The Return of the Living Dead (1985), directed by Dan O'Bannon, Shout! Factory 4k remaster plus original soundtrack, encoded in 10 bit HEVC with AAC sound, including original theatrical stereo with OST, original theatrical dual mono, stereo remaster, 5.1 remaster, four commentary tracks, and English subtitles.

IMDb : https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089907/

Video encoded in two-pass 14.5 Mbps x265 10bit with the veryslow preset for archive quality image. Audio encoded separately with Apple AAC for the highest-quality AAC sound available.

English SDH subtitles converted to VobSub and repositioned. "The zombies speak" subtitles kept as PGS and repositioned, since they use an annoying color scheme.

Note : It's great to be able to re-do one of my very first encodes from more than two years ago, this time in a glorious 4k remaster from Shout! Factory, which brings everything you could want, except the original soundtrack which has more and better songs. Luckily, I was able to grab that off of a German disc. What to say about this film? Maybe the best zombie comedy ever made, (although Braindead is up there), a pitch-perfect punk rock horror comedy which manages to both make fun of punks, and of everything punks hate, including jobs, corporate life, the military, cops, pollution, anti-drug policies, and even nazis. It's hilarious, the practical effects are great, Linnea Quigley is naked a lot, James Karen, Clu Gulager, and Don Calfa are very funny, the soundtrack is great, what's not to like? A perfect Halloween movie.

Foreman Frank is showing new hire Freddy the ropes at the medical supply company, and tells him the story of how Night of the Living Dead was loosely based on a real chemical spill incident, and that barrels with bodies from that incident was shipped to the company by accident. When they go to look at them, Frank accidentally breaches one of the barrels, releasing a gas that knocks them out and reanimates all the dead specimens in the warehouse. As they try to explain this to their boss Burt, a group of punks are driving Freddy's girlfriend to pick him up, and decide to spend some time in the nearby graveyard while they wait. When Burt decides to take care of the problem by burning the reanimated animals and corpses in the crematorium of his neighboring mortician, friend, and possible Nazi war criminal Ernie, they release the gas over the graveyard, with consequences that are not great for them, but a lot of fun for us.

This 4k remaster is quite good, the grain could perhaps have been slightly better managed, but otherwise nothing to complain about, color and contrast is nice and punchy, blacks slighty clipped, but nothing serious. All the sound mixes sound good, but you really want to watch this with the original stereo with the original OST, which has more and better music, as well as some other differences. A plethora of commentary tracks gives you all the information you could possibly want, and the "The zombies speak" subtitles are pretty funny in themselves, translating zombie groans and screams.

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