It’s a zombie, speaking on an ambulance’s radio to the hospital, after eating the ambulance’s crew.
Also: ‘Send more cops.’
It’s from the O’Bannon/Russo ones that came after that. In the original, they didn’t speak.
It should be noted, at this point, that despite Russo’s original intent, the Return of the Living Dead movies do not serve as sequels to Night of the Living Dead, as they are incompatible out of the gate (I don’t know how much of that has to do with Russo, how much with O’Bannon).
While both Russo and Romero’s actual sequels to Night included intelligent zombies, in both cases the intelligence was fairly rudimentary, and in Romero’s case, both an in-universe recent change (first appears in Land of the Dead, the final movie of the series - also, IIRC, the first time he had anyone use the word ‘zombie’ in one of his), and not actually related to the living intelligence of the people the zombies used to be.
Well, even in Night of the Living Dead the zombies use tools (the trowel, for example) which was surprising to me, as I’m only familiar with the most modern of zombie fiction.
Agreed with Zsofia, the seeds of intelligence were always there and it only got more pronounced as Romero decided that was the part of the universe that was most interesting to him (and the endless repitition of “humans are the true monsters!”). It’s probably why I prefer the Dawn remake to the original. No hacky social commentary and the acknowledgement that flesh-eating zombies can never be less evil than a jerky human.
Oh, you wanted the story in the scene. A group of zombies have attacked an ambulance and are eating the paramedics inside. One of them grabs the still-working CB radio and says this line to dispatch.
Intelligence was always there in varying degrees. In Dawn, for example, there’s the zombified Stephen “remembers” the fake wall and leads a group of zombies to the hideout. In Day, “Bub” the zombie uses a phone and appears to act docile at times. In Land, “Big Daddy” leads a group of zombies into the compound and learns how to use a gun.
However, speaking has always been the difference between Romero zombies and Russo/O’Bannon zombies. Also, the source has never been isolated, Romero films, while Russo/O’Bannon has developed the idea of a government experiment gone bad.
snipping mine
The word zombie is used in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead at least once.