DVD Review: Return of the Living Dead 3 & 4

As usual, when The Other Half is away, if there are no pressing tasks or errands, I watch horror movies. I could use The Walking Dead, AMC's new hit zombie reason as an excuse, but the truth is, I just love them.  A couple of weeks ago, I found a zombie 4-pack DVD in a bargain bin for $5. If you do the math, that's just $1.25 per flick!  It didn't matter how trashy they were,  at that price, who cares?

Image from Wikipedia

The set includes Dead and Gone and Boy Eats Girl (I kid you not), but I elected to watch the two quasi-sequels to the two quasi-sequels to George Romero's Night of the Living Dead.  Back in the early 80s, Dan O'Bannon, one of the original guys behind Night decided to make a sequel.  Unfortunately, Romero was making his own, and Day of the Dead--itself a follow-up to Romero's Dawn of the Dead--was released the same year.  So, while Day wasn't a smashing success, it was considered the "official" sequel.  That left Return of the Living Dead to always be considered "unofficial."

It's just as well, because Return was rewritten to include a healthy amount of campy humor, rendering the finished product very different in tone from Night. Still, it was very entertaining, fairly successful, and started a chain of sequels of its own.  Thus, the awkwardly titled Return of the Living Dead, Part II followed.  Part II was confusing, using two of the stars of the first installment in different roles. But it did well enough to lead to a few more belated sequels.

Return of the Living Dead 3 (or III if you prefer) came out in 1993, and was wholly different from the zombie films of Romero.  As in the previous two installments, the dead were reanimated by a toxin known as Trioxin gas.  Once exposed, the corpses would rise, and--new to the genre--would screech, "BRAINS!!!"  And they meant it too, eating brains right through the skull as if chomping on an apple.  Part 3 lacks a lot of the humor of the first two, but the tone is definitely lighter, and not as serious as Romero's films. For one thing, all of the dead are not rising all over the world, so the horror of Armageddon isn't present.  Also, in the Return series, living people who are exposed to Trioxin manage to hold on to their humanity for a while, as they are zombified.

In Part 3, this is taken to absurd lengths, with the lead actor's girlfriend dying early. He foolishly reanimates her, and she spends the rest of the picture fighting the urge to chomp on his noggin.  She finds that pain helps fend of the hunger, so she cuts, pierces and otherwise mutilates herself.  Luckily, she's got an eye for fashion, and so her body modifications just make her look like an extreme punk rocker.  The film is okay as these things go, very nineties, very lightweight.  Only Kent McCord is around as a name actor, but most acquit themselves fairly well. There are no real scares though, and the gore is rather uninspired.

Image from Wikipedia

Part 4 drops the numbering, and just calls itself Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis. It was made in 2005, so it's surprising they didn't just tweak the script and leave off the ROTLD moniker, but I guess it might have made them a few more dollars this way.  This time, it's Trioxin 5, and military scientist Peter Coyote (wearing a ridiculous rictus grin throughout) hijacks a supply that is inexplicably sitting in the abandoned Chernobyl nuclear plant.

Coyote's nephew (the parents died a year earlier) and his friends go to rescue their friend, who has been captured--for no discernable reason--by the government research facility Coyote works for.  These rebellious teens (they ride motorcycles!) dress up like miners (!) and infiltrate the facility with the help of a classmate who works there at nights in security. With me so far? You could be excused for thinking this doesn't make sense.

As the kids get deeper and deeper into the facility, they discover stranger and stranger military experiments, mostly centered around zombies. The military wants to weaponize them of course (a nod to the previous entries).  This includes cloned zombie babies (!!!) and Star Trek: The Next Generation BORG zombies. I'm not making that up.  And they're the lead kid's dead parents!!!  Along the way, several of the kids get eaten, at least one gets zombified, and a preteen actually gets his cranium munched. Kudos for that one at least.  The film was clearly filmed in Romania or nearby, as several actors have accents that give them away, even one of the "American" teenagers.  Again, nothing here is scary, and some of the "rules" seem to have been chucked when it comes to "how to kill a zombie."  There are also too many cliches here, from crawling through air ducts to the repeated problem of guns running out of ammo. Apparently, there is a Part 5 out there which features some of the same cast, so it ain't over yet.

If you find the 4-for-$5 set and you're into this sort of thing, go for it. But don't look to hard or make a special trip or anything.

Return of the Living Dead 3:  Recommended only for zombie fans
Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis:  Not recommended at all, unless you get it in a box set