Zombies run in this film, and they are fucking awesome.
Okay, with that out of the way, I know how some people feel about Shaun of the Dead, and while it took me a few viewings, I did come around to thinking it was great as well, but I still prefer Return of the Living Dead.
O'Bannon's technique is not as developed as Wright's, and the characters are perhaps not as across the board likeable or relatable or whatever as the people in SOTD, but that's mainly because O'Bannon is toying with caricature "You think this is a fucking costume!? This is a way of life!" and because this film is leaner and meaner and all about jumping right into the shit. However, the thing that I noticed the most when I rewatched it last night, is that it tracks as a really disturbing and cruelly funny document of O'Bannon's lost battle with Crohn's disease.
The amount of references to pain and physical deterioration and deformation are numerous. The fact that O'Bannon's zombies can articulate their feelings on being undead, is perhaps the masterstroke of the script. They think, they talk, and more importantly, they feel. They know they're dead and they can't do anything about that, they just want to "make the pain go away". That's a very ghoulish take on his own situation, and one that I suspect was therapeutic, or at least done with the aim of being therapeutic.
In a way, it's more honest than Cronenberg's The Fly, because by his own admission, at that time in his life (when he was young and healthy), Cronenberg was only imagining the experience, imagining how he or someone else would experience and document their own deterioration. O'Bannon is actually the guy who did it, and put it up on screen in the form of a long, wild, grotesque gag. I especially like how he deals with the character of Trash, a young woman (and I think it's key that she's young and sexy) who naively fantasizes about death, and dances naked in a graveyard and all that, but flips her shit when it really comes calling. I think that's O'Bannon telling the youthful target audience that no, you really don't get it.
And then we have the ending, which is similar to Night of the Living Dead's ending, but with my view of the film, perhaps recontextualized as a somewhat more personal statement, though the political satire is still very much a part of it all.
That's all me, I could be wrong.
