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Curt and his girlfriend, Julie, sneak into a top secret military base, where Curt’s father is the commander. Inside they discover zombie experiments. A little later on, Julie is killed in a motorcycle accident and Curt has the bright idea of using the resurrection gas from the zombie experiments to bring his girlfriend back from the dead. Hilarity ensues as the military, the police and some stock Hispanic characters chase after Curt and his zombie love…
The gore in this movie is good for the most part. There’s lots of gross looking deaths and plenty of blood to keep most horror fans interested. Some of the special effects show their age, like the Hispanic guy’s severed head and spinal cord, but it’s unreasonable to expect special effect’s perfection from a move made in the early 1990’s.
One particular gore effect that is worth mentioning is Julie’s self-mutilation. Every time she stabs herself with a nail or whatever she can find it is legitimately disturbing to watch. But then again, the same thing could be said about watching your neighbor pulling a scab off his knee…
I guess I have to talk about this point first, considering I just set it up with that last sentence. One of the things that annoys me the most about horror movies is when the gore is used ineffectively. In Return of the Living Dead 3, the gore isn’t there to help scare you more, it’s just there to gross you out. I don’t mind using some of the gore in a horror movie for this purpose, but I would say that the vast majority, if not all, of the gore in this movie is only there to gross out the viewer. Never does the gore ever serve to make a scene more suspenseful or scarier. A good example of what I mean above would be from the awesome horror movie, Zombie. When the doctor’s wife is running from the zombie in her house, all we ever see of the zombie is its hands. In Return 3 we got lots of gratuitous shots of zombies that serve no purpose at all. As well, when the doctor’s wife gets a large splinter pulled through her eye, it’s gross, but there was a build towards that outcome. As a viewer we’re almost expecting it, but at the same time we’re cringing at the thought of it. Most of the violence in Return 3 has next to no build up to it. An example of this lack of build up would be the scene in the convenience store, where the stock Hispanic characters end up robbing the place, shooting the clerk, and one of them gets bitten by Julie. I still can’t explain why any of this happens within the context of the movie other than they needed to fill time. The violence in this scene becomes gratuitous because the scene just doesn’t make sense within the context of the rest of the movie. This scene doesn’t add anything to Curt and Julie’s relationship, nor does it help resolve Curt’s strained relationship with his father. Unlike the doctor’s wife in Zombie, who ends up proofing herself right about wanting to leave the island they’re on, the convenience store scene is just filler composed of blood and violence that is supposed to entertain us. I actually can’t believe that people really like this movie. I’ve read reviews of this on the Internet Movie Database that actually claim there is character development in this movie. I usually don’t like reading other reviews before writing my own, but I’ve seen this movie three times, so I’m unshakable when it comes to my views on it. But let’s get back to this misconception that there’s character development in Return of the Living Dead 3. Curt is shown to have a poor relationship with his father. They don’t get along and things only get worse when he discovers his father’s ghoulish experiments involving zombies. At the end of the movie is this relationship ever restored? Well Curt’s father says something about taking some time off and them going away together, just the two of them. To me his sentiment here always sounded more like a come on that a father trying to restore his son’s faith in him. However, how does a proposed trip together translate into the characters changing any from the start of the movie? If anything, the fact that Curt wanders off a few minutes later to find zombie Julie just shows how little his character has grown through the movie. Then there’s Curt and Julie’s relationship. I think Curt is supposed to realize that sometimes you have to just let people go. The movie establishes that his mother died and that he and his father never really dealt with it. At the end of the move, does Curt realize the folly of his ways and that he needs to accept that people die? Nope, he goes and finds zombie Julie, releases her, and then stands back and watches as a bunch of zombies escape and overrun the military compound his father once commanded. I just don’t see how protecting his dead girlfriend, which is exactly what he did the entire movie, is character development. There’s just so much to complain about in this movie. And it’s not like I hate low budget horror movies, my reviews of the Leprechaun movies prove quite the contrary. My biggest complaint about Return 3 though would be that it’s downright boring in spots. There’s almost no humor in it at all and the actors aren’t given anything to work with. To add to this film’s many problems, there’s no chemistry at all between the two leads, Mindy Clarke and J. Trevor Edmond. Curt comes off as a whiny spoiled kid, who needs some serious time with a therapist as to what constitutes a normal relationship. Julie just comes off as some gothic-wannabe weirdo, and that’s before she’s even a zombie. Speaking of characters, could the Hispanic characters be any more stock? All they were missing was a scene involving tacos and tequila to make these characters any more of a walking stereotype.
Finally, I have to talk about the use of Curt’s father’s keycard. How a Colonel would misplace his keycard to a military base containing lots of zombies and not seem upset about it, is just mind boggling. However, what’s even worse is how he or anyone never thinks to deactivate it and just issue a new keycard. I know they say at the start of the movie that their budget from the military is low, but why even have keycards instead of keys if they didn’t have a system in place for replacing lost ones? I think the movie could have been almost the same if Curt just got into the base by saying he wanted to talk to his father and then just snuck around. He could have picked some locks with a hairpin or something. That would have been a lot better for the characters than having his father seem like a moron, who doesn’t realize the importance of keep track of his keys.
Return of the Living Dead 3 is pretty bad, but it’s far from the worse zombie movie I’ve ever seen (see my review of House of the Dead for that). There are probably some hardcore zombie fans out there who actually like this movie. However, when I consider all the better horror movies out there you could spend time your watching instead of this, I find this a real easy one to recommend people to avoid. Return 3 doesn’t even have some of the comedic charm part 2 did, so don’t bother with this one unless you’re a diehard zombie fan with absolutely nothing better to do.
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