Today’s Mitch Pileggi’s birthday, and in tribute to him we’re starting off our Horror Movie Poster of the Day with Return of the Living Dead Part II. Now Mr. Pileggi has been in a lot of great genre offerings including The X-Files, Sons of Anarchy, and Shocker, but I picked Return of the Living Dead Part II for my own nostalgic interests.
My father used to own a video store back in the ’90s – luckily he got out before it wasn’t profitable anymore (it wasn’t then either) – and I spent a lot of my time there as a kid perusing the horror shelves, studying box art and hoping that sooner or later I’d get to experience the films that I was imagining from their covers. Return of the Living Dead Part II was one that I kept returning to – something about that artwork captured my interest. Years later I would actually get to see the film and love it for the messy zombie film that it was.
The cover artwork employs that “bad cloud in the sky” motif that is notably similar to Fright Night‘s from 1985; however, the idea works here due to the film’s events, in which a cloud of noxious gas seeps out of a local mausoleum and envelopes an entire town. No, it doesn’t cause people to change into ravenous chihuahua dogs as the poster suggests.
Enjoy the artwork and let me know what you thought of the film in the comments!
