ambushed, and decimated. Later, when it becomes clear that he is doomed, a man tearfully musters the will to crawl into a cremation-oven before he can turn into an undead psychopath.

Along with the twisted appeal (assuming you care to behold such atrocities in a movie), Return adds a vexing wrinkle to the zombie formula popularized in 1968's Night of the Living Dead: the zombies of the Reagan-age are almost indestructible. They are impervious to pickaxe impalings of the brain. They rage undauntedly after their heads have been sawed from their bodies. Their dismembered and diced body parts can somehow still gyrate with bad intentions. The only way to destroy the '80s zombies is to burn and incinerate them, to reduce them to ash that can no longer put up a fight.

Upon watching the scene in which gruesome things are done to the head of a zombie by two terrified workers at an army surplus store (one that, yes, handles skeletons,the occasional corpse, and dog specimens that have been split in half), I was nonplussed by the monster's perseverance. In fact, for a while I felt dismayed. Betrayed. I truly thought I understood zombies—which is a strange conviction to have about a ghoul that doesn't exist—and I was loath to see the laws of zombie-hood so utterly defied.

I had grown accustomed to watching the undead get re-killed when their noggins get skewered. At the age of 29, I was startled to learn that, unlike the zombies featured in everything from Night of the Living Dead to Shaun of the Dead to Resident Evil (which surprisingly doesn't include “Dead” in its title), someone had conceived a different brand of zombies: one that could kill you after you had just blown its head off.

In an hour and a half of Return, a single zombie is destroyed by the survivors. The humans don't stand a chance in the battle of Louisville. All they can do is board windows and doors shut to keep the relentless monsters at bay. Their attacks, whether with sledgehammers or guns, only serve to knock zombies down or make them reel backward temporarily. When they flail and hack with lead pipes at arms groping through windows, it's in vain.

A second mockery of the rules of zombiehood gives the damn Reagan-zombies another advantage: These monsters are smart and articulate. Freshly undead cops and paramedics manage to respond to calls on CB radios to order backup (which is later ambushed and eaten). The top half of a cadaverous old woman delivers a poignant speech to explain why her lot craves for brains. Zombiehood in Return of the Living Dead does not entail the dumb yet determined zombies featured in everything from Dawn of the Dead to The Walking Dead to Zombieland. If anything, Returning as a zombie can do wonders for one's IQ, as is the case with Freddy, a rare punk/jock hybrid whose life and tender disposition fade to black in the arms of his high school sweetheart. When Freddy returns and attacks her inside the mortician's chapel, rampaging like a linebacker at a Black Flag show, he speaks with the psychological malice of Hannibal Lector.

The name of that eBook? Why, it's More Stories, and Additional Stories.