Friday 22 April 2011

Return of the Living Dead 3 (1993)

 Written by Happywax on April 22 2011
 Rating  7/12  out of 10


 Diretor   -   Brian Yuzna

 Cast
 Kent McCord          -   Colonel John
                                      Reynolds
 Melinda Clarke         -   Julie Walker
 J. Trevor Edmonds   -   Curt Reynolds
 Billy Cane                -   Sentry
 Mike Moroff            -   Santos 

Curt, a GenXer army brat, is madly in love with Julie, a Gothy punk girl with a fascination for the morbid. In order to impress her, Curt swipes his dads clearance card and the two lovebirds sneak into the high security testing facilities of the military base. Curt's dad, a high ranking military official, is involved in some pretty sick experiments which center around the reanimating powers of the chemical known as 245 Trioxin. After witnessing a gruesome resurrection, Curt and Julie flee, have sex and find out that Curt's dad is being transferred. Rather than be torn asunder, the two run away together. But a terrible motorcycle accident cuts their plans - and Julie's life - short. Now it's back to the base to reanimate his beloved, but even though the resurrected Julie seems normal, it's only a matter of time before her dead body rots, and her human emotions are replaced with an insatiable hunger for living human brains.

This third installment in the ROTLD series avoids the campy black comedy of the first film, and the utter stupidity of the second. It falls somewhere right smack between the two and ends up being halfway decent. There's some great scenes of cutting, scarification and body mutilation as Julie discovers that self inflicted pain can temporarily curb her nasty appetite. Whether or not this was an intentional comment on the habits of GenX teens to mutilate themselves to curb feelings of depression, I don't know, but it's quite effective and, considering that this came out in 1993, rather timely as well. Julie ends up resembling a Cenobite rather than a zombie, decked out in leather, chains and broken glass, but I'm not complaining. There's a LOT of gore, most of which takes place in the military labs as zombies are fitted with harnesses, lobotomized with power drills, held together with metal exoskeletons and, in general, end up resembling an S&M orgy gone horribly wrong. It's pretty nasty, graphic stuff, but the zombies themselves are pretty cool looking, especially one who ends up looking like a freaky, bipedal giraffe.
 Thanks god Brian Yuzna decided to take the the series in a different direction, after watching the pile of crap they called part 2 I had given up all hope, but really this is the man who brought us Re-animater, so you just know its gonna be good, and gory, no need to stick your head in a barrel of acid after watching this gem. Check out the trailer:   
                                                                                           

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