The Return of the Living Dead (1985)
★★½ — The Return of the Living Dead (1985)
There is a particular breed of 1980s horror film that seems almost allergic to good taste, and The Return of the Living Dead (1985) sits comfortably at the head of that table. Produced under the joint banner of Hemdale Film Corporation, Fox Films Ltd. and Cinema 84, the film arrives with a premise as gloriously daft as its tagline promises: two hapless workers at a medical supply warehouse manage to accidentally unseal a military canister, releasing a gas that starts raising the local dead. What follows across its brisk 91 minutes is less a genuine attempt at terror and more a full-throated celebration of chaos, bad decisions and very loud punk music. The film arrived during a golden run for horror comedy, a period when the genre was confident enough to wink at itself, and it planted a flag that later films have been navigating by ever since.
Behind the camera is Dan O'Bannon, a writer and director whose name had already become synonymous with a certain strain of irreverent genre filmmaking. O'Bannon had spent years working as a screenwriter before stepping into the director's chair for this one, and the film carries the energy of someone who understood horror conventions well enough to enjoy tearing them apart. The production was partly a British affair, reflecting a mid-80s moment when transatlantic co-productions were a fairly common arrangement for genre pictures working with modest resources. The result has a scrappy, handmade quality to it, polished but unremarkable in technical terms, that suits the material rather well. It is worth noting that 1985 also gave audiences Re-Animator, another horror film from that same year that was busy doing similarly anarchic things with the undead and with medical science generally, which tells you something about the particular mood horror was in at the time.
The cast is largely made up of faces you recognise from the edges of genre films rather than the centre of them, which again suits the film's energy. Clu Gulager and James Karen play the two warehouse workers whose catastrophic incompetence sets everything in motion, and Karen in particular commits to the material with an enthusiasm that tips freely into the absurd. Don Calfa brings a dry, slightly bewildered quality to his role, while Thom Mathews and Miguel A. Núñez Jr. anchor the younger, punk-adjacent contingent of characters who end up spending a memorable evening in a cemetery. Nobody here is doing their finest dramatic work, and the film is not asking them to. For a sense of how horror comedy can go in a very different tonal direction, it is interesting to compare this with Alien Resurrection (1997), another horror film reviewed on this blog, which approaches the genre's relationship with its audience from almost the opposite angle. And if you are curious how comedy films from the 1980s more broadly were using outrageous premises and loose plotting, the Homework review here offers a useful point of comparison for the era's appetite for wilful silliness.
This one’s a wild, wacky, and wonderfully weird ride, less horror, more punk rock zombie party. It’s loud, it’s messy, and it definitely doesn’t take itself seriously… which is both its greatest strength and its biggest flaw. Sure, the plot doesn’t make much sense, the effects are all over the place, and some scenes feel like they were written on napkins between takes, but damn if it isn’t fun. The zombified wisecracks, the punk fashion, the braaaains, it’s all so gloriously unhinged. And let’s be real: without this film, we probably wouldn’t have Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland, or half the horror-comedy genre we know and love today. But while it’s influential, it never quite lands as a fully satisfying movie. It’s more of a vibe than a classic, and sometimes, that’s enough.
For me, that phrase "a vibe rather than a classic" is about as honest a summary as you can give a film like this. I find myself returning to it not because I think it holds together as a piece of storytelling, but because there is something genuinely infectious about the commitment to its own nonsense. The punk aesthetic, the brazen disregard for internal logic, the sense that everyone involved was having a considerably better time than they probably should have been: it all adds up to something I cannot quite dismiss, even when I probably should. If you want to trace a fairly direct line between this film and the horror comedies that followed it, the journey is not a long one. Whether that lineage makes the original essential viewing or simply historically interesting is, I suppose, a question each viewer has to answer for themselves. Sometimes the party is more fun than the morning after.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 1985 | Watched: 2025-07-20
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for The Return of the Living Dead (1985) on YouTube
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from United Kingdom: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Shinjuku Boys (1995) · The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) · Blue (1993)
More from the 1980s: Nightmare City (1980) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Style Wars (1983) · Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers (1980)
More comedy: The Eagle (1925) · The General (1926) · Americana (2023) · The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)
More horror: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Viy (1967) · Nightmare City (1980) · Angst (1983)
