The Return of the Living Dead

Year: 1985
Director: Dan O'Bannon
Writer: Ban O'Bannon, Rudy Ricci
Genre: Horror: Zombies

I've circled around this film for years without ever giving it a chance. For some reason, despite growing up loving zombie films I felt I couldn't watch this one. It seemed like it was going to tapdance on the tomb of the more "serious" zombie movies I'd seen. I never really wanted to see my favorite films made a mockery of. But then Shaun of the Dead, Dance of the Dead, and Zombieland came out and made me change my thought process. Now, films like Dead Alive are the ones I'm madly in love with. Still, I couldn't get over my silly fear of watching this film until recently.

Having finally watched the film I can tell you it's a great time. The start of the story is with a guy who's just taken up a job and is learning the ropes. The job is one of supplying medical schools with various dead things from the warehouse as well as other teaching implements. The story goes that deep in the basement of the warehouse are old dead bodies that had come to life due to some crazy military experimentation (something like that anyway). Stupidly, the man showing the new guy around smacks a dead body bin, the toxic fumes escape, and well I'm sure you can guess that something happens. Oh, and did I mention that this building is right across the street from a graveyard? Yep.

I really like the humor in this film. It's a lot sharper than one might expect from an 80s film and for that I applaud it. It also takes a keen eye to have put together a more lighthearted zombie film when there weren't many on the market currently. Night of the Creeps came out a year later. Either way, it's a fun way to turn the genre on its head and it still manages to keep you on the edge of your seat at times.

The zombies looked great, the cast became their characters, the jokes were perfect, and there's even a naked Linnea Quigley running around for about half the movie. Poor Linnea... I think her role in this film is what pushed her into B-horror semi-stardom. The tagline for this film is "they're back from the grave and ready to party!" which basically sums it up perfectly.

Retro Puppet Master

Year: 1999
Director: David DeCoteau
Writer: Charles Band, Benjamin Carr
Genre: Horror: Evil Dolls

After the last film, I was expecting this to be Puppet Master 6.5 or something. However, instead of picking up on the obvious cliffhanger of the last film it went in a totally different direction. This version takes us further back to Andre's story. Instead of being in Nazi Germany though this is back when he was a young man and was learning about the puppets from someone else.

Whoever the teacher was he of course got the secrets in Egypt and taught them to his one apprentice - Andre. Back at this point the puppets were different too, although they were mostly analogous to the ones in the rest of the series. What I'm curious about is what happened to these original puppets because they were never shown getting completely destroyed or anything. Unless I was too busy eating my sandwich when it happened.

So anyway, somehow they once again managed to make a Puppet Master movie interesting. In a way, it feels like an Indiana Jones adventure which is pretty awesome considering the goofy subject matter. In fact, it is right up there as one of my favorites of the series. For the 7th film in a series to do that is excellent indeed. I can only expect though that the rest of the films are not nearly as exciting.

There's not much I can say about the movie otherwise... The set pieces and outfits were nice. The acting was a little stilted and funny in the beginning but after a while it goes away. I kind of wish the puppets were more active, but it was also nice to see the story play out with more human interaction.