The zombie movie phenomenon which started with Romero’s Night of the Living Dead has wound up providing us with a very-extended family tree; we have official sequels, unofficial sequels, remakes, sequels to remakes, and possible add-ons to the original Dead trilogy universe which makes the recent I Spit On Your Grave remake-sequel tangle seem positively straightforward by comparison. So, although the Brian Yuzna-directed 1993 flick, ‘Return of the Living Dead III’ (ROTLD3 from here on in, if I may) has little in the way of a direct relationship to the 1967 classic, it’s definitely a distant cousin, going to the trouble of linking back to its predecessors in its opening scenes.
But a lot happened between ’67 and ’93, and ROTLD3 is, in many ways, the original zombie movie come full circle. In Night… we wound up with an entire array of ghouls laying siege to the living – they were the soulless, mindless creatures which set the benchmark for an entire genre, and which stumbled on fairly uninterruptedly until 28 Days Later, all ‘but they’re not zombies’ squabbling aside. In ROTLD3 however, we have a movie ready to ask intriguing questions. What if someone was ‘brought back’ straight after death? Would they really be ‘monsters’ straight away? And why would they change? ROTLD3, in classic, gleefully grisly Yuzna style, plays with these ideas, and asks things which have again by and large sunk back into the background, as zombie horror has, with a few notable exceptions, plumped for en masse walking dead once more. Now when those eyes snap open again, they’re already goners – it takes a matter of mere seconds for this to occur in many films, too, such as in World War Z, to pick a recent example. But ROTLD3 opts to do things very differently. It is a zombie flick about individual relationships, not the terror of the horde. As such, it remains an unusual zombie movie even now, and it was in so many ways ahead of its time in the early Nineties. I’d also argue that ROTLD3 takes the 2-4-5 Trioxin idea – used in a fun, cartoonish way in Return… – and develops it in a much more unsettling, disturbing way, looking more closely at what happens to a small number of people, two in particular. This close focus allows the film to go places that at the time, other films had not gone, and to consider things they had not.
The underhand behaviour of the military is of course a big part of Dan O’Bannon’s 1985 classic, especially in its own shock ending, but it’s how it affects a specific family which forms the bedrock of the plot in ROTLD3. Generation X-er Curt (J. Trevor Edmond) has a troubled relationship with his dad, whose military career consists of top-secret experimentation in ‘bio-warfare’ – carrying on from Return…in that it’s based on working with the chemical agent Trioxin, a substance which has the incidental effect of bringing the dead back to life to create the “weapons system of the future”. And, hey, why not use the reanimated dead as weapons, right? The way this all plays out in ROTLD3 feels weightier than it does in Return… – there’s less of the playfulness of characters like Tar Man, less of things like zombie ambushes and the like. Here we have a regimented system of operations and a Colonel who has a very messed-up relationship with his son, a son whose momentary decision to defy him and stay with girlfriend Julie precipitates the whole course of events which follows. And, in keeping with the quality over quantity approach of the film, we only get up close to a couple of the living dead here, but we see what happens to them in detail. For me, this makes everything more effective, from Steve Johnson’s excellent make-up SFX right through to the focus on characterisation, which looks at other disaffected, vulnerable people too, not just Curt, his girlfriend Julie and his father.
In amongst all of the gore and the body horror, of course, ROTLD3 stands out because it manages to place a sweet romantic relationship at its heart. Curt and Julie are disaffected kids, each lonely, each estranged from anything which would provide them with any structure, and so they cling to one another, especially when the spectre of being reassigned threatens to take Curt away. It’s a darkly comic, and a tragic, touch that what happens to Julie, shall we say, complicates matters. Not that she was a straightforward girl before her little accident, though: Julie had a dark side, a fascination with death, which leads her to keep replaying what she and Curt witness at the military buildings even when they’re in bed together. In an obvious nod to her death-obsessed alt-girl predecessor Trash, Julie ain’t all sweetness and light before things happen to her, but this only makes the end result more interesting, whilst still adding to, not taking away from, the love affair in the film. It’s this love affair which eventually holds sway over the plot, and adds a note of grotesque, but irrefutable pathos to proceedings. Whatever comes before, you can’t deny that ROTLD3’s ending is a bold move, even a touching one too, even if it comes out of chaos which has by this point harmed the innocent, as well as getting even with the wicked.
Julie (played brilliantly by Mindy Clarke) is one of the most recognisable zombies in horror cinema. She plays the split in her personality really well as she fights against the human munchies and realises that being dead isn’t actually all it’s cracked up to be, while at the same time, working an oddly aesthetically-pleasing look. There are a lot of influences to spot here. Whilst the debt of honour to Linnea Quigley is obviously there, Julie (and Curt) are kids of the Nineties, on their way to Seattle to enjoy the music scene before everything goes wrong for them. As well as grunge, though (check out the L7 poster on Curt’s bedroom wall) the S&M/goth influence is in there too, and it’s worth remembering that this film hit the stands at just the time when piercings were emerging into the mainstream from their old haunts of the fetish club and the tattoo convention. Julie takes something which would have been a tad more familiar than it was ten years before, say, and then hyper-extends it until it’s monstrous. And, hey, there’s a dash of Cenobite in there too, with the slashed fetish wear and symmetrical piercings, right? Funnily enough, Julie would look more at ease in the ranks of the Cenobites than some of those we were expected to accept in the previous year’s sequel Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (a Cenobite whose prime torture technique was burning people with a cigarette? Bitch, please). Julie is both meaner, more engaging, alive or dead, and never loses her humanity, which stops her from ever becoming truly repellent. Brian Yuzna has done some sterling work in his time, but Julie is by far one of his best creations.
It’s hard to believe that this film is twenty years old. It’s hard to believe that I first saw this as a young teenager, and thought that Julie was one of the coolest entities I’d seen since Pinhead. How time flies. Well, I think it holds up brilliantly to this day, and it’s a movie that, as a Yuzna fan, I find myself revisiting often, and always finding something to enjoy. Yuzna knows that you can go to new places with your characters in a horror film without sacrificing on the gore, and it’s why he’s one of the masters of body horror. I’ve read a lot of reviews of ROTLD3 as preparation for writing this retrospective, and one criticism which cones up again and again is that it lacks the ‘fun’ of Return of the Living Dead. I don’t think that’s necessarily true – there are bleakly comic sequences throughout the film – but ultimately, ROTLD3 is just a different beast, and it works so well because it is. By using grim, graphic horror ‘what if?’ ideas, Yuzna is able to do here what he does so well elsewhere: body horror offers the scope for an entertaining, compelling and often blood-curdling glimpse at the human condition. It means that you don’t need to scrimp on blood and guts, but you can use their presence to throw in oddball questions about what we are and why.
When you can successfully merge love, death, noteworthy aesthetics and plenty of gore into a captivating story, then I’d say you’re doing something right, and that is precisely why we can still talk about this horror movie today, when so many of the other cousins-twice-removed of the original Dead films which wound up making ROTLD3 possible have already sunk without trace, or perhaps worse, deliberately been forgotten. ROTLD3 was unafraid to take a few risks, the risks paid off, and it deserves its place in zombie horror history accordingly.