REVIEW: Return of the Living Dead, Parts 4 and 5 (2005)

Since the two movies premiered back-to-back on the Sci-Fi Channel the other night featuring the same characters and directed by the same guy (and I actually watched them both in a row), I'm just going to throw the two together and pretend it's one really long horrible movie, instead of two individual crappy movies. It'll save me time and energy, since I can write things like "These movies are awful" rather than go through the laborious process of typing "ROTLD 4 is an awful movie. ROTLD 5 is also an awful movie."

After a long wait since 1993's Return of the Living Dead Part 3, the zombie-comedy franchise returns with the light-hearted and stupid Return of the Living Dead 4: Necropolis. It begins in the shell of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor (the first film to shoot there since the disaster), with skeevy Peter Coyote as a mysterious scientist who's determined to get his hands on the last remaining canisters of Trioxin, known to us ROTLD fans as the chemical that makes dead people get the munchies. Coyote makes a deal with the Ukrainian (or Russian) Mafia to get the canisters back to the US for research, presumably of the "evil" kind. After a short zombie scare, Coyote takes off with the cans of Trioxin, and then there's a totally inexplicable car accident that has nothing to do with him and probably happens somewhere else in the world.

Actually, let me backtrack for a second: the movie really begins with a short commercial for the fictional company "Hybra Tech," which is the Umbrella Corporation from Resident Evil with a different name. According to the commercial, they do everything from make cheese products to being the number one name in quelling all zombie infestations, which leads us to believe that zombie outbreaks are not all that rare or secret. I'm only mentioning this because it's the only way I can explain everyone's complete lack of surprise that there are walking dead people later on. Now, onward again.

Turns out that Coyote's scheming Dr. Garrison is taking care of his two nephews Julian and "Pyro" (named for his firestarting habits), since their parents died -- in a car accident! Just like the unexplained one we saw a few minutes ago! I'm making this connection apparent for you, because the movie doesn't. Even now, I'm not certain that they ever mention that the parents died in a car accident, but that's the only plausible explanation for having the accident scene in the movie in the first place.

Coyote, of course, is a horrible parental figure, spending all of his days and nights over at Hybra Tech being evil and reanimating arms and stuff. Julian is pretty much left to fend for himself and Pyro, all the while trying to convince his pal Zeke that he's not trying to hook up with Zeke's ex Katie, who -- for plot convenience -- works as a security guard in the Hybra Tech compound. I would talk about how bizarre it is for a high school girl to be a security guard at a giant top-secret lab, but, y'know, not fair to the movie.

Finally, after forever and ever, the plot really begins. Zeke hurts himself slightly in a motorcycle accident, and when Julian tries to visit him at the hospital, they tell him that Zeke has died. Feeling like bearing bad news, he calls Katie at work, only to find out that she just watched the paramedics wheel Zeke's still-breathing body into the Hybra Tech building. Something is amiss! Julian gets his pal Cody to hack into the Hybra Tech computers, where they find a secret weapons research program called "Necropolis." Being idiot kids, they decide to grab their dirtbikes, break into the compound, and rescue their pal.

Turns out to no one's surprise that Hybra Tech is trying to develop the very same zombie weapons program that began in Return of the Living Dead Part 3, then continued into Resident Evil, then Resident Evil: Apocalypse, and probably five or six thousand other unrelated movies. They've got a whole storage facility for angry zombies downstairs, and that's where they've locked up Zeke, so of course the kids make their way down there. You now get one guess as to what happens.

If you guessed that the movie got really gory and entertaining, you're wrong. Go back to line one and try again.

If you guessed that the morons accidentally open all the cages in an edited-for-TV manner, you are correct. Your prize is knowing enough about the rest of the movie so that you won't feel bad turning it off.

So, what's a gang of high-schoolers to do when locked in a building with a hundred zombies and Peter Coyote? You're right: they immediately go down to a lower level because that's where Julian's parents' weaponized zombie bodies are, just to see. I do not even want to imagine what these kids got on their SATs.

And that's pretty much it. Zombies kill everyone in the facility, Zeke turns into a zombie, and a decent amount of the main cast actually dies. Even little Pyro gets his brains chewed on, which won some respect from me since small children tend to live through these things in most movies like this. Coyote lets loose the parent zombies for pretty much no reason other than that he's evil; so evil, in fact, that one of the kids asks him what Hybra Tech really wants and he actually says: "Why, world domination, of course! What else is there?" In the end the army shows up and takes care of the zombies in an incredibly efficient manner, and Coyote makes off with three cans of Trioxin.

Then, we go to Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave.

Julian is now in college with his old survivor buddy Cody, enjoying himself almost as if his entire family wasn't murdered by his zombie-making uncle that's intent on world domination. He's got a hot blonde girlfriend with a dipshit drug-addled DJ brother, and Cody is now a chemistry major with a minor in illicit drug manufacturing. Things are going just fine until Peter Coyote is killed during a Trioxin sale gone horribly wrong, and Julian finds a couple canisters in a hidden compartment in his house. It would seem to me that the smart thing would be to immediately report those things to the police, or the feds, or a haz-mat outfit or something, but I guess if movie-people were smart there would just be a lot of movies about people being successful and happy and in love, and I'd have nothing to do on Saturday nights.

Julian and his girlfriend Jenny wheel the barrel of Trioxin over to Cody's lab on campus to "find out what's inside," apparently not remembering that two of the three of them had seen the same container hooked up to the zombie-making machines in the Hybra-Tech building not ninety minutes ago (in viewer-time, that is). Cody finds out that Trioxin is chemically kind of like a combination of crystal meth and LSD. The stupid DJ samples a bit to see if he can get high; he does for a little while, and it appears to have no adverse effects. Julian demands that they stop experimenting, but after he leaves, Cody, the DJ, and their drug-dealing pal Skeeze decide that they've got a phenomenal money-making opportunity on their hands: safe hallucinogenic meth. They call the little pill "Z," in that it makes you stand still and drool like a zombie. Why the coincidence goes over Cody's head is beyond logic.

Skeeze sells the drug all over campus in preparation for the big "Rave to the Grave" that weekend, and apparently makes a lot of cash off of it before Julian catches on and demands that they stop before it gets out of hand. Before Cody can even say, "Jesus, Julian, I'm a fucking moron, because I was in the prequel and already know that this stuff makes people come back from the dead and eat brains," we've got a whole campus full of zombies looking for dining hall brains.

To mix it up a little bit, the movie throws in a couple of Russian Interpol agents who are looking for the caviar bonuses that come with tracking down the canisters. They're pretty much for comic relief, and their role is to make "funny" jokes by messing up common English phrases. On occasion, they also shoot zombies.

The plot climaxes at the titular Rave to the Grave, where the Z pills start turning everyone into zombies regardless of how much they ingested. The middle of the rave scene has what's probably the only effective part in both movies, where Cody is looking for his girlfriend in the crowd as people around him suddenly start changing into the undead -- there are a few moments of genuine creepiness in there. Almost as good as the last movie (if that's an applicable statement), most of the main cast dies, save Julian, Jenny, and one of the Interpol guys -- sorry about that big spoiler I threw in there, but believe me, by the end of the movies you won't care who lives or dies.

Both Necropolis and Rave to the Grave were directed by Ellory Elkayem, the New Zealand filmmaker that brought us the pretty enjoyable mutant spider flick Eight Legged Freaks. (Oh, how the grammar Nazi in me hates that title. It should have a hyphen between "Eight" and "Legged," otherwise they're not referring to freaks that have eight legs (spiders), but to a group of eight freaks that all have an indeterminate number of legs. ARGH.) Freaks was a fun little homage to all the 1950s mutant animal movies, and watching his two ROTLD films gives the impression that he wants to continue that same vibe: mad scientists, evil goings-on, and youngsters out to save the day. Unfortunately, the tone just doesn't jive with the material and the whole thing falls apart pretty quick.

The main offense of these two flicks is that they're really, really dumb. Back in film school, I was writing my senior thesis script for my epic film noir cartoon, and I got to a point where the hero is locked up in a guarded room while the villains are off on their quest for the mystery device. I got stuck; I knew what had to happen afterward, but I had no idea how to actually get the character there, so I just wrote:

WINTER comes up with an incredibly clever plan for escaping the room, disposing of the HENCHMAN, and catching up with DR. STERLING right before the climax.

That works as a placeholder if it's the first draft and you're only the second week in, with another eight months to actually come up with a clever way for the hero to escape. It doesn't work in a final shooting script, but somehow the ROLTDs ended up with a lot of moments where I thought, 'Did they not finish the real script?' Everything in the two movies happened too conveniently, everyone was too evil, or too good, or too lucky. The zombies were too slow and then too fast, too smart and then too stupid. They make much of the Trioxin canisters, tying in to the first movies, and yet blatantly ignore all the rules that it set up -- zombies can be killed with a bullet to the head in this one. It's almost as if the two screenwriters just mashed out a big outline for the two movies, and then forgot to fill in the rest of the screenplay with cohesive details and logic. It's not hard to imagine the two movies as being relatively decent horror films -- maybe even fun ones -- but the filmmakers weren't really trying.

The two that I hold mostly responsible for the mess(es) are William Butler and Aaron Strongoni, who should really know better: Butler co-starred in the vastly superior zombie flick Night of the Living Dead (the 1990 remake, not the original). As far as remakes go, that one was a decent horror movie. It had scares, it had a heart, and something resembling a point in the end, three things that his ROTLD films did not.

And what in the hell happened to Peter Coyote? Not that I was a big Peter Coyote fan, but I'm passingly familiar with some of the bigger movies that he's been a part of -- and he looks awful in ROTLD. Awful-awful, like his face has been frozen into a bizarre Joker grin, perhaps with Botox; he drawls most of his lines as if he can't really move his lips. Whatever muscles power his cheeks are apparently receding deeper into his throat, making him look like he's always on the verge of swallowing his own tongue. It's not pretty.

Luckily, the rest of the cast looks like they're going to live through the filming. If there's one real compliment that I can pay the film, it's that most of the high school kids in the movies look like they might plausibly be high school students -- none of that 30-year-old girl with a Trapper Keeper stuff for this series. They're all appropriately skinny and doofy-looking, although in Part 5 they manage to squeeze into the college freshman look. Looking back, although I was going to crap on all of the acting, it really wasn't too bad overall. Coyote was slumming (and he knew it), but the rest of the kids did about as well as can be hoped with a script like this. Not every line comes out sounding natural, but there're so many absolutely retarded things being said that I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and accept the 75% of decent readings as being as good as humanly possible. I can't even imagine Pacino being able to pull off some of this stuff.

I'm pretty disappointed with these two, as you can probably tell. I love ROTLD Part 1 with a passion, and although Part 2 was a dumb comedy, Part 3 was actually starting to get the series on an interesting track with its Romeo-and-Juliet theme. I was hoping that these two films -- with the assistance of Elaykim -- would continue to provide some kind of neat-o entertainment, but it turns out that I'm gonna have to wait until Dan O'Bannon comes back to the franchise.

In summation: avoid even on a lonely Saturday night. If you have to watch a video, at least go rent something that has gore and boobs.