By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Horror comedy is the pineapple on pizza of film…that is, some people don’t think they go together, but these tastes (both in cinema and in slices) make for a perfect pair. Unfortunately, horror comedies often fall flat because they lean too far in either direction, resulting in films that are either scary without being very funny or silly without being very spooky. Fortunately, one film got the ratio right decades ago and you can now watch it for free: Return of the Living Dead, a zombie classic now streaming on Tubi.
Return Of The Living Dead On Tubi
If you’ve never seen it, you should know that Return of the Living Dead has a hilariously thin plot, even by the standards of Tubi horror movies. This film follows the misadventures of a mob of movie misfits dealing with zombies who have been transformed into monsters by toxic gas. As the walking dead increase in number, it becomes a race against time for our protagonists to save the day before they get bitten and become the very monsters they are struggling to fight.
While Return of the Living Dead doesn’t have that much of a plot, it certainly has a better cast than you usually see from Tubi’s eclectic collection of horror. For example, the film stars Clu Gulager (best known to horror fans for starring in A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge) and Thom Matthews (best known for playing Tommy Jarvis in Friday the 13th: Part VI). It also stars beloved scream queen Linnea Quigley, an icon known for starring in films like Night of the Demons, Silent Night, Deadly Night, and Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama.
Fortunately for Orion Pictures and director Dan O’Bannon (who wrote Alien and worked on genre classics ranging from Star Wars: A New Hope to Total Recall), Return of the Living Dead was a major box office success decades before Tubi was even a twinkle in an executive’s eye. The film went on to earn $14.2 million against a budget of $3-$4 million. This modest profit was enough to greenlight a sequel, and the franchise now includes five films, with a reboot slated for release later this year.
Incredibly, Return of the Living Dead even managed to impress critics like Roger Ebert who are historically unimpressed with the horror genre. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a critical rating of 91 percent. In general, critics lauded the film for its fresh, punk-centric take on zombie films as well as its balance of humor and horror.
Plus, if you’re a horror fan who hasn’t seen it, you should check out Return of the Living Dead on Tubi so you can appreciate all the cheesy moments that have made it a genre classic. For example, the film is full of crazy dialogue like “Trash is taking off her clothes again,” a line that precedes Linnea Quigley stripping down in a graveyard. Just think of this as one of those movies that perfectly embodies Joe Bob Briggs’ standards of drive-in horror cinema due to its delicious combo of blood, breasts, and beasts.
Additionally, Return of the Living Dead has its roots in some slightly complicated horror history. The name is similar to Night of the Living Dead because the story loosely adapts a novel of the same name written by John Russo, who co-wrote the aforementioned George Romero classic and retained the rights to make films with the term “Living Dead” in them. Fortunately, Dan O’Bannon only agreed to direct the film if he could dramatically rewrite it, which is why the story feels fresh and daring rather than feeling like a Romero retreat.
Will you find Return of the Living Dead the perfect horror comedy as I did, or is this one film you’d rather toss back into the graveyard (next to Trash’s clothes, naturally)? You won’t know until you stream it for yourself. By the time the credits roll, you’ll be wondering why more directors don’t follow in Dan O’Bannon’s steps and do something fresh with zombie cinema, a genre that has been just as rotten and decayed as its monsters for years.
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