Return of the Living Dead Part II (1988)

Fantastic!

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

A few moderately decent special effects are probably the best thing on offer in this lacklustre sequel to the classic comedy/horror yarn, in which the non-existent plot serves to vainly attempt to recapture the highlights from the original. For no explainable reason, the stalwart tag-team of James Karen and Thom Mathews are also brought back from the first film, playing different characters, but exactly the same thing happens to them here as it does in the original! Aside from the overwhelming déjà vu, this is a bigger-scope but lacking film, with the overdone comedy a real bore most of the time. Although there are a fair few macabre gags that pay off (the Michael Jackson homage, the severed head scenes, the disintegrating zombies) for the most part this is an irritating film that contains nothing memorable like the original. Even the music is worse.It's a bog-standard '80s comic horror romp with little brain and even less imagination on offer. The effects of the zombies are decent but the overacting – done by the entire cast now and not just Karen and Mathews – is a really big mistake. In fact there is not one straight character in the film. Just loads of bland teenagers, an annoyingly smart kid, and other extraneous folk who shout and scream a lot. It's pretty embarrassing really. The plot is predictable, the casting instantly forgettable (all long forgotten today, aside from a brief turn by X-FILES star Mitch Pileggi), the jokes just keep getting dumber and dumber. Ignore the bigger budget and heightened effects, the first film in this series is still the one to look out for.

When I was a kid I had the poster to this movie on my wall. Not just that, I also had a 4x3 foot cardboard stand from the local video shop that stood proudly in the corner of my room.I also had a miniature cardboard display next to a 5 foot RoboCop, a 4 foot Crocodile Dundee and a 6 foot Robin Williams from Good Morning Vietnam.Liking this movie was a given, I had stacks of Fangoria magazines piled next to my graphic novels that were cushioned next go my porn collection. Comics, gore, porn.... everything a growing teenage boy needs, but why is it that I can't remember anything from this movie, yet I could recite lines from the original verbatim?25 years on I got the Blu-Ray of the first 3 ROTLD movies and decided to spend a whole Sunday watching them back to back with hot winter food and alcohol, but 5 minutes into this....effort, it all came flooding back. It's appalling.I'd like to say it's like a lifeless corpse of a movie in some ironic attempt at thematic humour but it's just a pale imitation, a copy bereft of charm or wit, a typical studio failure to replicate an original premise that had vibrancy, heart and soul. From the awful staged sequences of the badly directed kids 'fighting' at the beginning.Cringe-worthy music that sounded like it was taken from a TV movie sound library.Shocking editing, as the 'gas' creeping through the graveyard is blatantly shot on 2 completely different film stocks and it just looks woefully poor. Yes, the original movie suffered from certain budget restraints and I could write a list of deficiencies as long as my arm but that makes it all the more memorable and charming and re-watchable. All of these years later, watching Return Of The Living Dead again, just hours ago was fun filled, laugh a minute entertainment. This film is everything the first movie isn't and everything we dread about sequels.I have no idea what Ken Weiderhorn thought he was doing but pissing on the legacy of a great concept. I switched this film off 15 minutes.I guess I must have done the same when I was a kid, before tearing the poster off my wall and ripping the cardboard stand to pieces.All of these things, utterly forgettable.

If you're a fan of the cult horror film Return of the Living Dead (1985), then chances are you've watched this lazy sequel, only to be left wondering where the last 90 minutes of your life have gone. The plot surrounds another lost toxic barrel, containing the chemical gas that will awake the living dead. An obnoxious child witnesses the birth of the zombies after the gas is accidentally released, and the town is soon overrun by seemingly indestructible, brain-eating zombies. A couple of gravediggers robbing the dead are caught up in the midst of the zombie outbreak, and with the boy and his family, try desperately to survive the onslaught.If the plot sounds extremely dull and familiar, it's because it is. The first film was a very amusing, and often quite clever little movie, bursting with ideas and scenes of pure lunacy brought to life by a cast who look like they're genuinely having fun. Part II obviously knows this, and rather than trying to expand on the originals quirky charm and develop the universe, director Ken Wiederhorn, who ended his relatively short career in television, chose to simply re-hash the first, involving similar scenes and situations, and even bringing back some of the actors. What the film becomes is almost pure comedy, aiming at a teenage audience (although the humour is for infants), and lacking the fun horror and gore from the first. There's nothing that even comes close to the limbless female zombie demanding "braaaiinnnss!" from the first.What we do get is a wise-cracking severed head with the voice of a finger-snapping black woman, a little boy hero who I was praying to be brutally murdered, and a zombie dressed as Michael Jackson doing the Thriller dance (yes, really). It's such a desperate, pathetic attempt to humour an audience that was most likely getting into each other's pants in the back row, and I fail to see how this would amuse anyone apart from those who are entertained by jangling keys. Even James Karen and Thom Mathews, who were very funny in the first, look uncomfortable with the crap they are given to work with. It's just one boring, cringe- inducing 90 minutes, made worse by the fact that this is a missed opportunity, given the quirky charm of the first. One fellow IMDb reviewer put it better than I can, so I quote - "not funny, not campy, not scary, not good."www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

Confession time; I never was really fond of the first "The Return of the Living Dead" in the first place. I know I'm a minority on this but the humor was very childish and simplistic to me, as was the script, while the movie itself seemed to think that it was being a very clever one. Can't really say they improved any of this in this first sequel.I can see how this movie got mostly catered toward teenagers at the time and perhaps I would had liked this and the first movie better if I had grown up with it in the '80's. This is a problem I often have with popular '80's movies that are made for youngsters; I just don't get what's the appeal of them. This is of course not the case with just any movie but this does seem often the case with movies that are being regarded as cult-classics now days.But luckily I'm not all on my own this time. Generally speaking "Return of the Living Dead Part II" is not a very well liked movie, which does seem a bit surprising to me, since I just can't really see how this movie is worse than the original. As a matter of fact; I honestly liked this movie a bit better than the first one, simply because I didn't felt as annoyed with it this time.It's obviously not a great movie. It takes a far too simplistic and cliché ridden approach with things for that. The story is pretty much non-existent. Things just happen in this movie and most stuff seems very random. It doesn't follow a clear main plot line, which makes it feel like this movie is just going on and going on forever, even though the movie in fact is only about 85 minutes short. I was just pretty much fed up with all of it about an hour in already. I just couldn't care less about anything that was happening and I never got into any of the characters. I don't even remember any of their names and was actually more annoyed by most of them. The little kid is annoying (I hate it when they don't let children act like real children) but so was the screaming and shouting girl, as well as the old guy who was supposed to be funny but just never really made me laugh.The effects are also only half successful in this. At times all of the zombie and gore effects are fantastic and quite convincing looking, while at others it's just way too fake. It's very uneven, just like the entire movie basically.It's harmless and silly enough to still entertaining plenty of people I guess, just don't mistake it for a good movie as well.5/10 http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/