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The Return of the Living Dead III
My girlfriend loves me for my brain
1993
Review: November 23, 2007
Director: Brian Yuzna
Starring: Melinda Clarke, J. Trevor Edmond, Kent McCord
Sure!
THE SETUP:
Guy’s girlfriend dies, he brings her back to life, sparking zombie explosion.
DISCUSSION:
Having just watched the hilarious Return of the Living Dead, and having heard that part two was a total unadulterated piece of crap, I set my sights on this one, which everyone said was a fairly good sequel that departed from the formula and featured a moving take of romance beyond the grave. Sweet! So let’s get to it!
We open, as so many movies do, at a top-secret military base. There we meet our hero Curt’s dad, who is in charge of the local zombie research program. You see, the military has this gas that brings the dead back to life, and still has some zombies from an earlier outbreak sealed in cans to preserve freshness and trap in vitamins. There’s also some ball-buster woman who wants to fashion mechanized exoskeletons to force the zombies to be a deadly weapon. Is that all the military does, mastermind new foolproof supernatural weapons programs? Anyway, tuck this exposition away, you’ll need it later.
So Curt drives on his motorcycle to meet his 80s goth-tinged teen friends. His girlfriend, Julie, is there, and she’s really keen on sneaking in to the top-secret base and seeing what goes on there. And it turns out that Curt stole his Dad’s entry pass! So they sneak onto the base and into the ceiling, where they watch the bizarre experiment. You’ll note that Dad’s security card doesn’t work until Julie licks it.
The soldiers string up this zombie, then spray some gas at it and bring it back to life. Then they shoot a bullet into its head and freeze its brain [they could have just fed it ice cream!], and it goes dead again. So they slap each other on the backs and cut down the zombie, which they now think is harmlessly dead again. But we know better... don’t we?
So Curt and Julie go home and spork, then Dad, who does not like Julie one bit [and he’s got a point, as we shall soon see], tells Curt they’re being reassigned to Urbana or somewhere, and they’re going to move in two weeks. Curt refuses to go! Then he and Julie defiantly take off on his motorcycle! Then they have an accident and Julie’s neck is snapped. Curt throws his all into his mourning scene, as he just broke with his father to be with Julie, and now she’s a corpse. And all he has left in this world is the clothes on his back, his motorcycle, and a Subway Sandwich Club card with only two stamps on it. Oh, and a corpse, too. He could maybe sell that.
SPOILERS > > > Now let’s turn our focus to Julie. She is a wild, thrill-seeking narcissist who is obsessed with death and courts risk and trouble every chance she gets. She’s constantly wrapping her arms around Curt and saying things like “You’re MINE, honey,” with a slightly threatening air. So she’s kind of the self-centered, possessive psycho girlfriend from hell, and I thought the movie was going to explore this subtext, but no, it just drops it after a while. Anyway, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, Curt takes Julie to the lab and sprays her with zombie gas and brings her back to life, in the process waking up one of the zombies-in-a-can. Julie’s first words upon waking are an erotic “God Curt, that was incredible, let’s do it again!” You see, she had her neck snapped and died, and this is kind of like having great sex! You never hear about this from Dr. Ruth.
But the can-full-o’-zombie has been busted open and he’s pretty ornery. This zombie was a big let down from the canned zombie in the first one, who had big eyes and a tongue and was like a cute little cartoon character who looked and people and sighed with delight: “More brains!” The one in this movie is a nasty gore creation with his hand grown into his chest. He eats a security guard then comes after our teen heroes, who stand around having personal drama while he’s trying to get through a door just inches away. Soon he is ripping his grown-in hand away from his body, which causes half of his flesh to peel away from his skull. I have written in my notes: “Total gore! Head splits open! Hardcore gore!”
So Curt and Julie escape on his motorcycle, Julie having found an exciting new conduit for her self-centeredness in her undead status. “My skin! It feels so cold! My face!” Yes, you, you, you, I know, okay? You’re dead, all right? Other people have problems, too. She’s hungry, so they repair to the local mini-mart where she starts snarfing snack cakes. I was wondering if we were going to start edging into eating-disorder subtext, and we do a little but—we haven’t even gotten to the self-mutilation yet! Anyway, Curt bumps into these Latino thugs and associated molls as they are trying to play this video game, and this draws their ire. There’s this whole getaway in a van, one of the thugs dies, and Julie starts eating his brains. This represents a disturbing new development to Curt, but still, he loves her just the way she is. Soon she starts running metal springs through her own skin to numb the hunger [Sweetie, could you not do that?], and telling Curt that he should have left her dead. Ungrateful dead! Meanwhile Santos, the leader of the Latino thugs, is vowing revenge on those impudent teens. They bumped into him and totally didn’t even say ‘excuse me!’
So Curt and Julie meet up with this crazy black homeless man who says “I’m alive! I’m not dead! I’m just… lonely.” Meanwhile Dad is trying to find Curt and his undead lady love before the military blows him to smithereens. Then the hardass woman from earlier takes command, and Curt’s dad leaves his job to find the boy on his own. Ravenous undead girlfriends CAN bring families together.
Meanwhile Julie and Curt are in some industrial setting, where they have zombie sex, which thankfully takes place offscreen. Then Julie really goes all out with her self-mutilation thing, and ends up with all these nails driven through her arms and glass spikes coming out of her head, one glass spike even driven through her breast. Which. Is. Gross. Call me a prude, but self-mutilation really isn’t for me. Her breasts are also now exposed, by the way, indicating that someone out there is supposed to be finding her sexy like this. Santo corners her and is going to have sex with her—indicating that despite his studly persona, he’s actually pretty desperate. Maybe he’s just lonely. Personally, I try to avoid sex with things that have spikes. But I’m not lonely. I have a bunny. Anyway, turns out Julie isn’t really in the mood for sex either and, well let’s just say Santos won’t be lonely anymore.
Meanwhile Julie has been caught and returned to the lab, where we get a demonstration of the zombie-control exoskeleton [ZCE] we heard about way earlier. Julie is next in line for the program, but Curt won’t hear of it. In death, dignity! He creates a ruckus and sets her free, getting bitten in the process. In a heart-rending conclusion he chooses to die [for reals] with his love at his side, wishes his father, not to mention this too cruel world, adieu, and heads into the flames with Julie. Near, far, wherever you are, I know that the heart goes on.
< < < SPOILERS END
Could be worse, it’s true, and it did bravely present a new variation on the first movie rather than just being a retread of it, but as a movie on its own, I wasn’t that thrilled. For one, I’m not turned on the female-sex-and-death thing, the titillation of which a lot of this movie seems to be relying on, and I also don’t find female eating disorders and self-mutilation to be cool. Aside from that, it just got a little boring and spun its wheels for too long. I had checked out by 50 minutes in and just scanned through the rest so it would be over. Straight guys excited by nasty undead chicks might be into it, though.
The DVD also includes trailers for The Dentist and The Dentist 2, both of which look pretty amusing, although I’m not sure I want to think much about teeth being destroyed by power drills, as we see in the trailer. Eh fuck it, yes I do. There’s also a trailer for Faust: Love of the Damned, which seems to contain several key deviations from the Goethe text. That one just looks like crap, not amusing crap.
Hmm, I’m late for work.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
It won’t kill you, but if you do, watch it if you want to see sexy undead chicks with spikes through their bodies, not because you want more of what you got in the first film, cuz that ain’t here.
RELATED MOVIES:
RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD was the first in the series, but is very different from this film, a horror-comedy about a zombie outbreak affecting a bunch of punk kids.
