Rebelling Against Grief in ‘Return of the Living Dead 3’
The Return of the Living Dead is one of the greatest horror comedies of the 1980s. It is the ultimate punk rock horror film. The zombies are smart, they think for themselves, they are fast, they feel themselves rotting and eat brains because they are the only thing that offsets that constant agony. It is a hopeless scenario for the film’s eclectic cast made up of punks, preps, and blue-collar workers. That’s what makes the spirit of the film so special. It’s basically depicting the end of the world, there’s no way out, it should be one of the most nihilistic movies ever made, yet it’s wacky and almost slapstick in its approach. The entire mood of Return of the Living Dead is that if it’s the end of the world, and we’re all going to burn, we might as well party. I love that about it.
Return of the Living Dead Part II pushed things in an even more comedic direction, amping up the silliness and lightening on the dread and gore to the point that it’s almost a kid’s movie. That alone makes it unique. It’s also a retread of the first film’s formula right down to bringing back James Karen and Thom Matthews as characters who have different names, but are essentially the same people they played in the first film, going through exactly the same scenario.
Given how uniquely linked those first two were, Return of the Living Dead 3 sticks out like a sore thumb for many people. It does not bring back any of the lead actors from the original, it does not retread those basic plot points — at least not in the same way — and, in fact, it’s not even a comedy. It’s almost natural at that point to say, “Well, it simply isn’t Return of the Living Dead.” But that’s a huge mistake, because the way it goes about being a Return of the Living Dead sequel is actually genius, and also because it is in general one of the greatest horror sequels ever made.
One distinctly genius thing about Return of the Living Dead 3 is that it is a completely different film than the first, even a completely different type of film, obeying the exact same rules. It honors the lore, the history, and all of the numerous things that make the zombies of this franchise different. Because there are many. Return of the Living Dead zombies are conscious zombies, self-aware even as the hunger completely takes them over, which makes this truly the only zombie franchise in which this movie could even have existed as a sequel.
This should never be derided as a sequel that is “too different” or “should have been called something else” because this entire formula of telling a totally different story within the same world, playing with the same tools as the original, is exactly what a great sequel should do. We’ve gone from borderline slapstick horror comedy to tragic, doomed romance, and yet everything in this movie is an expansion, inversion, or update of things laid out in the first.
Return of the Living Dead is the ultimate punk horror movie, in terms of visual aesthetics and its outrageous cast of characters, as well as its entire tone. It’s a movie that’s basically about the end of the world, and offers absolutely no hope. Forces more powerful than us are going to wipe us out to save their own asses, but they’re also completely inept, which is how this entire problem started in the first place. We’re all going to die and we might as well go out laughing. That’s the best way to sum up the overall mood of the original film.
For Return of the Living Dead 3, director Brian Yuzna and writer John Penney updated that approach for the body mod culture that had rose to prominence in the mid-‘80s and only continued to thrive into the ’90s. It was the same culture that had inspired Clive Barker to write The Hellbound Heart and Hellraiser very shortly after that. Hellraiser and Return of the Living Dead 3 share immediately obvious similarities, to the point that I think many people take one look at the poster and assume this is a Hellraiser ripoff with a zombie flourish, but they’re simply pulling from the same influences, visually and spiritually. Like Hellraiser, Return of the Living Dead 3 is about blurring, perhaps even erasing the line between love and pain.
First and foremost, there’s the fact that the relationship is doomed from virtually the moment the movie begins. Curt and Julie are teenage rebels, madly in love, living completely in the moment without so much as a single thought toward tomorrow. But Curt’s father has just fumbled a military experiment to weaponize the living dead, and now they’re going to have to move again. No matter what happens, today is the last time Curt will ever see Julie. They’re over. Every single thing Curt does is an attempt to prolong the inevitable. Julie literally dies in their attempt to run away immediately after learning that he has to leave. In Return of the Living Dead 3, death and grief, in particular, are things to be rebelled against, to be rejected outright. Life itself is an act of rebellion, and an unsustainable one when the writing is already on the wall. This is an ending, and it was going to be one even if they had lived. Their refusal to let go of one another kills them both.
As Julie transforms into a zombie, she discovers that inflicting pain can keep her growing, gnawing hunger at bay, and that is the catalyst for her eventual physical transformation. It is a flawless inversion of a line in the original film, in which a zombie explains that they eat brains to quell the pain of being dead. All Julie wants is to appear normal, to pretend that nothing has happened. Hours ago, she was pure passion, and now she just wants to feel something and it is a remarkable transformation to watch, especially for a low-budget threequel.
Melinda Clarke’s performance is incredible. She’s given so much to act in such a short amount of time, but it’s also just the way she moves. There’s something animal-like, but also strangely fluid to her movements after she becomes a zombie. I absolutely love the shot when she emerges from the doorway, fully transformed, uncoiling like a snake in a way that is both captivating and unnerving, creepy and erotic all at once. By the time she’s revealed in full as depicted on the poster, and Curt still refuses to leave her behind, the line between love and pain is gone forever, and pain can no longer keep the hunger at bay. That’s obvious even in her design, where she has pierced and mutilated her body for both aesthetic and practical purposes. She has driven a knife through one hand and sewn a strap holding a rock into the other, almost like a cavewoman, all for the purpose of hunting prey, to crack open the skull and get to the sweet brain beneath.
Return of the Living Dead 3 is a film about letting go. More accurately, it’s a study of what happens when you can’t. There’s an overlooked single line early on in which Curt’s dad mentions his dead mother, and it’s clear that’s something they’re both still dealing with, or more likely still ignoring. That moment informs everything he does afterward.
He watches his girlfriend die in front of him, he watches her be dead in front of him, and even when he is disgusted by her, he cannot move on. He barely even lets himself think about it. And because of that, he destroys everything in the process. Return of the Living Dead 3 is basically Pet Sematary for Gen X teens with septum piercings, and that is a beautiful thing to be.
