Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Return of the Living Dead!

Theme: Zombie Zoo - Tom Petty

FUN FACT: anyone is allowed to make a sequel to Night of the Living Dead (1968), because it's in the public domain because someone cropped the copyright symbol off a poster or something, further reminding us that copyright is fake and gay (it's also the reason you see it playing on TVs in other low-budget movies a bunch).

Me relating the above to my enraptured date.

We also have this fact to thank for the sole worthwhile zombie movie, Return of the Living Dead. If you're an extraterrestrial who just touched down on Earth five minutes ago and have no context whatsoever (and I know you are), let me put it this way: the most interesting thing fans have to discuss regarding this "genre" of "films" is whether zombies should walk slow or run fast.

Allow me to weigh in.

Return provides the only correct answer: they should lurch around like the iconic Tarman, swarm on cops and paramedics, and say "brains" a lot. Yes, this is the kino in which the zombies actually say "brains". Return's zombies even have such a thing as motivation:

The plot is that a chemical leak results in an outbreak of zombies, who attack a group of delinquents hanging out in a cemetery, while the hapless working stiffs who unwittingly caused it run around trying to fix it, in the process making everything worse for our unsuspecting band of wastrels.

>tfw no friends who cruise around and hang out in cemeteries (or otherwise)

Return further benefits from being made in the 1980s, when people dressed like this and listened to punk and new wave music, so it looks and sounds interesting and characterful, instead of everyone just looking vaguely grizzled. Our cast of characters have names like "Suicide" and "Trash", the latter played by C- or D-movie staple Linnea Quigley in her most indelible role:

You can just start a conversation like this.

So pleased is Return with itself that it replays a highlights reel over its end credits, and so good is it that this comes off as warranted and even endearing instead of douchey. Can YOU think of any other movies that could pull this off? I know I can't be bothered to.

It's not as though there's any deficit of highlights.

So if you too have no other loser friends to go hang out with at the cemetery, ring in All Hallows' Eve with the closest approximation. ♫ DO YOU WANNA PARTY? IT'S PARTY TIME

Greatest Album of All Time of the Week: We're Outta Here!

Theme: R.A.M.O.N.E.S - Ramones ft. Lemmy (the narrator from Tromeo & Juliet)

Actual punks pass righteous judgement on the posersphere.

The first Ramones album I ever heard was the live album of their final show. When I went back and heard their OG studio recordings, they seemed way too slow. This is because the Ramones kept playing faster as they went along, with the result that by the end they less resembled that orangutan trying to hammer nails in that one video you've all seen and more resembled Travis the chimp on the fateful day of his gamer uprising.

This is because Johnny, the reactionary chud who invented the punk guitar style*, also forced the band to wear their signature uniform leather jackets and bent his efforts toward endlessly refining and perfecting the sound now most ripped off in all pop music history. I know it's fashionable to pretend prog was actually gr8 and punk ruined everything, but you're wrong on that, and the posers who immediately co-opted punk are right: two-minute songs that sound like Dennis Hopper wilding on that log with a chainsaw are the Platonic form of rock, and everything good about prog found its correct expression in the metal of Crimson Glory, Queensrÿche and Megadeth.

But as much as the sound saved rock from disappearing up its ass completely, it would never have transcended gimmickry without the songwriting, which is funnier than any imitator to this day. The greatest lyric ever written isn't "Scaramouche, can you do the fandango" (???) or "I'll see you on the dark side of the moon"; it's "now I guess I'll have to tell 'em/that I got no cerebellum" from DDT abuse PSA "Teenage Lobotomy". A thousand monkeys on typewriters would replicate the works of Shakeƒpeare twenty times before they'd write something that good. Likewise, "Cretin Hop" consigns your attempts and mine at political incorrectness to the tryhard penalty box of shame. But it's not just the household-name hits that are on parade here: hardcore dabble "Wart Hog" makes the cut along with "The Crusher" from Dee Dee's epochally bizarre rap album. The most inexplicable choice is to end the set (and their career as a band) with a cover of "Any Way You Want It", but it wouldn't be the Ramones if they didn't throw a questionable curveball at the moment least expected.

It is a testament to their singularity that the most ripped-off band in history's like will somehow simultaneously never be beheld again on Earth. Everyone gets one time-machine gig to attend, and this one would be mine, after I was done giving thalidomide to famous boxers' mothers and planting a rotary telephone in Ötzi the ice man's cave.

*We will entertain no hipster ackshyouwallys of any kind.

Greatest Album of All Time of the Week: Static Age!

Theme: The Monster Mash - Bobby "Boris" Pickett

The hairstyle came later.

The Misfits might have been through any number of lineup, sound and image changes over time, but I don't care about any of that; they got it right the first time. Static Age was cut in 1978 in a handful of takes but never released until 1997 (though most of the songs were re-recorded for the inferior Legacy of Brutality), in a decision as inexplicable as any in the lengthy history of popular music, since it was first recorded at the height of the punk rock phenomenon and contained most of the band's most sledgehammer of bangers, including catchy jingle "Last Caress" and the last word in B-movie tributes "Return of the Fly".

This historic blunder could have easily served to strangle the nascent institution in its crib, since debut mark 2 Walk Among Us, while containing some fine songs, sounds like it was recorded in about eight different locations on variously archaic machinery, which is endearingly chaotic but distracting even to my utterly inexpert ear. It's a wonder the band caught on at all, for which we can only thank Danzig's underrated songcraft and some canny image-crafting over time. Misfits tees are fourth only to Nirvana, Iron Maiden and the Ramones in the is-it-a-band-or-a-brand sweepstakes, but, like the Ramones and Maiden, it doesn't matter because cool is cool (Nirvana is not cool; MTV lied to you).

The OG Misfits have aged better than any of their punk contemporaries because their music is principally about B horror flicks and being edgy bois, as opposed to laundering your teachers' ideology through a veneer of rebellion, which became the purview of the genre retrospectively and then increasingly intentionally as the years wore on. Even admirably ill-meaning edgelords of yore like Fear and the Anti Nowhere League would drop the odd cringe boomerism like "fuck religion" or "we don't care if you're black or white", which can only give any self-respecting thoughtcriminal of today what wahmen call "the ick". No such reflexive cucking can be found in laugh-out-loud wifebeatercore like "Attitude". Sure, "Come Back" drags on too long and sounds like Danzig trying to ape Jim Morrison, but if that's the worst thing I can say about a record, it's a keeper.