“Do you ever feel like taking a drill and boring a fricking hole in your head so you can let the screams out?”

Justin’s rating: Brains… this movie needed some

Justin’s review: The original 1985 Return of the Living Dead is one of my favorite zombie movies of all time, period. It’s gooey and funny and more interested in having a fun time with the undead than being scary or brutal. The second and third entries were pretty good too, but that’s where I tapped out of the series for a long time, especially considering that we didn’t see any more sequels until the 2000s. And for a series that was undeniably ’80s, I didn’t hold much hope that it could transition well into the new millennium.

Yet an incomplete movie review series nags at me, so here I am digging into the fourth film, Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis, which was made for the Scifi (Syfy) channel. As I did so, I chanted under my breath, “Please don’t be a complete waste of my time. Please.”

For the uninitiated, Return of the Living Dead was a sidequel series that postulated that Night of the Living Dead actually happened for realsies but Romero’s sequels didn’t. It then goes in a much different direction, for the better.

What sets the Return of the Living Dead franchise apart from the rest of the zombie crowd is a dark tongue-in-cheek sense of humor* and the fact that these undead are a result of a special military compound (Trioxin 5) that got out of control. Oh, and the zombies can talk and think a bit.

But at the start of this film, there hasn’t been a zombie outbreak in over a decade. Life is good! Puppies frolic in the tall grass! School children sing of halcyon days! And one mad scientist brings back some of the very last of the Trioxin 5 from Chernobyl!

Whoops.

The Trioxin 5 makes its way back to the USA, played here by Romania and Ukraine (as was its sequel, Rave to the Grave), where it’s used for experiments at suspicious company Hybra Tech. When one of their gang is kidnapped by the corp, it’s up to the rest to infiltrate, head-butt a zombie or two, and make it out with all body parts intact.

Necropolis made no friends with the die-hard Return of the Living Dead fandom for jettisoning two of its core features: near-indestructible zombies (they die very easy here) and the black humor (this isn’t that funny so much as cringy). As a result, the movie comes across as a cheap Resident Evil clone instead**, which was probably the intent.

It’s not the absolute worst — there are genuine moments of inspiration, such as the creepy clone babies, cyborg super-zombies, and some cool zombie attacks — but it’s far from “good.” The acting is abysmal, and there’s no way that you’ll buy that this was made anywhere other than a destitute eastern European country.

There was definitely potential for a 2000s comeback of this series if it had been well-written and stuck to the fundamentals of the franchise. That is not even close to what happened with this silly abomination, and that thought haunts me — as does the realization that there’s another sequel that was shot back-to-back with this one.

*Fun fact: The original Return of the Living Dead was the first movie to establish the trope that zombies really like eating brains.

**Complete with so much techno-industrial soundtrack noise.

Intermission!

• Maybe don’t trust a snack food company if they also boast about being into toxic waste disposal and Chernobyl cleanup
• “She’s the Russian Britney Spears!”
• “Would you like to see the place where they made the big boo-boo?”
• When your younger brother is called Pyro and plays with flame throwers, it’s time to get a new family
• “How many bikes is that this month?” “I don’t know, four?”
• Zombie arm just living his best life
• So many Dutch angles in this film
• INDUSTRIAL TECHNO SOUNDTRACK BECAUSE THIS IS THE EARLY 2000s! I CAN’T HEAR YOU OVER THIS NOISE!
• Where do you get a six-pack of brains to feed zombies?
• Zombie rat!
• Tasers make a weird girl laugh for some reason
• “Oh. Christmas is cool!”
• Go figure, nunchucks are not that effective against zombies
• “Nice pooper!” what
• Oh it’s the laboratory with a lot of assault weapons on the wall
• The floating deformities room
• “This company’s making much more than cheese in a can.”
• The floating grinning clone is freaky deaky
• “It’s about world domination, of course!”
• “Send more security guards!”
• If I had someone bite that much out of my neck, I wouldn’t shrug it off and not be screaming for the next six scenes
• “It’s game time!” [character throws away empty shotgun that lightly bounces off the chest of a zombie]
• I guess the Borg are in this movie too
• Some casual rappelling from a skyscraper, as all teens are wont to do
• Dude, the KID gets eaten? That’s messed up
• About half the guns in this movie never fire when someone pulls the trigger
• The end credits have a way better font than the opening