While this pretends to be a sequel and does employ the use of the trioxin gas that created zombies in the first two movies, there isn’t much about this movie that makes it a worthy successor to the masterpiece Return of the Living Dead or the passable Return of the Living Dead Part II.

The plot is fairly basic: an army brat named Curt is in love with his girlfriend Julie. Curt’s dad works at a top secret army research facility that does experiments on re-animating corpses for weaponizing purposes. After Curt crashes his motorcycle trying to run away with Julie. Julie is killed. Curt brings Julie to the research facility with his dad’s access card he stole at the beginning of the movie. Using the trioxin gas to re-animate Julie works, but also sets in motion the zombie apocalypse. Thanks, Curt!

The biggest departure from the other two movies is the tonal shift. Instead of the comedic, tongue-in-cheek tone of the first two movies, which poked fun of the material and never tried to get too serious, this movie decides to abandon all the comedy and it suffers.

Julie’s slow transformation to the ultimate zombie badass was kind of interesting in a uniqueness sense, and rolling in her weird self harm fetish gave it some extra depth. However, the rules for zombie creation and transitioning were kind of murky, but only because I had time to think about it instead of laughing at some zombie gags.

The production value and acting were both B-grade awesome (suckfest), but the make-up and special FX were good enough for this type of movie.

Rating:

Available to stream on: Amazon Prime (subscription required)