Dan O’Bannon’s Return of the Living Dead (1985) was the rare horror comedy that was as much a bona fide homage to the films it referenced as it was a parody of them. With tongue planted firmly in cheek, O’Bannon responded to the ghoulish apocalyptic anxieties of George Romero’s Dead Trilogy—the final installment of which, Day of the Dead, came out the same year as O’Bannon’s film—with goopy zombies that could talk (“send more paramedics”) and were decked out in punk attire. Return of the Living Dead was a modest hit which, naturally, spawned a sequel in Return of the Living Dead Part II (1988), a similarly goofy (and similarly plotted) sequel that saw O’Bannon replaced with Shock Waves (1977) director Ken Wiederhorn. Both films operate similarly to The Evil Dead (1981) and Evil Dead II (1987), with the sequel liberally borrowing from the first film while also making ample use of additional resources, albeit maybe not as successfully as Raimi’s superlative follow-up. This all leads us to 1993’s Return of the Living Dead III, a film that couldn’t be more different from its predecessors.
Brian Yuzna, who came to fame as the producer for Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator (1985) helmed the third entry. Throughout the second half of the ‘80s, he produced films as disparate as the gory body horror opus From Beyond (1986) and Disney’s Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989). And, in 1989, Yuzna directed his first film: Society. A now semi-iconic litmus test of perversion for the most jaded cinephiles, Society proved that Yuzna could direct as well as he could produce. It made sense that someone involved with Re-Animator and Society would helm the third Return of the Living Dead film, until it turned out not to be a comedy.
Return of the Living Dead III belongs to the pantheon of legacy sequels that have a tenuous—at best—connection to their source. When the film opens, we can glimpse the canisters of Trioxin, the reanimation agent that brings the dead back to life in the two earlier films, but beyond that there is little resemblance to the films that O’Bannon or Widerhorn directed. Instead, Yuzna’s Return of the Living Dead film is something wholly unexpected: a romance. And a rather sincere one at that.
Yuzna is known for his kitchen sink approach to genre and that’s on full display in Return of the Living Dead III. His film effortlessly segues between ‘50s era sci-fi spectacle, oppressively gory zombie film, and inner-city crime film before careening head first into undead romance. The crux of Yuzna’s film, written by The Kindred (1987) screenwriter John Penney, is that a teenager (who, of course, happens to be the son of a military colonel) brings his girlfriend back to life using the Trioxin compound after she dies in a motorcycle accident. But, she doesn’t come back as herself. Instead, she comes back as a heavily pierced and body-modded goth zombie! Yuzna’s film scraps the outright comedy of the first two films in favor of much gorier violence (that required the film to be heavily edited to earn an R-rating) and an oddly endearing element of romance that never feels forced. It ends up being a great, unexpected, sequel, but an even better love story.
Return of the Living Dead III is currently scheduled to screen tonight, February 23, at Nitehawk Williamsburg as part of the series “Romancing the Dead.”
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