Return of the Living Dead III

Return of the Living Dead III (1993) was released upon the 25th anniversary of the release of Night of the Living Dead (1968). Instead of making another bad spoof, Brian Yuzna wisely decided to make a return to the basics. A creepy and dark horror film. A young military brat and his girl are fooling around on a motorcycle and she's killed in a fatal accident. Grief stricken and severely sprung, the kid takes his girl to the army base where his dad works and takes her to a secret lab and revives her. Sadly the boy doesn't know what he's unleashed and this young "frankenstein" has to destroy his little "creation". If you're going to watch this movie please avoid the "rated" version. As in all of Brian Yuzna's films he likes to make his flicks over the top and very gory. The "family" rental companies carry the "rated" version so "look out" for the "unrated" label. If not then you'll be treated to a bunch of freeze frames and badly cut scenes. A sad tale about true love.

Recommended.

Let's hope this ends the series. If it does then it'll end on a high note.

Here we have the third installment in the ROTLD series. It is a Romeo and Juliet-ish tale about ill fated love. Curt is an army brat that met a girl that borders on beigg goth. Curt's father is in charge of a project that will use the trioxin to create an army of undead super soldiers. To impress his girlfriend Julie, they sneak into the army base and witness some experiments. Because these experiments end up failing epically, Curt finds out his father is being reassigned and they must move. Curt chooses Julie over his father and they flee. While on the road they are in an accident that claims Julie's life. Curt uses the trioxin to reanimate her and the zombie fun begins. I liked this better than the first two installments. It was a different take on this subclass of zombie, and the humor was cut way down. Melinda Clark steals every scene she is in as Julie. The rest of the cast, the acting is on par with what one might expect from this kind of film.

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.

The story isn't anything new, but some of the acting (especially that of Mindy Clarke as Julie) is pretty good and the zombie effects are impressive. The ending is a downer, but not as grim and disheartening as it could have been.

All in all, it's fairly enjoyable. It's much better than Part 2 was, anyway.

Return of the Living Dead III is the type of horror film you can watch with your friends, or your girlfriend. It is a film with a romantic (yet tragic) edge to it that saves it from the muck of sequel overkill. The story follows a young man who, after seeing his girlfriend die who he loves so much, brings her back to life in a top secret facility with the gas that brings back the dead from part 1 (without them being able to get electricuted), but then strange things happen. Clever horror with a edge, with it's only problem not stopping too often and of course the sequel overkill. Still worth a look, especially for horror enthusaists who don't believe there's life after part 2. A-

The third movie in the Return of the Living Dead series marks a change in direction from horror comedy to tragic love story. The plot to this one has a teenage boy (J. Trevor Edmond) using the zombie gas from the first two films to bring his dead girlfriend (Melinda 'Mindy' Clarke) back to life, with horrifying results. This is easily the second best in the series, surpassed only by the first. The '90s wasn't a great time for horror fans. Most of what was being made was cheap straight-to-video stuff. I can count on one hand the number of decent horror movies from that time. This movie would make the cut. It has interesting direction from Brian Yuzna, a refreshing story, and a decent cast. Melinda Clarke is especially good. Definitely worth taking a look at if you want something different.