Return of the Living Dead Part II (1988)
"Return Of The Living Dead" is one of my favourite horror comedies of all time. I decided to see what the sequels were like. I'd heard that part 3 was the good sequel, but I didn't want to be missing anything.
The first movie began with a worker at a depot showing the ropes to a new recruit or possibly a boy on work experience. This time around the two of them are here again, but this time the older of them is collecting skeletons (and essentially graverobbing at the same time) and he's once again showing a new guy the ropes. These two are still funny, but they've got nowhere such a good script this time around.
At the heart of the film we have a child actor who manages to be pretty much the only other interesting character. Still, the zombies look pretty cool and there's still a clear sense that this is the same movie series as before.
The problem is that both a sense of horror and a sense of humour are both mostly missing from this film. The zombies aren't scary and the jokes are falling flat.
Still, while the story meanders I wouldn't say this was an unpleasant experience. As a poor attempt to recreate the first film, I can't say I was completely bored by it. But it's definitely not a good film, all the same.
D+
Return of the Living Dead III (1993)
Straight away this was an improvement on the second movie in the series. It's not long before we see the zombies being experimented on and this time we begin from the perspective of the shady US military faction dealing with the zombifaction problem. Apparently it's been decided that zombies might have some military application if they can easily freeze and store the zombies to quell an outbreak.
Unfortunately one of the military professionals working on how to handle the damage caused by the toxic substance that creates the zombies has a rebellious son with a girlfriend who is a bad influence. Little does he know that his security card has been stolen and that his son and his son's girlfriend are going to sneak into the complex.
The girlfriend is a bit of a goth and seems to actually be sexually excited by the idea of zombies, which is a little odd... Anyway, the two lovers decide to leave town, there's an accident and the girlfriend breaks her neck. The boyfriend knows of one surefire way to bring her back to life and he returns to the complex. And you can guess where things go from there.
In the original "Return of the Living Dead" there was a zombie commonly known as "tar man" he certainly looked distinctive, but he looked less like a dead body and more like a cartoon character. Next to a canister of the toxic substance we see a brief appearance of a zombie in the second movie. This time around there's also a rather awesome zombie, this time with his face splitting apart during the struggle revealing the skull underneath.
As the boyfriend is trying to run away with his now-undead girlfriend, they bump into a latino gang. One of the actors involved in this group I recognised from Rodriguez' "Desperado" and he's not made best use of here. Another figure the two lovers run into is a black man who calls himself "river man" but actually seems to be living in the sewers next to a storm drain. He's playing a rather cliched helpful and wise and yet half-mad figure, but I must say the acting from him is probably some of the best in the film. So it's all the more emotional when he gets turned into some kind of robo-zombie later on. (The military's backup plan is to provide zombies with remote controlled metal exoskeletons which are powered by the perpetual motion of the zombies. Not least since zombies appear to need no food or water yet never seem to run out of energy.)
We already noticed that the girlfriend (now zombie-girlfriend) seemed to have some weird fetishes when she was alive. Now as a zombie she seems to become a self-harming zombie. In order to discourage herself from eating her boyfriend's brains she puts spikes through her body. It's not quite in line with the first movie where the zombies eat brains to quell the unbearable pain of being dead and decomposing, but it's a cool new idea anyway, so I found it easy to forgive.
The plot is a bit meandering and after the initial awesome zombie I mentioned, there's not much cool gore here either. There's some pretty cool ideas here and I must say that I enjoyed the robo-zombie idea. Essentially it's the ideas that make the zombie film what it is. While I'd say part two was on the lower side of a D+, this is probably on the higher side of a D+, but the fact is that neither movie is terribly good. And both pale by comparison to the hilarious first entry.
D+
Warm Bodies (2013)
This was one of the films I was excited about at the beginning of the year and admittedly it was because of the trailer most of all. Nicholas Hoult is a great actor and it was obvious just from the trailer that he would be on top form here and, just to clarify, he is AWESOME here.
However, when judging what a film will be like it's generally a good idea to look up the director. Jonathan Levine's previous movie was "50/50" which I really didn't like. I know a lot of people loved it and I will admit that "50/50" also had a fantastic lead actor being brilliant in the form of Joseph Gordon-Levitt. But my problem with "50/50" is quite big in that I found myself mostly unengaged with the drama and found myself mostly unamused by the comedy. It seemed to me to be another of these "dramadies" so-called because they don't have enough jokes to be called comedies and don't have enough drama not to be called comedies.
Still, any director can have an off-day or a film you don't get. Also, I couldn't ignore that perhaps my biggest problem with "50/50" was being completely unimpressed with Seth Rogen. I had every confidence that "Warm Bodies" would be different.
Let me first acknowledge that the first, what, 15 minutes of "Warm Bodies"? That whole section is BRILLIANT. It's amusing, inventive, silly, clever and just generally great fun with a combination of Nicholas Hoult's performance and a highly engaging voiceover of his internal mental monologue. He comments on how he needs to do more with his life and how he really wants to connect with someone. He even has a best friend who he often sits with and fails to communicate with as the two of them stare and grunt meaningfully at one another.
One element that I really enjoyed in "Warm Bodies" and was probably my favourite part of this new zombie mythology is that we not only have zombies eating brains, but we see that they gain the memories of their victims. So when our zombie protagonist eats the brain of the female protagonist's boyfriend, he falls in love with her.
All Nicholas Hoult's zombie can remember of his name is "R" and the female protagonist is called Julie. Guess which story made famous by Shakespeare is being aluded to here? Julie is the daughter of the leader of the anti-zombie resistance, playing by John Malkovich, while R is an ordinary zombie who persuades the other zombies to leave so that he can hide Julie from them.
R gets Julie to hide out in the abandoned aeroplane that has become his personal den. Somehow he's got a record player in there which he can control perfectly well (which I thought was a bit of a stretch). He and Julie. It's finally at this point where I think things are getting a little too mushy and a little too hipster-Twilight. A boyfriend who scares the female protagonist, but who likes the same music while they spend time together mostly not speaking. And we are stuck in that aeroplane for far too long.
Eventually they get moving and it becomes clear that the plot has nowhere to go. The trailer revealed that love changes zombies back into human beings and yeah, that's what happens. The sign that you are changing back into a human? Your heart beats. Meanwhile, the zombies that have completely lost their humanity, called "bonies" will kill anything with a heartbeat. So we do get some pretty cool fight scenes towards the end.
In the end, this is a film that could have been a LOT better and while there are plenty of great elements, there are also points where the film drags and is a great deal more predictable than it should be. I'd like to give particular kudos to Rob Corddry, who plays R's zombie best friend. I can't quite think of where I've seen him before though apparently he's been in both "Arrested Development" and "Community" so presumably I've seen him there. But he's really good here.
Not awful, but I was expecting something a lot better.
C+