Return of the Living Dead Part II

In sleepy suburbia, toxins from a canister are released by two punk kids in the neighborhood unleashing the dead from their graves in a nearby cemetery, while also making a few characters (one of those two bullies and two graverobbers) sick through breathing the fumes in (soon turning them into the walking dead as well). Will those still in the area not infected be safe or can they find an exit strategy even though military has removed most of the locals and quarantined the town?

**½ / *****

“Lord forgive me…the dead, I thought you were finished with them.”

While I have a soft spot for Return of the Living Dead Part 2, after watching it again tonight, I can most certainly say that this isn’t a film that ever comes at the jugular or offers anything even remotely terrifying. It is strictly built to poke fun at zombies (the ones preferably from the previous film directed by Dan O’Bannon) and provide some entertainment to teenage kids of the 80s. The first film seemed built for an adult cult audience. This one seemed to target kids with a strong stomach…the kinds of kids who would sneak viewings when mothers and fathers are asleep.

 

The sequel is not a strong R, but it does have a few gore make-up set pieces that put it just over. Like a zombie split in two by a shotgun blast, as the lower torso, legs quite actively walking, moves off while the upper half reaches out still for brains. Or a neighbor of our young heroes getting his head bit into by a collapsed zombie hit by a cable van. The lower jaw of a zombie is yanked off as its tongue wags around without it! There’s even the return of “slime barrel zombie” as it calls out for brains while the film’s kid lead flees. Zombies suffer gunfire, beheadings, screwdrivers, but damned electricity is just too much to withstand.

 

The effects of rotted faces are of the Halloween store rubber mask variety. It isn’t more apparent than when a character punches a zombie’s face and it squeezes out green slime. A shot cuts and she pulls her hand from a hole in its face. And it’s obvious because there are so many close-ups of the zombies. The film plays the zombies entirely as tools for our amusement. When zombies lose all effectiveness as creatures to fear and there aren’t scenes and events within the films featuring them that are considered food for thought, I think it is almost a sure thing that certain fans of the wildly popular genre will be a bit polarized or disappointed. I personally think occasionally a zombie film can be used to entertain and not exactly demand a gulp in the throat or pounding heart beat…or that emotional impact that does come with the human race’s struggle and inability to stave off a potential apocalypse.

 

 

Still the cast gives the material their best shot. James Karen and Thom Matthews (along with redheaded Suzanne Snyder as Thom’s love interest) go the hammy route, with overreactions after breathing in the Trioxin gas (a canister falls from a military jeep, soon to find its way into a culvert, discovered by Thor Van Lingen, the chief bully of the film’s kid hero played by Michael Kenworthy, responsible for releasing the gas and a slimy zombie) while robbing a grave in a mausoleum. Karen must have been encouraged to look as particularly cartoonish as possible with overt animated reactions and whining/lamenting as he turns zombie. Like in the previous film, Thom and Karen slowly turn zombie, as death starts to take them the pain of the process is elaborated throughout until the desire to eat brains has taken over.

 

This sequel allows, though, the small group to venture out a bit more than in the first film. A town is vacated of most of its residents, with the small number in the cast trying to either escape or come up with a way to deal with the zombie crisis. The military is behind the quarantine, and so we follow the group as zombies seem to come out of the woodwork at times, while certain instances show a town absent its citizenry. Marsha Dietlein is Kenworthy’s big sis (yep, she has an aerobics scene where she’s working out to a video; this video would later prove helpful as zombies become transfixed by the video!), Dana Ashbrook as the cable guy who graduated a year after Dietlein (and proves to be her love interest and courageous in his attempts to keep her and her brother safe), and Philip Bruns shows up in the middle of the film as another neighbor pulled into the “great escape” when his car is needed to drive them out of harm’s way. With animated electrical bolts at the end as Ashbrook devises a plan to use a power plant as a weapon against the horde of undead, a local cemetery producing plenty of undead to rise from beyond their graves, and a severed hand giving our heroes the “finger”, this film aims to please.

 

I guess I can reason why this is held fondly by some who, like me, watched it on HBO back in time past or on home video; if it weren’t part of the Living Dead series, though, this might would have been lingering still in cult obscurity. The close resemblance between the two Karen and Matthews play in the first film and this sequel is jokingly mentioned when they are in Bruns’ car and Thom states that this seems like it has happened to them before! This is like some sort of alternate universe Return of the Living Dead in relation to the first film. Karen and Thom’s involvement will give this sequel a boost, but they really don’t stray far from how they were in the first film. Karen and Thom's facial reactions to the crises overwhelming them certainly are theatrical. Kabuki theater, with the two of them taking their characters from the original one step further into hysterics thanks to the zombie virus coursing through them.

I was thinking about this film and next to zombie films of today, it almost seems like a classic. It has enough comedy that might be funny enough to endear itself to an audience looking for cheap laughs. Because the zombie films and series of today either go completely towards the dark and melodramatic or on the opposite end with total hi-jinx and "please laugh at me...PLEASE!!!!" comedy, Return of the Living Dead Part 2 seems to remain nearly family friendly (as far as brain-eating zombie films go, at least) and wanting to entertain not have their audience aching and in deep thought about the human condition. There's time for those kind of zombie films and thankfully other times brain candy that exists to have us just chill back and waste 80 minutes without pondering how we would exist in a world overran by the undead.