No Surrender Cinema: Return of the Living Dead III
It’s become a rite of passage that when you’re young and in love, you’re bound to do some foolish things. Maybe you threw a song on a mix CD that you thought she’d like, but she actually hated. Maybe one the girls in your clique was being mistreated in her relationship, and you thought you’d swoop in to save the day, creating more drama for yourself in the process. Or maybe you agreed to go to a dance with a girl, but it was just to get closer to her sister that had a crush on you, thus intensifying a sibling rivalry.
I’m not saying I did all of those things, but… I did all of those things.
Now, you’re probably wondering to yourself what the hell this all has to do with No Surrender Cinema. After all, this is where I cover the cult classics, the movies full of karate kicks, gratuitous gunfire, and bone-crushing battles that Bulletproof Action has become known for. Granted, I’ve long lived my life like I’m a character from a high school sitcom, but this is not the place for me to wax nostalgic. It’s all just a build up to the bloody rampage you’re about to read about, one that wouldn’t have happened had it not been for two kids who go from head over heels to in over their heads. Can their love survive an undead uprising, one that has a tremendous impact on their relationship? Let’s find out as we look back on 1993’s Return of the Living Dead 3!
Curt (J. Trevor Edmond, who once played a high school kid who pranked my hero, Zack Morris, on the Saved By The Bell precursor Good Morning, Miss Bliss) and Julie (Melinda “Mindy” Clarke, who may be more familiar to the mainstream as Julie Cooper on The OC and Amanda on Nikita) are your typical teenagers who are smitten with each other. Curt is a military brat, the son of Col. Reynolds, whose current assignment has him overseeing a project where the military wants to utilize zombies in combat. Naturally, it’s a top secret assignment… so secret that not even Curt knows exactly what his dad has been doing on base. Curiosity gets the best of Curt, so he swipes his dad’s access pass and sneaks on base with Julie to see what goes on behind closed doors. Together, the two witness firsthand what’s being kept under wraps; the military is once again tampering with Trioxin (the gas that was responsible for the swarm of zombies in previous Dead films), but this time they’re trying to control the outcome. See, the military thinks that by reanimating corpses and enlisting them in battle, it would allow the good ol’ US of A to have the upper hand in any conflict.. It’s a novel idea that could cut back on the casualties of war (you know, since they’re already dead) and you could build an army that can withstand an enemy onslaught, but as we’ve seen in virtually every zombie movie ever, nothing goes as planned.
The elder Reynolds’ plan is to test the Trioxin, ensure that the corpse can be reanimated, and then once it is, use advanced weaponry that will leave the zombie in a frozen state. A test subject is brought in, and sure enough, the exposure to Trioxin brings it back to life. This is enough to satiate Curt and Julie’s need to see what Papa Reynolds has been doing, so they jet before they get found out. Fortunately for them, it means that they’re about to miss the carnage that ensues. You see, Col. Reynolds’ idea is that when the zombie army is not active, they can be held in a state of stasis. The zombie is shot with a specialized weapon that effectively freezes its brain, but the duration of downtime is a lot shorter than expected… which is bad news for the crew that happens to be in the room at the time. There’s blood, there’s biting, there’s another zombie because of someone who was bitten… anything that could go wrong just went wrong. The Colonel just watched his entire idea go to shit, and that’s enough of an excuse for Lt. Col. Sinclair to take over the project and dismiss Reynolds from it.
Since Curt and Julie didn’t stick around, they made good use of their time having sex back at Curt’s house. After they’re finished, Julie continues to wonder about what they’ve seen earlier, while Curt would rather not. As if talking about a zombie wasn’t buzzkilling enough, Curt’s dad comes knocking and tells him that they’ll be moving to Oklahoma City due to the reassignment. Curt, probably pissed off that he got to enjoy his orgasm for all of 30 seconds, flat out refuses to go. He and Julie bolt, deciding that nothing and no one will keep them apart. Curt can’t seem to get away fast enough, but speed and a hypersexual girlfriend don’t mix, so when she tries to turn him on again, it causes him to take his eyes off the road. The happy couple is about to collide with a tractor trailer head on, but a last second swerve from Curt sends them off the road. A collision is avoided, but Julie is thrown from the bike, into a telephone pole.
Remember the intro, where I talked about all the stupid things we’ve done in the name of love? Now is Curt’s moment to shine. Distraught and codependent, he does what any lovestruck kid with access to a top secret military facility would do…he brings Julie back to the base and exposes her to Trioxin. Of course it works, and Julie seems none the worse for wear, but it’s clear that this might not have been Curt’s best decision. Not only that, but they’re soon being chased through the base by a mutated zombie whose skull starts breaking through his skin. The lovers manage to get out unscathed, though one of the guards isn’t so luckily. The kids witness him getting mauled, and Julie is scared to realize that Curt’s choice to revive her will wind up backfiring on them, big time.
Curt is obviously overwhelmed too, since the next portion of the movie has the two of them going back and forth between snapping at each other and apologizing. Curt finally caves in to Julie’s demands for food, but while they’re in the bodega they wind up drawing the ire of a gang of thugs. The confrontation winds up with the store owner being shot, but as the gang attempts to escape Julie winds up channeling her inner McGruff and taking a bite out of crime (that is, she chomps down on one of the bangers’ arms). Everyone scatters, but Curt once again has to play hero and tries to take the store owner to the hospital. Despite the noble gesture, the owner is mistakenly killed by the cops, right around the same time Julie decides that the Twinkies and Ho-Ho’s she was devouring at the store weren’t enough. She heads into the back of the van, and when Curt finally pulls over, he sees his girlfriend chewing up the poor man’s grey matter. This leads to even more fighting between the two, since Curt is now disgusted and Julie can’t control what she’s becoming. Julie jumps off a bridge (silly girl, zombies don’t die that way), and Curt heads down to the water to see if he can save her again. While Curt plays the world’s worst game of Marco Polo ever, the gang from back at the store decide that Julie’s actions deserve payback, even though they can’t understand why their friend who got bit is suddenly feeling very ill.
Julie washes up in the sewers, which isn’t even the worst thing to happen to her tonight, and Curt comes after her, accompanied by a vagrant appropriately named Riverman. Riverman gives the two kids shelter after the gang happens upon them, taking them deeper into the sewer into his makeshift home. Julie still just wants to die (or at least go back to being dead), but Curt keeps shouting her down. He doesn’t seem to realize that she can’t stop her hunger, and the only way she seems to contain herself is thru self-harm. As she tells Curt at one point “the pain makes the hunger go away”, and the more she cuts into her skin, the more she’s able to maintain a sense of normalcy (to the extent of seducing Curt into sex in Riverman’s lair…who knew sewer sex was ever a thing). Curt and Julie go 0 for 2 on post-sex pleasure, because the gang discovers Riverman and starts to assault him, demanding to know where Curt and Julie are. Curt attempts to repay Riverman by coming to his aid, but the gang gets the better of the two. It’s then that we get the “big reveal” of what Julie has become, and what we see on the box art for Return of the Living Dead 3. Julie took her self-harming ways to the next level, sticking spikes through her skin as well as other accoutrements that give her the look of an undead dominatrix (which was somewhat prophetic for Clarke, as she would play the dominatrix Lady Heather in a recurring role on CSI). Everyone is shocked by her appearance, and her newfound feral nature finally takes over, as she tears through the gang members, causing them all to join her in the wonderful world of zombie-dom. Curt can’t seem to fathom that he’s the cause for all of this, and seems content to let himself be killed, but his father shows up in time to spare his son from death.
We now find ourselves back on base again, because now that the threat (including Julie and Riverman) has been contained, Sinclair is proceeding with her exoskeleton project. Curt sees what they’re doing to Riverman, basically creating a bionic zombie, and doesn’t want Julie to meet the same fate. Shit goes south for the second time at the base, and this includes various test subjects escaping containment while Curt and Julie flee. Lights go out, zombies lurk, military personnel panics, and there’s at least one oddly touching moment in the melee. Can our heroes stop the onslaught of military and mutants? Will their love lead them out alive (well, at least as alive as Julie can be?)? Can Curt make a decision that won’t seem so short-sighted?
Return of the Living Dead 3 is anything but a run of the mill horror flick. Since it was released during the direct to video boom of the late 80-mid 90’s (I can still remember the PPV previews of it when it debuted back in ’93), a lot of people wrote it off as nothing more than an in name only sequel of a once popular series. With video store shelves flooded with enough low budget content to keep viewers happy this was probably not high on many’s list to rent (except mine). The cover art featuring Melinda Clarke all done up as she would appear in the third act was a bit of a spoiler, but let’s face it, if anything was going to draw you in for ROTLD3 it’s going to be the attractive Ms. Clarke. Sure, other makeup jobs in the movie look every bit as early 90’s as they should (the plasticky, stop animation style mutants and makeup expose every bit of the low budget this film had), but Julie’s ultimate acceptance of what she is was developed into a cutting edge straight out of a fetish club. It was all very grunge, very against the norm, and the artists did an amazing job on it. Speaking of against the norm, you can’t say that without speaking of the movie’s plot. This wasn’t just zombies eat, zombies kill, zombies are bad. This was Romeo and Juliet taken to a very dark place. There’s a genuine chemistry between Edmond and Clarke, and the two are decent actors (though Curt’s whining is grating at times, we all whined like that over a girlfriend at some point, so I suppose I can give the kid a break). These are tragic heroes, done in by circumstances that they set in motion, especially Curt, who spends most of the movie post-Julie resurrection having a crisis of conscience over it. The end of the movie is a poetic bit of closure for the couple who love each other too much to lose each other, even if all of their original expectations are no longer achievable.
Love stories in zombie media is nothing new, including ones that involve zombies themselves being in love. There was the 2013 film Warm Bodies, and the “forgotten by everyone but me” 90’s comedy My Boyfriend’s Back. To tackle that aspect in a straight up horror wasn’t part for the course in 1993, so credit is due to the writers for delivering something different in a period of copycat movies made on the cheap solely for VHS and cable content. Return of the Living Dead 3 is not what anyone could have expected going in, and I think that’s the reason why it could, would, and should earn more fans.
The cable channel Epix has recently resurrected Return of the Living Dead 3 for your viewing pleasure, and it’s also available on all the usual formats (VHS, DVD, and Blu Ray). This movie gets my recommendation for straying from the standard horror formula, an attractive leading lady, and some creative sequences. I’d go so far as to say anyone who has even the slightest affinity for horror movies should see this one just for a prime example of how to be true to the genre while going in an entirely different direction. Sometimes the movies you don’t expect to surprise you over-deliver, and this is one that does so in spades.
