Return of the Living Dead 3 Review: Frightfest goes retro with this 90’s zombie gem.
Return of the Living Dead 3 Review
FrightFest can be offer the opportunity to un-earth old curiosities that you may have seen long ago adorning your local video rental’s shelves, those movies with a striking image that burn into a young subconscious. Return of the Living Dead 3 is one such film for this reviewer, the image being of Melinda Clarke in her spiky punk glory looking straight at you with an infected zombie gaze that was a mixture of threatening and alluring. The years passed, the rental shopped changed catalogue, and the Return of the Living Dead 3 receded into the background of my mind, seemingly destined to dwell in the realm of pre-adolescent fascination and obscurity. Until FrightFest 2017 that is.
Return of the Living Dead 3 follows young lovers Curt (J. Trevor Edmond) and Julie (Melinda Clarke). After uncovering strange experiments exacted by Curt’s military father (Kurt McCord) has been embarking on, in which he and a team turn people into zombies with the hope of utilising the fierce rage and hunger into military force (solid idea, what could go wrong). When a terrible accident leaves Julie dead, a grief stricken Curt believes the only option he has is to bring her back from the dead with the very same experiment his father has been working on. Can true love survive when one half of the pair has an insatiable hunger for brains? They’re about to find out.
Return of the Living Dead 3 Review
Return of the Living Dead 3 bares little in the way of continuity to the two previous instalments (I had previously only seen the first one). This franchise, which was birthed following a rights bust-up with between George A. Romero and his producer concerning how the sequels to Night of the Living Dead should develop. With part three, the franchise retains certain elements of mythology (these zombies run, Trioxin is responsible for the outbreak), but takes a turn for something a lot more stylised, embracing the pop punk aesthetic to the extreme. As a result, Return of the Living Dead 3 feels as though it was very much made with the very intent of becoming a cult classic. Time has made that the case, and it is this pure cult spirit that allows you to accept this tale of tormented lovers; warts, gashing wounds and all.
For a B-movie experience, Return of the Living Dead 3 offers more than enough in the way of corny dialogue, exceptionally gory deaths and questionable taste decisions to tickle the interest of horror hounds, but you may come away more surprised by how affecting you find the relationship between Melinda Clarke’s Julie and Edmond’s Curt. Yes, most of the decisions they make are dumb and irrational and help contribute to a downfall of society, but there is something intoxicating about how much these two love each other and the extremes that they will go to in order to preserve that love.
Return of the Living Dead 3 Review
Having had the image of her buried in my subconscious, I was paying particular attention to Clarke. The pop-punk image of her is certainly brought to life (irony intended) with enough angst and strikes an impressionable figure. Sure, she does often come across as a means in which the producers can fetishize the zombie in genre cinema, but it is hard not to be impressed by the audacity of the transformation she undergoes whilst wrestling with her newfound appetite for human flesh.
Return of the Living Dead 3 plays out in a manic fashion, perhaps even more so than my young mind could conjure when catching sight of the cover in the rental all those years ago. It’s messy around the edges and more than often relies on cheap thrills to get a kick out of you. None the less, it is one of the purest examples of cult genre film making that I would happily recommend to those who enjoy their horror flicks with lashings of gore, commitment to corn and memorable characters with cosplay potential.
Return of the Living Dead 3 review by Andrew Gaudion, August 2017.
Return of the Living Dead 3 is currently playing as part of the Horror Channel Frighfest 2017 programme. The film arrives on Blu-Ray on Monday 28th August 2017.
