- Directed by Brian Yuzna
- Written by John Penney
- Starring
- Mindy Clarke
- J. Trevor Edmonds
- Kent McCord
- Sarah Douglas
- Basil Wallace
- Produced by Gary Schmoeller and Brian Yuzna
Consider, if you will, the following premise:
“When a young man’s ladylove is killed in an accident, he breaks into a military installation where they store the 2-3-5 Trioxin compound (the reanimative agent featured in Return of the Living Dead and its sequel) and uses it to bring her back to life. Unfortunately, she slowly succumbs to her zombie nature, betraying his dreams of restoring things to ‘how they once were.’”
If Jim Henson were Satan, this would be Hell.
You gotta admit, it’s a premise with a lot of dramatic potential. It breaks from the pattern of the previous two films — the tongue-in-cheek zombie siege — and makes it a darker, more personal story. A lot of occasional for meaty internal conflict and raging denial.
You might want to just sit back and think about that concept for a bit. Savor it. Imagine the movie you would expect to spring, pretty much fullgrown, from that premise. I can almost guarantee that the movie in your head is better than the one on the screen.
In fact, it’s hard to recount the storyline without turning it into a laundry list of foolheaded mistakes. Let’s start with our protagonists: Pseudo-teen Curt (J. Trevor Edmund), and his pseudo-goth girlfriend Julie (Mindy Clarke). Despite the fact that these are the people we’re supposed to care about and identify with, their first actions are to steal the cardkey which Curt’s dad, Col. John Reynolds (Kent McCord) uses to let himself into the secret military project he heads. Why? Well, partly because Curt’s got the standard issues with his authoritarian father (stemming largely from the standard trauma of having a dead mom), and partly because Julie thinks it’d be all cool to sneak onto a guarded military installation and kinda nose around. All of you in the viewing audience who aren’t self-centered, thoughtless brats, please feel free to feel alienated from our protagonists.
“I’m sure I left the TARDIS right around this corner…”
Not that general stupidity is limited to the younger generation. Col. Reynolds’ project, and the facility housing it, are run with a lack of security, common sense, and brains in general that I hope the zombies don’t have to survive solely on the grey cells they scrounge within. The building itself seems to be composed entirely of used corridors from old Dr. Who episodes, spray-painted rust orange, with bizarre slits cut through the walls. And Reynolds’ project involves using Trioxin gas to create undead soldiers (assuming that, by “soldiers,” you mean “violent dead guys that flail around in an uncontrollable fashion”). For this test for hus superior, Colonel Peck (James T. Callahan) and rival Lt. Col. Sinclair (Sarah Douglas — how much of Army brass is actually composed of British nationals?), they hook an emaciated cadaver (Clarence Epperson) up to hanging restraints in a large room, then let gasmasked scientists douse the cadaver (and most of the room) with gas from a Trioxin canister. Never mind that some sort of self-contained tube for the zombie would necessitate a far lesser amount of the gas, and afford much less risk of a containment leak. The second part of the plan is to show that the zombies can be disabled by shooting them in the head with freezing bullets. Funny that no one thought that attaching a radio-controlled freeze-injecting unit to the zombie’s skull before reanimating it would dispense with the necessity of loading a hokey single-shot freeze rifle and taking careful aim at the zombie to shut it down.
So while Curt and Julie watch from the most surveillance-convenient air duct in the world, they reanimate the corpse, measure its vitals, shoot it in the head… and then the gasmasked scientists proceed to act like it’s no longer a threat until it crawls around and starts biting them. And since the people in Reynolds’ control room really weren’t watching, and there’s no continency plan, Reynolds and Co. basically stare in horror at their ill-controlled experiment gone awry.
At least someone in the military realizes that losing at least two trained personnel in a supposedly controlled laboratory test is a bad sign in leadership, because when Reynolds gets home that night, he announces to Curt that he’s been reassigned to Oklahoma City within the week. Curt reacts predictably — anywhere but Oklahoma! — and refuses to go with Dad. After all, he and Julie have just had hot zombie-inspired sex, and exchanged the requisite “I’ll never leave you” lines that effectively guarantee an immediate death for one of them.
“Boogah!”
The one turns out to be Julie; as Curt storms out of the house, the two of them go out joyriding on his bike, and since Julie is unable to keep her hands in her own pants, they end up in an accident which sends her flying improbably for about forty feet before slamming into a telephone pole, breaking her neck.
Quicker than you can say “plot contrivance,” Curt remembers that whole reanimation thing, and trundles Julie off to revive her. This time, he manages to sneak with a corpse in tow onto a military base which has just experienced a casualty-causing snafu in the last couple of hours. (One expects the security guards to be running around with peashooters and nametags reading “SEKOORITTY” scrawled in crayon.) And since no one’s bothered to lock the lab or stow the canister of Trioxin since the test, he immediately starts pumping her full of gas.
Now, wanna hear something downright scary? Up to now has been the good part. From here, it gets really stupid. Because, having established the premise, nobody thought to attach a story. Curt and the revived Julie battle their way out past the zombie in the Trioxin canister that Curt accidentally let out, Curt clues her into that whole “You’re really dead, you just think you’re not” thing, and they immediately go… to a convenience store. Hey, Julie’s got some unidentifiable cravings, which either means she’s starting to turn into a zombie or she’s pregnant. While there, they accidentally piss off some videogame-playing chollos, and the whole rest of the movie — the entire remaining running time, save for a too-long ending that was even more annoying than the preceding story — is driven by these four homeboys chasing Curt and Julie through the sewers.
Eww. Lips that touch brains shall never touch mine.
The one interesting thought here is treated more as an afterthought and excuse for further Goth posturing: Julie discovers that pain distracts her from her hunger for brains, so she starts impaling herself on whatever sharp doodad she can find. By the end, she’s got glass through her cheeks and forehead, weighted nipple piercings, nails in succession through her forearm, and leather straps threaded through the skin of her neck. It’s all well done, but it’s just window-dressing.
More interesting questions would have been, How does Curt deal with the fact that, in trying to save his girlfriend, he turned her into a monster? How far is he willing to go for love in helping her through her affliction, either by pain or by brain? What’s for lunch? Instead we get gang-bangers in the tunnels, and some necrophilia (animate, but nonetheless icky in concept and boring in execution).
There’s also a tedious sequence with a black homeless man (ever notice that white homeless men in movies are urbanely drunk, but black homeless men are cryptic prophets and sages?), who helps them escape through the sewers and gives Curt a “pass it forward” Mardi Gras coin, which is entirely a wedged-in set-up for part of the movie’s conclusion that’s so annoying, I’m not even going to tell you about it. And meanwhile, Dad is out looking for the two lovebirds, always a step behind.
“Sticking your neck out?” Naah, too corny even for me.
The zombie makeups are passable, although they keep outstripping their resources with poorly executed pieces like a severed head and spinal column that looks like it was sculpted out of Silly Putty. And did I mention that the ending is overlong and undersmart?
Possibly the most disappointing thing here is that the main plot idea, while nifty, isn’t original anyway. There’s nothing here that Wes Craven’s Deadly Friend didn’t do better seven years earlier (not that Deadly Friend‘s any great piece of cinema to begin with). One might say that the story itself was reanimated, and not unlike Julie herself, deteriorated quickly.
Some Notable Totables:
(all from the unrated version)
- body count: 16
- breasts: 2
- explosions: 1
- ominous thundertstorms: 0
- actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 2
- Mindy Clarke (Julie) played “Sarin” (as Melinda Clarke) in the Enterprise pilot “Broken Bow”
- Basil Wallace (“Riverman,” the homeless guru) played “Duras’ Aide” in the TNG episode “Reunion”
