Good morning, House of Madness corpses:
Nothing beats a good old trip down Memory Lane, and into the depths of nostalgia. Rummaging through your old comics in your parents' basement can not only bring back fond memories of your childhood, but can also prove to be quite profitable if you were the type of child that looked after their belongings. Hearing that song by Whitesnake as you're driving down the highway in your family wagon brings back memories of when you were cool, and blaring hair bands through the airwaves made you feel on top of the mountains, rather than over the hill. One day you stumble across your favourite old pair of pennyloafers and think to yourself, "I USED TO WEAR THESE FUCKING THINGS!?"; alas, some things are better left in the past. As for "The Return of the Living Dead", I've never been so happy to revisit a film that my younger self saw an absurd amount of times.
Freddie (Thom Mathews) has just been hired at the local medical supply warehouse, and is being shown the ropes by his boss Frank (James Karen). They deal with all kinds of things of the macabre, like skeletons, miniature dissected dogs, and all sorts of chemicals in which they ship around the globe. It doesn't take long for Freddie to inquire about whether or not Frank has seen anything crazy in this business, and Frank is only too happy to oblige as he takes Freddie into the basement, and shows him the sealed corpses of the remaining mutations from an old military experiment, which was the true basis of the "Night of the Living Dead" film. As Frank attempts to show Freddie there's nothing to fear, he smacks the side of a barrel and releases a toxic gas that renders them both unconscious, and releases an unknown evil into the air. Uh-oh.
As all this is going on, Freddie's punk rocker buddies are hamming it up in the nearby cemetery, waiting for him to get off work so they can all get naked for no reason and cause a public nuisance just for the hell of it. As the party hammers on, Frank and Freddie come to, and as they head back upstairs to the office, they realize they have a major problem on their hands: the frozen cadaver in the meat locker is alive and well, and it's just a matter of time before he breaks out. With time short, and panic levels rising, Frank sees the only solution being to call his boss Bert (Clu Galager) and fess up. Bert arrives, they discuss how in the movies destroying the brain incapacitates the evil, and they each get ready as they hatch a plan to 'brain' the corpse with a pickax once they open the door. The plan goes smoothly, but with a hitch, it didn't work. The corpse is still violently thrashing and biting even once they cut off its head, which means it's time for a new plan, one with extreme results.
Turns out there's a crematorium right across the street (PHEW!), and Bert has been friends with its caretaker Ernie (Don Calfa) for at least 25 years, and it's time to call in a favour. After much convincing, Bert persuades Ernie into letting them burn the corpse, and end this little charade once and for all. The cut up body parts are thrown in the incinerator, and all seems well, until the toxic smoke from the corpse hits the atmosphere, and the rainfall which ensues starts bringing the dead back to life. It's now Hell on earth, and there's no stopping the chaos they've caused as they're trapped inside the crematorium with no one to call, and nowhere left to hide. Perhaps their last resort is to call the 1-800 number on the side of one of the barrels that will connect them to the military where all this started, they always have a plan, right? RIGHT?
This film just oozes everything 80's from the hair, clothes, dialog, right down to the soundtrack. I haven't had this much fun watching (rewatching) a flick in a long time, and even though this film is cheesy, it's high class cheese that you can't help but indulge in until you're sicker than our friends Frank and Freddie after a trip to the basement. An absolute classic for the ages.
Madness Meter: 8.4/10
