The Return of the Living Dead (1985) is not really a sequel to Night of the Living Dead, although it makes no bones about using that film for inspiration. Further, it is more a comedy than horror. A young man is working her first night in a medical warehouse that sells cadavers, skeletons, etc. His girlfriend and circle of friends is waiting at the cemetery across the street for him to get off work. The man training him asks if he has seen Night of the Living Dead, then explains that it was a true story, ad the Army accidently shipped the zombies to their warehouse. He takes him to the basement, and they accidently release one. The gas overcomes them, and when they wake up, they are feeling terrible, but are even more concerned that the cadaver in the freezer is alive and trying to break out. They call the owner, admitting what happened, and together, they try to kill the zombie. These are not ordinary movie zombies. First, they are not slow moving. Second, they eat live brains. Third, destroying their brains, or burning them doesn't destroy them.

After cutting their zombie into pieces, and having each piece still alive, they decide to cremate it at the mortuary across the street. The smoke from the cremation mixes with raindrops, reanimating all of the corpses in the cemetery where the teenagers are killing time. By now, the two warehouse employees are really feeling sick, with headaches, muscle aches, and chills, so they call in paramedics. The paramedics find no pulse, no blood pressure, and body temperature the same as room temperature, and the mortician correctly diagnoses the headaches and muscle pain as rigor mortis. The two don't take this news well. Now, the question becomes how to either defeat the zombies, or escape them, but fast, intelligent and indestructible zombies are a formidable opponent.

Linnea Quigley, as one of the teenagers, strips to nothing but leg warmers, then dances and runs around showing bush, buns and breasts for a large portion of the film. IMDB readers have this at 6.3 of 10, and even Ebert liked it at three stars. His was the only top critic entry at Rotten Tomatoes, but the film scored 83% overall. The special effects range from good to excellent, the graphic design is very good, and the acting is not at all bad. With appeal both as horror and comedy, the proper score is C+.

Other crap

• The reviews for Pluto Nash are devastating, as expected. ZERO good reviews. (The release was delayed two years, and the film was not pre-screened for critics, a fairly sure sign of a disaster) Metacritic estimated the damage at 7/100
• American Film Institute's 50 Greatest Screen Legends. DiCaprio misses the cut.
• The Vancouver Sun reports that the top-secret war against Iraq is already under way, with top-secret air bases being built in Kurdish Northern Iraq, and other such top-secret stuff. I have to admit this: if it is under way, it's a lot better secret than I thought.
• Remember that Mel Brooks bit about the two thousand year old man? Now he's 2050. Peter Gammons is propped up long enough to write about the baseball strike.
• EW picks the 100 greatest moments in TV history
• Kind of an interesting article. You Americans have been forced to learn about Lewis and Clark in World History. Their importance is a complete fantasy, like Edison and the Lumieres inventing motion pictures. A historian writes, "If Lewis and Clark had died on the trail, it wouldn't have mattered a bit". His complex argument in a nutshell: they accomplished nothing, were not first at anything, and all their recommendations were wrong.
• the CIA's web page discusses their role in hiding UFO investigations. No, that doesn't mean there actually are UFO's, but it does mean that the CIA was interested at one time, and did keep its interest a secret.
• Coke and Pepsi get in trouble for painting the Himalayas
• I happened to run into Hunter Thompson's obituary for Richard Nixon, and I had to type up some excerpts. When Nixon died, all the people in power made a grand hypocritical show of praising him, Clinton included. Of course, Clinton was just exercising self-preservation. It wasn't in his interest to start ripping on disgraced ex-Presidents, since he was about to become one. Hunter didn't allow death to distort reality, and said the same things he would have said the day before Nixon died.

Here are the latest movie reviews available at scoopy.com.

• The yellow asterisks indicate that I wrote the review, and am deluded into thinking it includes humor.
• If there is a white asterisk, it means that there isn't any significant humor, but I inexplicably determined there might be something else of interest.
• A blue asterisk indicates the review is written by Tuna (or Lawdog or Junior or C2000 or Realist or ICMS or Mick Locke, or somebody else besides me)
• If there is no asterisk, I wrote it, but am too ashamed to admit it.