a warehouse owner, his two employees, a mortician friend, and a group of teenage punks deal with the accidental release of a horde of brain-hungry zombies onto louisville, kentucky. the gas that reanimates the dead, trioxin, was stored in military drums that landed in a medical supply basement by mistake. when foreman frank tries to impress new employee freddy by showing him the drums, he cracks one open and the nightmare begins.
the film does several things no other zombie film had done. it introduced the idea that zombies specifically eat brains, not just any human flesh. it gave the undead a voice: one captured zombie explains that eating brains relieves the pain of being dead, that she can feel herself rotting. the zombies are unkillable by conventional means. dismember a body and every piece keeps moving. burn one and the smoke carries trioxin into the clouds, where it rains back down and reanimates an entire cemetery.
it is also the definitive punk rock horror film. the teenage characters are not jocks or camp counselors. they are gutter punks with mohawks, studded collars, and razor blade necklaces. the soundtrack pulls from the los angeles deathrock and punk scene of 1985. the film treats its punks with more affection than most horror films treat any teenagers.
dan o’bannon, who wrote alien and dark star, made his directorial debut here. the film understands that horror and comedy are the same thing: timing, escalation, the sudden release of tension. one minute a paramedic is checking a pulse, the next minute a dozen zombies are tearing him apart while the survivors barricade a mortuary. the shift never feels cheap because the film earns every scare with a joke and every joke with a scare.
the ending is genuinely bleak. after the military nukes louisville to contain the outbreak, toxic rain begins falling again over a wider area. zombies scream from their graves. the cycle starts over, bigger. for a film with a talking half-corpse and a nude punk dancing on a gravestone, it lands on a note of real dread.
criterion 4: the first film where zombies eat brains, talk, and feel pain. every modern fast zombie owes something to the tar man.
image: tmdb still, pre-brightened 1.90, baked factor 0.45, output brightness 19.9