31 days of horror Day 31

The Return of the living dead

Source- MGM original DVD release

Besides Texas chainsaw massacre this is my favorite horror film of all time. I was lucky that my uncle took me to see it when it first came out. It has just right blend of horror and comedy. Freddy is on his night at a new job. He works at a medical supply warehouse. His co-worker goes to show him something in the basement. It is a corpse in some kind of military drum. One of them hits it with a wrench and a yellow gas starts leaking out. They both pass out. Across the street in the cemetery,Freddy's girlfriend and 5 of his friends are hanging out waiting on him to get off work. Freddy and his co-worker wake up to discover all the dead bodies in the warehouse have become reanimated. They end up cutting one up with a saw and stuffing it into a trash bag. They haul it across the street to a morgue that also has a crematorium. The mortician is a friend and agrees to burn up the reanimated parts. Well the smoke produced by burning the parts gets up in the clouds and causes it to rain. Then all hell breaks loss all the corpses in the graveyard come back to life and you end up with Freddy,the mortician,the co-worker and most of his friends barricading themselves into the morgue. One by one they die then it becomes apparent that from the exposure to the yellow smoke earlier Freddy and his co-worker are also becoming zombies. The cast in this film is just amazing,from a young Linnea Quigley and Jewel Sheppard to Clu Gulager James Karen Don Calfa,the cast does great work. The effects are very very good for what is a small budgeted mid 80's film. And the soundtrack is amazing,sadly some of it is changed on both DVD releases. But the VHS release is the original soundtrack and it isn't too hard to find now. This is a film that I end up watching at least 8 or so times a year,and usually at least once on Halloween. Return of the living dead gets an A+.