Headscratchers / The Return of the Living Dead

• Why didn't they call the number on the tanks as soon as they received them? What were they holding onto them for?
  • The barrels were sent to various locations as part of a coverup, so no one can find out what happened. Presumably part of this was the government ordering the owners of the various locations to not ask questions, not mess with the barrels, and just pretend they aren't even there. Out of sight, out of mind.
    • That just raises more questions. If the government didn't want anyone asking questions and, more importantly, didn't want another zombie outbreak, why didn't they just bury the tanks in the desert next to those E.T. cartridges? Sure, there's a possibility of them still leaking, but it would still be a helluva lot safer than in the hands of some random mortuary.
    • Bert does mention a "screw up", so its possible the medical supply depot got them by accident. As for why they didn't bury them, its because, as is usual in horror and scifi films, the government is run by idiots.
    • That's exactly what happened. When Frank is telling Freddy the story of the cannisters in the beginning, he says that "the orders got crossed" and the tanks got sent to the warehouse by mistake. They were never supposed to have them, and Frank (and later Bert) initially didn't want to call the Army because they were afraid they'd be criminally indicted for not turning the tanks in.
    • "I'm the government, I'm the government, I'm the reason nothing works!"
• Why didn't Tina make another escape attempt while Tarman was busy pulling the winch? That was the perfect time to jump out and run upstairs. He's much too slow and was at a far enough distance to where he couldn't grab her.
  • Tina was hiding in a closet and couldn't make out how far away he was, only that he was somehow trying to open the door. Plus she was panicking and not in a state of mind to think clearly.
• Speaking of Tarman, what sense did it make for him to stay in the basement for so long? The door was left open, he could've made his way upstairs and wandered outside in search of brains. Do you think he purposely stayed hidden in case someone came or was he genuinely unsure of what to do and Tina's arrival simply sparked his hunger? Remember Burt was a fresh brain, but the yellow cadaver knew what to do.
  • Either being trapped inside a 3' x 4' barrel for decades has made him extremely stiff and he needed time to stretch, or he's just kinda lazy.
  • Tarman might've learned from experience, from his years stuck in the tank, that not moving around excessively hurts less than shambling about. He might've found a quiet spot to sit down in, since Frank and Freddy were already dead and not worth bothering with.
• Why is the taxidermied dog Frank and Freddy come across not out for brains like literally everything else that ate meat when alive? Instead, it pants and wags it tail and even whines, generally behaving like an ordinary dog. I'm not complaining, the split dog is kind of cute in a super morbid way, it just struck me as odd that it acted vastly different from every zombie we see after it.
  • Its body was probably wired in place on its display stand. It couldn't bend its neck enough to snap at the people, even if it wanted to. Panting and tail-wagging in dogs are actually signs of stress and uncertainty.
  • Why would it react in any different fashion than it did with Frank and Freddy?
• Why did the medical supply warehouse have a pickaxe on hand? A fire axe is easily understood, but a pickaxe?
  • The warehouse might've served other purposes in the past, or been renovated years ago with tools that were tossed in a back room and forgotten about.
• When Burt and Spider are fleeing the zombies, Burt mentions needing to get to a phone to call the police for help, but they're in a police car. Why not use the radio?
• How did the police car exploding once Burt and Spider make it to Uneeda also wipe out Frank and Burt's cars? Granted, the keys to Frank's car were likely still in his pocket when he climbed into the crematorium oven and the numerous brain-hungry, determined zombies meant breaking in and hotwiring it were not possible, but Burt's car is never shown getting destroyed.
• Also, how did the police car catch fire in the first place? I understand it was a nod to Ben's pick-up blowing up in Night of the Living Dead and trapping the people at the farmhouse, but that movie established on-camera how the truck caught fire and went boom. Here, Burt and Spider pull up outside Uneeda and suddenly there's a fire.
• When Burt and Spider come across a crowd of Zombies, why not just plow through them? I get that hitting a person with a car at that speed could damage the vehicle, but these are undead corpses that have been decaying and rotting for decades, some of them for over a century. Wouldn't a car just rip through most of them like they were nothing?
  • They couldn't take the chance of that not working and leaving them stranded in place. Plus they might've gotten thrown through the windshield since they weren't buckled up.
• So the US military put the zombies in the canisters because they couldn't figure out how to kill them. Okay, but how did they get them inside the canisters in the first place? For that matter, why are they unconscious when we first see them?
• Why did the police officer with the moustache who gets killed by the zombies, then helps them ambush the other officers, reanimate? The film makes it pretty clear that you don't become a zombie unless you get a heavy dose of Trioxin (while you're living or dead), and the cop didn't inhale any and arrived after it had mostly stopped raining, so he should have stayed dead like all the zombie's other victims (save Trash, but she was doused in Trioxin-infused water while naked.)