Thursday, March 22, 2018

Errorvision - Highlighting The Goofs in Return of the Living Dead

Recently I somehow ended up on the Goofs page on the IMDB entry for Return of the Living Dead. It's a favorite that I've owned since I was around 7 or 8 years old, so I've seen this movie realistically probably around 30 times, but I was amazed by how many of these goofs I had never caught before. I had spotted a couple over the years, but there are like 25 things on that list. So, I thought it would be an interesting experiment to watch the movie for the 31st time while completely ignoring the important things like story, characters, and dialogue and just focus on the background trying to spot as many mistakes as I could.

Sure, you can just go on the IMDb and look at the list of the mistakes, but I thought it would be fun to go through and actually provide some visual evidence using the high-tech tools at my disposal; VLC Media Player and Microsoft Paint. I actually enjoyed grabbing these screenshots writing this post, so look for more of these sometime soon. Feel free to comment if you know of any other movies with an epic amount of mistakes that I could feature in the future.

Onto the goofs.

Like this scene in the embalming room with Ernie and Spider are discussing an escape plan—wait...who in the fuck is the guy ducking under the table?


Speaking of people who aren't in the movie appearing in the movie, where did this guy come from? 


This happens very quickly, which is why this screenshot looks so blurry, but in motion you can tell it's someone from the crew and not Don Calfa, Beverly Randolph or a bearded zombie. He slides that window open and closes it two times immediately after Clu Gulager gets out of the door. Who is this guy and why did he think peeking out of a window during filming was a good idea? That guy, if you're out there, can you explain what happened?

How about this scene where Frank and Freddy hold down a reanimated corpse with their 5 hands. I thought maybe one of these hands might've belonged to the yellow dude, but the way the hands are positioned (and the fact that none of them are yellow) it seems unlikely:



Then there's this shot of the Tarman just before eating Suicide's brains. (I don't think you'd call it "brains" when you're referring to a single person's brain, but who am I to correct a zombie's grammar?) It's a little-known fact that zombies are actually born with an extra set of teeth:



After Spider and Burt break through the cemetery gates and run into the undead roadblock Miguel Núñez, Jr., who is sitting in the passenger seat, turns from a black guy into two white guys with a camera and sound equipment:



There are several more mistakes to be found, but these were the most visually interesting. Most of them are more minor things like Clu Gulager's character name appearing onscreen as both Bert and Burt, strings attached to puppets, decades-old zombies with perfectly intact eyeballs, or things that you'd need to see in motion like when the cardboard falls on Scuz's corpse, then disappears in the next shot.


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