Zombies Meet the '80s
"Scientists predicted a light show unparalleled for sixty-five million years. Not in fact since the dinosaurs
disappeared... Reggie and Samantha surface the day
after the comet. They appear to be the only people still alive. Except for a number of zombies."
(Night of the Comet, 1984)
The '80s is the only decade in which you'll hear references to zombie dinosaurs.
Also, zombie intelligence shot up to an amazing extent in the '80s, as it is the first decade in which
zombies develop space technology, piloting spaceships and the like. I guess someone had to
be smart in the '80s.
|
Movie:
|
Night of the Comet (1984)
|
|
Who Becomes a Zombie:
|
Dinosaurs (awesome). Apparently, the dinosaurs died out when zombie dinosaurs decimated the
rest of the reptiles of the age. Now, the insatiable force which made the world undead back then
has returned, and is apparently Haley's Comet, which hasn't been seen since the age of the dinosaurs (huh?).
Earth passes through the comet's tail,
any Los Angeles valley teen who isn't having sex in a theater at the time, or isn't burnt to a fiery crisp
by the comet's ice trail, or isn't Robert Beltran of Star Trek, is now a zombie.
|
|
How to Survive:
|
If you see the Loch Ness Monster, don't let him bite you.
Also, stay in the light and Vidal Sassoon's good graces. Know zombies by their conservative hair and
the fact that they wear sunglasses.
You see that picture below? That's not a zombie standing in the light. That's HAIR. That's like
Whitesnake in the zombie apocalypse or something. And our only hope.
|
Also in this decade was Day of the Dead (1985), which was yet another sequel to Romero's Night
of the Living Dead. Same premise and zombie parameters as the other "of the Dead" films, although
there's a zombie named "Bob" in this one who shoots a gun at an early version of Stephen Dorff. Let's
move on to more groundbreaking zombies than that.
|
Movie:
|
Night of the Creeps (1986)
|
|
Who Becomes a Zombie:
|
Anyone who lets the giant space slugs from the mothership crawl into their mouth becomes a zombie.
That's also the greatest sentence we could've hoped to write in this feature, so we thank the movie
and the '80s for making that possible.
The space slugs, which are a fugitive alien experiment, crawl into your mouth and incubate
from the warmth in your brain, even if you're a cold dead corpse (*magic!*), and take control of your
now-zombie body
while multiplying in your head. Then it makes you ring doorbells and take women on dates for the
whole movie, because space
slug fugitives are apparently just as hard up as earth prisoners are.
|
|
Who Will Save Us:
|
European Vacation's Rusty Griswold himself, Jason Lively, is smart enough to
figure all of
this out when his roommate (shrug) leaves him an audio cassette message explaining it all in detail with a
"Play Me" sign over the cassette. This is the movie's way of making us realize that
Lively is the only one clever enough to unravel this mystery. So when the zombies attack him,
he locks himself in a small wooden shed with
a flamethrower until his prom date helps him kill the zombies. It was just an easier time to be a hero then.
|
That's the zombie's mothership above, hovering over a graveyard, waiting to beam up the slug pilots below. Yep.
|
|
