aka Return of the Living Dead 5

• Directed by Ellory Elkayem
• Written by William Butler and Aaron Strongoni
• Starring
  • Jenny Mollen
  • John Keefe
  • Cory Hardrict
  • Aimee-Lynn Chadwick
  • Peter Coyote

Before we launch into our examination of the fifth and last (to date) installment of this franchise which never needed to be a franchise, let’s examine the fundamental quirks or gimmicks which distinguish a Return of the Living Dead movie from any other middle-of-the-road zombie movie:

1) Trioxin. This is the chemical that brings the dead back to life. The usual source of Trioxin is canisters which contain the marinating zombie corpses that were involved in the outbreak which predates the original Return of the Living Dead (1985).

2) “Brains!” Instead of indiscriminately gutmunching their victims, these zombies specifically eat brains; the rationale given in the first movie was that these zombies instinctively know that brains will salve the pain of feeling themselves rot.

3) Headshots don’t work. Despite being a staple of Romero’s zombies and all of their imitators, the Return zombies can’t be dispatched by a simple bullet to the brain, a fact that’s central to the opening of the original movie.

“And I STILL can’t get ‘MacArthur Park’ out of my head!”

Having established these three details, I should point out that Rave to the Grave is a direct sequel to Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis (2005), the fourth installment; they were shot back-to-back as SciFi Original movies (always a mark of quality) and share the same director and writers, much of the same cast, and the same Romanian shooting locations (which means that outside of the principal cast, most of the actors who weren’t redubbed stateside speak with distinct Eastern European accents). Rave to the Grave contains — in fact, proudly displays — the modifications to the rules established above that were rampant in Necropolis: for one thing, these are wasteful zombies. They usually take single bite out of someone’s cranium, then move on to the next victim. Hey, do you think brains grow on trees? And also, headshots work. Despite this, characters who know that headshots kill zombies will nevertheless pepper a zombie’s midsection with bullets before finally dispatching it with a headshot. Why shoot a zombie once when you can shoot it half a dozen times?

I will say this for Rave to the Grave: Despite being a dumb and unnecessary movie, it at least does not rely on screenwriter-enabled stupidity on the part of all characters involved to move each scene to the next one. If that sounds like damning with faint praise, you’re right.

The first order of business is to get rid of the most expensive cast member, Peter Coyote. You’ll recall that he plays evil Uncle Charlie, the employee of the nefarious multinational corporation which likes to experiment on zombies simply because it can. He fled at the end of the last movie in an obvious setup to a sequel and returns here, trying to unload a canister of Trioxin on three gentlemen who appear to be representatives of some Eastern European mob. They are naturally suspicious that the canister contains nothing but a placebo, so they have Charlie demonstrate on some convenient corpses. Because nothing demonstrates intelligence like administering a zombifying agent to three corpses at once, corpses to which no restraints have been applied. (Hey, I said stupidity is not involved in every scene. It’s still the single most common element in this movie universe.) Exit Uncle Charlie! The only two left alive are two of the (we assume at this point) mobsters, Aldo and Gino (Claudiu Bleont and Sorin Cocis).

“I think it’s a Pong console.”

That leave nephew Julian (John Keefe), returning star of the first movie, alone in the world except for his hot blonde girlfriend Jenny (Jenny Mollen). Oh, and Becky and Cody (Aimee-Lynn Chadwick and Cory Hardrict), the other survivors of the first movie. Julian’s in college now and lives in the dorms, since I really can’t see him patching things up with Uncle Charlie, but he does go back to the house to pack up a few things of his in the attic (the artfully-decorated kind, you know, with empty picture frames hanging from nails and a birdcage sitting on a trunk). While there, he notices drag marks on the floor leading to a supposedly solid wall, and discovers a secret room with some scientific paraphernalia in it, and canisters with military stencils and electronic locks, and marks in the dust that show that there had been a third. He and Jenny together can’t puzzle out what Uncle Charlie could have been doing with them. Okay, thinking-cap time, Julian: Your parents worked for a company that turned them into combat-enabled zombies after they died. Your Uncle Charlie worked for the same company, headed their zombie research department, and enabled the reanimation of your parents. So the super-secret canisters that Uncle Charlie hid in the secret room in the attic, might be related to… “Sorry, I can’t see where you’re going with this.”

Julian and Jenny decide to take one canister to Cody, who, you might recall, is both the requisite science whiz and the requisite black character. (Having left half of their circle of friends dead in the last movie, Cody’s place in the Circle of Stereotypes isn’t quite as apparent.) He’s also become something of a binge-drinking drug friend, using the powers of science for greater inebriation in venues such as the raves DJ’ed by Jenny’s brother Jeremy (Cain Mihnea Manoliu). (Enough with the “J” names, already! Having characters named Julian, Jenny and Jeremy does nothing for viewer comprehension — or, for that matter, for reader comprehension.)

Test tubes? Of colored liquids? But that must mean — there’s SCIENCE going on here!

They drag him back to the chem lab and have him run tests, because a freshman student has free access to all of that equipment after hours on weekends. And when he discovers that, among other components, the fluid they extract from the canister contains something with a passing resemblance to Ecstasy, Jeremy takes it upon himself to sample a bit for the good of mankind. It gives him a quick-passing high unlike anything he’s had before, so while he and Cody say that they’ll take care of the canister until Monday for Julian, they instead try to go into business for themselves, creating hundreds of capsules of the substance they dub “Z,” because when the rush hits you just stand there like a zombie. (Oh, irony!) And with the help of the local drug dealer Skeet (Catalin Paraschiv) who dispenses his wares like the shady muppet who always tried to hook Ernie up with the letter M, they manage to distribute the stuff all over campus in anticipation of next week’s Halloween rave.

At this point, you could probably write the script for the main plot yourself, or trust the task to a rudimentary software package or a vat-grown colony of rat neurons that have been taught their task by the selective application of punishment and reward. As the “Z” spreads, a few people are wholly zombified via overdose, but you just know that the main action is going to have to wait until the climactic Halloween rave. But that’s a long time away, so we’ve got some subplots for filler. Aldo and Gino turn out not to be mobsters but Interpol agents who are tired of expressing concern about videotape piracy and want to track down the missing Trioxin themselves. (Their revelation as Interpol agents is not so much a plot twist and more a symptom of sloppy, unfocused writing or really haphazard editing.) Jenny carts the canister to the genetics lab where she enjoys the same free-range privileges that Cody enjoys in the chemistry lab, which leads to some infected hamsters getting out and spreading the contagion. Becky, the other survivor of the last movie, is in a subplot labeled “let me out of here”; her second appearance on screen, she gets infected when scratched by a zombie. (Scratched? Seriously, in what zombie mythology is that not a foul?)

Great. Now everyone will want to hold their raves in Romania.

At least this installment is leavened by some humor, reminiscent (if you squint) of the first couple of installments and in contrast to Necropolis, which is a good example of why “silly” and “serious” don’t mix. Aldo and Gino provide most of the comic relief, always arguing about who gets the potential promotion and butchering American idioms; in the end, they steal the costumes of two Brunhildas to get into the rave. Not quite up to the level of “Send more paramedics,” but… On the flip side, though I had to make up the new term “scare-grab” to describe those idiotic moments when a sudden hand on a character’s shoulder turns out to be someone innocuous. (Add it to the glossary, Ken!)

The makeup is generally good, with a couple of odd habits. According to the latex work here, the first thing that happens immediately when you die is that the cartilage of your nose shrinks, leaving a clear ridge on the bridge of your nose where the bone ends. It’s a good effect in moderation, but it appears on every zombie, no matter how fresh, including the bony-faced actor whose nose bone obviously ends somewhere other than where the appliance says it should.

The question is, are those verbs or nouns?

It’s not as aggressively bad as Necropolis, so if that’s all that it takes to sell you on a zombie movie, consider yourself sold. Of all of the missed opportunities in this movie, I think the biggest comes after the canister is finally opened and the slimy, dessicated cadaver inside (an admittedly welcome effect) goes on a walkabout; not a soul ever remarks that this “miracle drug” that half the campus is crazy for is actually decades-old corpse juice.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: I got to 91 before I lost count
• breasts: 14
• explosions: 5
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• scare grabs: 3
• actors who’ve been on Star Trek: 0