Return of the Living Dead III

Brian Yuzna’s Return of the Living Dead III trades the franchise’s comic book zaniness for teenage tragedy. The result is watchable but minor.

The setup has promise. Curt and Julie are teenage lovers with boundary issues. She goads him into stealing his Army Colonel father’s security card. They break into a military lab. They watch scientists pump Trioxin into cadavers and turn them into flesh-eating monsters. Standard date night stuff.

Then Julie dies in a motorcycle crash. Curt drags her corpse back to the lab and doses her with the compound. She wakes up. She’s hungry. Not for pizza.

Yuzna knows this territory—he’s mined teen angst in Society and gore in Bride of Re-Animator. Here he delivers both, wringing startling effects from pocket change. The makeup work alone justifies the price of admission. Melinda Clarke is the real find, though. As Julie, she navigates the film’s thorny subtext about self-mutilation with conviction and restraint. When she pierces her flesh with glass shards to quiet the hunger, it’s genuinely unsettling.

But John Penney’s script keeps tripping over its own feet. Characters in this film have the situational awareness of mannequins. They stand in quiet, confined spaces while zombies shuffle and moan just off-screen, yet somehow never hear them coming. These aren’t stealth zombies. They’re awkward, clumsy, and loud. Yet time and again, characters remain oblivious until the plot requires them to turn around and scream. It’s lazy staging masquerading as suspense. It doesn’t build tension. It builds irritation.

The film devolves into a chase picture—Curt and zombie Julie fleeing from cops, soldiers, and armed gang members—and while Yuzna stages the carnage with his usual flair, the script can’t sustain momentum. The black comedy streak that animates Yuzna’s best work is missing. What’s left is competent horror-drama punctuated by impressive gore.

Return of the Living Dead III works as a franchise side-story, not a true sequel. It’s too somber, too earnest. That’s not inherently bad. But when your script keeps undermining itself with deaf characters and convenient stupidity, earnestness isn’t enough.

The ingredients for something special sit right there on screen—the effects, Clarke’s performance, Yuzna’s visual flair. They’re just trapped in a script that never quite comes to life.