Like ROLLING THUNDER and FIRST BLOOD, but before both of them, this is a genre movie about what happens to soldiers when they come home. Andy is a soldier who dies in Vietnam (well, they never actually say it’s Vietnam). And his family gets a letter and they cry and they deny it and his mom says it’s a lie and wishes it wasn’t true and sure enough that night they find him downstairs, back from the dead.
Even though he’s a zombie, he’s also a metaphor for people who survive war. They come back changed and nobody knows what to do to help them. Andy doesn’t get his hand in a garbage disposal like in ROLLING THUNDER, he doesn’t get bullied by the sherriff for being a longhair like in FIRST BLOOD, he doesn’t get spit on by protesters like in the urban legends. On the surface people treat him real good, like a great hero, but they just don’t understand him. They don’t even try.
At first the family thinks it’s a miracle, the state department made a mistake. But it’s immediately clear that their son has come back different. He barely talks, he stares off into nothingness, he smiles worse than Dick Cheney, he strangles a dog in front of a bunch of little kids. Also he’s been going around killing people, draining their blood and shooting it up (a little vietnam drug reference for you there). And then he starts to rot. Andy never had maggots crawling out of him before Vietnam.
But nobody seems to notice that Andy is different, or at least they don’t want to admit it. They welcome him home and ask him questions and then answer them for themselves and don’t notice that he’s not talking to them and maybe not listening. They tell him anecdotes about world war 2 and act like they’re his buddy and don’t notice that they aren’t connecting with him on any level, or that he literally doesn’t have a soul. Or a pulse either. (more…)
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