Day 9: Return of the Living Dead with Funhouse

I learned something Tuesday. Greg Proops is funny! I live a sheltered life when it comes to TV. Hell how can I watch TV when I am practically living inside movie theaters.  My diet lately has been Milk Duds, Popcorn, and CocaCola.  When I am not inside the friendly confines of one of my local cinemas I am watching films at home. I don't even have cable. Hell, I don't even have a TV antennae! The only TV I watch is downloaded episodes of Breaking Bad or the occasional stream from Netflix. I almost never watch TV. Point is I never had the chance to be introduced to Greg Proops. The man is witty.

Greg Proops did a live podcast  at the Cinefamily Tuesday night before the screening of Return of the Living Dead. He does the podcast, then they screen the film, then he follows that up with live questions from the audience. Basically he's showing films he loves and then talks about them. No worries, he does I love that when it came up that he had not seen Saun of the Living Dead and the audience moaned, he proceeded to cut the audience down for a solid 4 minutes or so. Just cut into them with joke and jab after jab. It was amusing and very funny. So witty!

Return of the Living Dead is the punk rock comedy version of Night of the Living Dead. You got a new wave art school kid, an 80's leather and chain clad punk, a freaky new wave girl, a Rick James look-alike, and even a wholesome girl next door. Then there's Freddy who works at a local medical supply warehouse. I like to think of Freddy as a rock-a-billy kid although he doesn't really wear the attire because he's at work. He just feels like if he were in street clothes he would be 50's greaser sorta punk.  

The main course though is Burt (Clu Gulager) the owner of the warehouse, and Frank (James Karen) and Freddy (Thom Mathews) who work at Burt's warehouse. With a fun performance too from Don Calfa as a mortuary attendant. Dan Obannon (Dead and Buried) shows up again in the series, this time as the writer director. 

In a supporting role, Linnea Quigley would forever seal her label as scream queen with her performance as the punk rock new wave chick, Trash. She spends half the movie naked, not just topless, but fully nude. As she sheds her clothes in the graveyard, apparently turned on by death, one of the punk rock posse comments, "There she goes again!" Like I guess she routinely strips nude. She stands on a grave and dances. 

The thing that makes this zombie movie different than all the others before it, is the zombies in this film are smart. As Greg Proops points out, they even understand the concept of pulley and fulcrum! They understand the concept of surprise. Plus they can't be killed. You chop the head off and they keep coming. You know the world is doomed. How the hell can you beat that!

Next up was Tobe Hooper's funhouse. This is part of the Video Nasties series. Yes, Funhouse was banned in Brittain! A movie produced by Universal Pictures was found to be deplorable by England standards and banned. Again, it seems surprising that they would ban this. It is pretty sleazy, but enough to be banned from an entire country….

Believe it or not, I saw this when I was 10 years old in the theater. I went with my older cousins. I guess in the midwest in the 80's the theater chains really didn't police R rated films. If you had the money, the didn't care. Man! It has nudity, violence, gore, definitely not appropriate for a 10  year old. This made me think, how old was I when I first started watching horror films. It was long before this. I remember seeing Carrie on Showtime when I was a kid….so that must have been when I was around 8 or 9. I saw The Shining at the Drive-In when I was 9. My interest started with films like King Kong, Godzilla, Dracula, Wolfman, and TV shows of Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents when I was probably about 6 or 7. I guess I quickly graduated to full blown nudity and blood spilling by the time I was 8. No wonder I am so fucked up!

Anyway, Funhouse has a soft spot in my heart. I still think it stands as creepy even by today's standards. Tobe Hooper was the man in the late 70's and early 80's. Not sure what happened to him.