The Return of the Living Dead

Any film which features a dead, bald and very hungry punk lurching towards the camera screaming 'More Brains!' gets my vote. Directed by O'Bannon courtesy of George Romero, this is an energetic cross-referencing of genre: not just a horror movie, but a comic apocalyptic zombie horror movie. O'Bannon has his cake, eats it, and then throws it up in the face of the audience. Warehousemen unwittingly release a zombie interred by the CIA (of course) along with a nifty gas which ensures that local graveyards are bursting at the seams with brain-peckish corpses. Most of the film froths and bubbles merrily: there is a deeply artistic sequence where a punkette dances naked on a tombstone before being transformed into a zombie, and another moving bit where para-meds get their heads munched. Finally, however, O'Bannon runs short on the bad taste gags. Matters conclude, anti-climactically, with the death of civilised life as we know it.