Exploring the Sequels

#7 Return of the Living Dead 3

And Bringing BACK Baby.

Return of the Living Dead 2 made its debut in 1988, a minor success at the box office making nine million off a six million dollar budget. Yet it suffered a major bite getting chewed up critically and closing the cemetery gates on zombie horror for the 80’s with kid friendly comedy, basic metal ballad needle drops, and no clear direction for the series to follow. The ROLTD series laid still in its grave, as good as dead, while music, fashion, and movies evolved from Risky Business “put in the work and it’ll happen” Reaganism into a cultural rebirth in the early 1990’s of non conformity, authenticity, and not selling out at any cost.

Loud, bombastic fashion gave way to muted, second hand thrift full of flannel, Doc Martins and you dad’s old concert t-shirts from the 70’s most likely bought at the malls Romero warned us about. The music remained hard but with a softer spirit, all open wounds and jaded sensitivity at the forefront with no flashy excess. And movies became more modern, grounded, realistic, and driven by characters and less by spectacle. All representing a shift from optimism and brightness to something darker and full of angst. Gen X was growing up, getting pissed off, and preparing to fight for their voices or run away to a new place to find them. A cause to fight for, whether it be the grunge scene of Seattle, the Alaskan wildness of Into the Wild, or in this zombie movie’s case, a Los Angeles subterranean nightmare.

By the time Return of the Living Dead 3 (ROTLD3) was released in 1993, horror audiences had been exposed to a varying tonal range of the new 90’s zombie flicks with the exploitation cult classic Frankenhooker and Tom Savini’s ode to his roots and the past with a faithful yet more female empowering remake of Night of the Living Dead (1990 and both very good), the under-seen schlocksterpiece, The Boneyard (go see this for the zombie poodle alone, no seriously go) in 1991, and undisputed horror comedy classics by Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson with Army of Darkness and Dead Alive in 1992.

ROTLD3 does not feel like the last gasping breaths of 80’s spirited holdovers like say, Scanners 3. It is a newly packaged product of the 90’s era through and through. This was a series no longer following an anti authority subculture of the punk movement in part 1 or any out of their depth, square Spielbergian suburbanites in part 2.

Director Brian Yuzna (Society, Bride of Reanimator) came aboard to take the bare bones of ROTLD’s own zombie lore (Trioxin) to break a few rules and mutate it into something darker and more serious like a goth horror compound of equal parts Shakespearean and Mary Shellyesque tragedy. Star crossed lovers by way of a gender swapped beauty and the beast. Except the beast is still the beauty in this. No offense romantic lead guy.

Before we shuffle on (hey, like a ya know..) I gotta briefly discuss Mr. Yuzna. Dan O’Bannon (spoiler) may have made the best of the bunch, but Yuzna is the most accomplished director of the three movie makers so far. He is one of my four, unheralded, tier B horror directors (also see Tommy Lee Wallace, Anthony Hickox, and Steve Miner) that excelled in taking on sequels of established franchises and making them uniquely and successfully their own. I’ll be touching on them (not literally) later this year in a write up about all four of these fellas and what they accomplished during this era in the straight to video wilderness (more additional free content, just giving it away).

Brian Yuzna took on the project wanting to direct a ROTLD sequel since seeing the first. He hired John Penny (editor on part 1) to pen the script and create a world where Yuzna’s visual obsessions with body horror and slimy practical effects took center stage while being encased in a smaller, more intimate story of a “two lovers on the run”road movie.

We begin with our lead couple Julie (like Shakespeare!) played by Melinda Clarke and Curt (J Trevor Edmund) sneaking into a military base (just terrible security protocols here) using the security key card he stole from his dad, Colonel John Reynolds (Kent McCord), to spy on the Colonel’s long gestating top secret project. The experiment involves bringing back the dead, using Trioxin, to make unstoppable zombie soldiers to be controlled by shooting the zombie’s heads with large chemical cocktail darts (basically). The experiment goes awry, chaos ensues, and scientists are killed as Julie and Curt flee without being discovered.

Curt’s dad is then thrown off the now disastrous project and given instructions to relocate to a different base in one week. Once Colonel Reynolds breaks the news to Curt, they argue about that and all the time he’s spending with Julie (Dad disapproves) and Curt tells him he’s not going. Curt and Julie take off on his motorcycle to run away together and make their own way.

Caught up in the giddiness of becoming star crossed lover teen runaways Julie playfully distracts Curt and to dodge a semi he crashes his motorcycle accidentally killing her in the process. Grief and guilt stricken, he remembers the Trioxin experiment witnessed earlier and heads back to the military base with the now deceased Julie to pull a “Pet Semetary”(these never work out) and bring her back.

Curt is successful in resurrecting her but Julie is not quite herself. She has no pulse, is ice cold, in pain, and getting hungry. She is still able to keep enough of her humanity (for now) and love for Curt to not attack him. The military finds out and it’s a race against the clock for Julie and Curt to escape the clutches of a military competitor to Colonel Reynolds. Lieutenant Colonel Sinclair (Sara Douglas), took over the program and wants to track down Julie for her plan to use zombies as soldiers in military grade exo-skeletons (yeah, this gets weird). Curt’s dad goes rogue to find them first and save his son from danger be it the military or from the inevitable hunger he knows Julie possesses and may eventually succumb to.

This is where the movie begins to take some missteps that slow down the pace of of the zombie and the story that should be moving faster with more engaging interactions in the places they go and characters they interact with. There are really only three set pieces remaining and each one lingers longer than necessary.

Julie and Curt frantically gather food for her in a grocery store as by this point she has regressed and desperately wants to die again so she doesn’t hurt anyone. They are interrupted by four gang members (Mike Moroff, Julian Scott Urena, Ria Reyes, and Sal Lopez) playing a Street Fighter 2 arcade game. They fight Curt, Julie bites one of them, and her and Curt flee from them adding another subplot of villains on the hunt.

Julie and Curt seek refuge in a sewer system and are saved by a homeless man who goes by the name, Riverman (Basil Wallace), who has made a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle like layer there (we are down here for a looooong time). The gang members uncover Riverman’s home, a battle for their lives breaks out with casualties and new zombies. Julie, having discovered that piercing her skin with sharp objects dulls her hunger, finally let’s loose and the Curt loving beast is fully formed and ready to fight.

And this is a highlight of the movie that harkens back to the vhs box cover. Julie looks nothing like your typical decaying zombie risen from some backwoods graveyard or gothic cemetery craving brains, but rather the offspring of some cenobite/dominatrix vampire, as if the last of a demonic royal bloodline, cast out from a Clive Barker approved, erotic pit in hell determined to devour your soul.

Melinda Clarke plays her as rebellious “bad girl” teenager turned BDM, sado-masochistic goth-monster forged from sharp piercing metal, razor blade talons, broken shards of glass, and an insatiable, enteral starving that can only be dulled by the deadening of self inflicted pain or satiated by eating the living. She makes you feel every puncture and hunger pain and she’s excellent. This battle between the undead leads Julie and Curt back to the same military compound in which an all out war breaks out to tragic conclusions.

J Trevor Edmond is milquetoast in the less interesting role but believable as a guy in love with a Melinda Clarke. This is really her movie though. Being a product of the early 90’s the Hispanic gang members are unfortunately, typical racist stereotypes of the era and Riverman is an African-American man who’s saddled with the wise, “magical other” trope expounding simplistic wisdom as he vulnerably bonds with Curt. Although the gang members are far from nuanced, three dimensional characters and Riverman could be written less like a folksy plot device cypher, all five actors bring some heat to their roles.

Another major highlight is a tour de force berserker zombie near the end that is equal parts Resident Evil level boss and some inbred offspring of Monstro ElizaSue from The Substance. I won’t spoil THE scene of visual head splitting but count this guy impressed. This is classic Yuzna just cooking a five star meal with the effects team made up of Elaine Alexander, Trevor Alyn, and John Axford.

Oddly the soundtrack is made up of strictly the score and no actual band tracks were used that I could find. This movie would have been ripe for a hard edged “The Crow” like album composed of an eclectic mix of grunge, goth, punk, and metal. All sub genres that make up the visual style and spirit of ROTLD3.

ROTLD3 is a better acted, more original story with stronger special effects than part 2. The film is vastly different than really any other zombie movies holding its own with many of the “girl and her monster” films before and after. Even a modern comparison like, Life After Beth is a more straight forward comedy and lacks any real horror or danger that this strives for and mostly succeeds especially in the opening and finale. Return of the Living Dead 3 may not be the MVP of 90’s zombie movies but despite some flaws in plot, pacing, and padding in the mid section it plays the game well. This movie resembles very little of the original world The Return of the Living Dead built, but there is a distinct parallel running through both.

We end the original, The Return of the Living Dead with our supposed saviors sacrificing the surviving heroes to protect the world from a larger threat of monsters. Return of the Living Dead 3 ends with a couple of tragic monsters sacrificing themselves so their supposed saviors can no longer be a threat to the world it’s supposed to protect. Sometimes you must burn out because to fade away means to lose your humanity and the ones you love. Both movies end in fire, only the monsters are different.

I recommend ROTLD3 as an interesting zombie oddity that’s visually fun and emotionally unique in the zombie genre that, like part 2, it gets really close to cult classic status. So grab your vinyl of The Cure or Nine Inch Nails, take out those gross, rusty nipple rings you made out of sewer garbage, get a tetanus shot or three, and let Return of the Living Dead 3 close out this run and maybe open up your heart.

***This series has been a blast to revisit and thank you to everyone who’s followed along but I won’t be reviewing the 4th and 5th entries as they were both straight to tv SyFy channel movies from 2005 that are even more loosely related to the original.

So coming up next we will be discussing Fright Night 1 and 2!

Final series rankings:

1.) ROTLD

2.) ROTLD3

3.) ROTLD2