Most critics like it, and the praise lands on the comedy. The reviews describe a fast, gleeful film that breaks the usual zombie rules and enjoys doing so, with the humour, the gore and the lively performances coming up again and again. Several single out the dialogue and the punkish, anything-goes spirit, and the more recent write-ups treat it as a comedy-horror that has lasted well.
The reservations are about brains rather than entrails. Time Out finds the film fun and bloody but short on ideas, and Variety, writing at the time, thinks the opening is funny before a threadbare production and a familiar story let it down, though it credits James Karen’s goofball turn with much of the early comedy. Even an admirer at Empire admits uneven patches. The spread is fairly narrow: nobody dislikes it, the older reviews are cooler than the newer ones, and the one New York Times notice could not be read.