REVIEW: Return of the Living Dead, Part 2

I always say that you can tell a lot about a movie by the way they title the sequel. Do they use the same title, but slap the digit "2" after it, or do they go for the ever-classier Roman Numeral "II"? Do they keep the original title, then add a hook-subtitle after a colon? Or do they just come up with something new and hope fans of the previous installment figure it out on their own?

Well, to illustrate my point (or not), we have "Return of the Living Dead, Part 2," that late-eighties classic zombie film that most people remember for inexplicably featuring the reanimated corpse of Michael Jackson. Yes, I said that. Pretty much casting aside the first "Return...," and ignoring the fairly huge ramifications of the first movie's ending, this one comes across as a lighter, brighter zombie comedy. Also, it's dumber. In fact, this movie's essentially made for the ten-year-olds in the crowd that weren't allowed to see it until they were too old to be in the target audience anyway. And by the point when they were allowed to see R-rated features, they probably discovered that they were better off playing outside than watching this anyhow.

Taking a page from Part One, the US government has been up to no good with its experiments again: cutting taxes for the rich, soaking the poor, dropping necessary social reforms, taking us into a war without merit, consistently using the presidential seal as a dodge to bleed the impover-- what? Oh, sorry. They reanimated the dead. And, in either A) the usual government style or B) the usual zombie film style, they lose one of the barrels that's filled with a corpse and the toxins that will bring him back as a brain-eating zombie. I don't think I'm going to ruin the film by saying that he gets loose, some living dead things show up, and it's left to an eleven-year-old, a teenage girl, and a TV repairman to save the quarantined town.

Now, the zombie genre is my favorite genre, so I'm a little bit biased when it comes to the hungry dead. I'm exceptionally forgiving when it comes to zombie films, but while this isn't the worst I've seen, it sure isn't among the greats. If "Return of the Living Dead" is a box of Band-Aids, then "Return of the Living Dead, Part 2" is a box of Plastic Health Strips, another inferior knock-off without the intelligence or wit of its predecessor. (METAPHOR!) In other words, it's the kind of movie people point at when they say that sequels are a bad idea. The film is set up as a horror flick, but from the five-minute mark you know that it's just a comedy with the trappings of a horror film. That's fine and all, except that it's a shitty comedy, too. Come to think of it, there's really no reason to see this unless you're a zombie completist like myself. Or a Michael Jackson completist. Or you're not a Michael Jackson completist, but just want to see him die, and Thriller isn't enough anymore.

The new DVD features a commentary track by the director, Ken Wiederhorn, as well as Thor van Lingen, the actor who played Billy the undead bully. I'd be going into more detail about what went wrong with this movie (bad acting, bad makeup, rehashing Part Uno for no reason) but because of DVD technology, the director himself can tell you just how much he didn't want to be making this movie. At least the grown-up Thor, who hasn't had a credit to his name since, provides reasonably interesting comments about how cool it was to be a thirteen-year-old zombie; also refreshingly, he doesn't seem to have any bitterness over not working in Hollywood afterwards unlike Chunk during the "Goonies" commentary. The DVD also mysteriously features a new score for the film (surprising to the director as well), which is conducted at about the same quality level as the movie. The original score can be heard on the French-language track. Actually, if you end up watching this, watch it in French. That way, the score is better, you won't know how bad most of the jokes are, and you'll probably be giggling enough to not notice the special effects.

ARE YOU ASTONISHED?

• Doesn't Billy the bully already look dead, before he's dead? It's a little anti-climactic when he actually dies.
  
• The last line in the movie: funny when I was 11, unforgivable at 25.
  
• I don't even need to mention that Michael Jackson's corpse dances across the screen, but I will.
• On Billy's nightstand, he's got a George 'The Animal' Steele WWF action figure. I had that one when I was Billy's age! Luckily, I didn't tamper with a cadaver, and have lived to outgrow the WWF.
  
• Aren't brains hard to get at? I know my skull is pretty tough, and it takes some serious force to get through it. More force than teeth. And since zombies that carry big jagged rocks or baseball bats are a lot scarier than ANY of the zombies in this movie, it's a surprising choice they made.