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“I thought you said if we destroyed the brain, it’d die!” “It worked in the movie!” “Well, it ain’t working now, Frank!” “You mean the movie lied?”

It’s Kristina‘s birthday… and Matt Binder of DOOMED and Majority Report joins us to talk about
Dan O’Bannon‘s Return of the Living Dead

Holds up very well on rewatch. It is really crazy what a daunting force the ROTLD zombies are. You pretty much have to immolate them completely or nuke them! Also: closest type of zombies to the original I AM LEGEND model of them having human savvy and cunning (“SEND MORE PARAMEDICS”/”SEND MORE COPS”) as a tool in the tool box. Building off of what Romero did with Night of the Living Dead.

Tar man is definitely one of the many great examples of practical effects in this. The actual design of the zombies is pretty incredible, taking some notes from actual mummies. 

Pretty wild that Clu Gulager, The Virginian himself, was in this.

Dan O’Bannon (who also wrote Alien) made something very interesting here, the comedic bits didn’t work for some at time… and in a world with Dead Alive/Braindead, Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland and more. It all makes total and complete sense. Everybody is low key terrible at their job and kind of lame and it is lovely. The things not to love about the punks are only countermanded by all the things to love about them.

We still don’t know any that ran around naked so much though.

This film is often left out of the discussion, in a culture overrun (if you will) about Zombies.