Revenge of the Revenant Review Finale: The one that lost the rights to its own soundtrack

 

Title: Return of the Living Dead Part 2

What Year?: 1988

Classification: Weird Sequel

Rating: It’s Okay! (3/4)

 

With this present review, I have decided to mark a finale for the Revenant Review. This doesn’t mean I am not going to do any more reviews for the feature, or of zombie movies in general. What it does mark is the end of what I set out to do. What settled this in my mind is that, after due consideration, there was really only one movie left that I still definitely wanted to review, one which I had indeed had in mind from the beginning. It happens to be a movie that has never been obscure or inaccessible, but has been subject to a lot of controversy and outright hate that I have never understood. I decided it was a good use of a final review to take a fresh look at this polarizing entry in an actual franchise. I present Return of the Living Dead 2, a sequel that among other things got separated from its own soundtrack.

Our story begins with a familiar-looking barrel falling off a truck that couldn’t deliver a carton of eggs without 75% casualties. Of course, it’s full of trioxin, the deadly gas that raised the dead and destroyed Louisville in the first movie. The barrel is soon discovered by two sets of players, a pair of bullies who chase a smaller kid named Jesse down the drain pipe where it rests and a pair of grave robbers looking for their next score. This time, it’s the bullies who open the barrel, for absolutely no comprehensible reason beyond the fact that Jesse begged them not to. Soon, a cemetery full of the undead have risen and begun overrunning the town, without quite the same intelligence and coordination they showed before. Meanwhile, the bullies and the grave robbers are transformed by the gas, threatening their friends and loved ones. It’s up to the plucky kid and a homespun doctor to rally the survivors and destroy the zombies, before the military destroys the city first!

Return of the Living Dead Part 2 was written and directed by Ken Wiederhorn, previously sighted with Shock Waves, reportedly based on a script originally unrelated to the first movie. James Karen and Thom Matthews returned from the first film, recast as the grave robbers rather than in their original roles. The additional cast was led by child actor Michael Kenworthy and Suzanne Snyder of Killer Klowns From Outer Space as love interest Brenda, with Phil Bruns as the town doctor and Thor Van Lingen as Billy the bully. The finished movie was distributed by Lorimar, with a release of the soundtrack by Island Records. Much of the score was replaced when the film was released on DVD in 2004, apparently due to rights issues. In 2018, a Blu Ray with the original soundtrack restored. The film was widely criticized by critics and fans of the original film, and holds a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes (see Terrorvision and Mac & Me).

For my experiences, I have to start with the first movie, which I watched in the early 2000’s and was immediately impressed with. In my assessment, it is easily the strangest zombie movie to fall within “mainstream” parameters. After watching both it and the present film leading up to this review, I gave more serious thought than I thought I would whether to review the original instead. But I still never doubted that I would go with this one, above all because it is certainly in far more need of reappraisal. After my timetable was already shot to Hell, I even found a way to watch it with the original score. With that under the belt, I can still say first and foremost that this is one of the better non-Romero sequels to come out of the 1980s zombie wave, though with the main competition being Bride of Re-Animator, Pet Semetery 2, and random movies with “Zombie” and a number slapped on, that might not be saying much.

Moving forward, the most noteworthy thing about this movie is that it is quite a bit more conventional that the original. I have always found this to be the source of its comparative strengths. Of course, it doesn’t improve on the original, nor does it try to, but in the best tradition of the Romero series, it gets enough breathing room to do its own thing. This shows most in the zombies themselves, which have a quite unique look. They definitely aren’t the nearly skeletonized undead of the first movie, nor are they as low-tech as the Romero zombies; in many ways, the closest comparison is with the Real Ghostbusters animated TV series (interestingly an observation others have made with House). Their behavior and the resulting tone are a mixed bag, and this is where the movie makes an arguable miscalculation. The one thing that was really “funny” about the undead of the original was that they could usually outsmart the human protagonists. Here, there is a lot more slapstick specifically at the zombies’ expense. Still, there are good moments of humor, like a pack that joyride in an army jeep and a zombie that puts on glasses after clawing out of the grave (in a sequence where I prefer the “replacement” music), and another that  loses its jaw. More impressively, there are moments of genuine horror, especially from the reanimated Billy, who is easily the most unnerving of either film.

Things get tellingly mixed with the human characters. The front-and-center issue is the return of Karen and Matthews. The sheer audacity of bringing them back after their characters (and, spoiler, everyone else) clearly died in the first movie provides decent entertainment for a while. Unfortunately, after a while, their presence simply becomes a reminder that they weren’t the most entertaining characters or actors in the original. (My pick for that distinction is Don Calfa, sighted in Chopper Chicks In Zombietown, as Ernie the possibly Nazi undertaker.) The much bigger problem is that their screen time takes away from the development of some reasonably promising new characters who become far more important to the story, particularly the kid and the doc. Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of further polarization over the kid, to the point that whether you like him is likely to decide if you can even tolerate the movie. In the finale, the two sets of characters become diverging arcs, with the only further payoff from the graverobbers being the demise of Brenda/ Snyder. The sexualized subtexts of the first movie are more explicit and in some ways improved on, but then the already cringe-worthy scene is derailed by what seems to be very clumsy censorship that also disrupts the audio of the following scene.

That leaves the “one scene”, and I’m going with a sequence that pretty much copies the original. As we go into the final act, the kid, the doc and their generic companions are on the run from the military as well as the undead in an appropriated ambulance. The kid tries the radio, asking plaintively for help. We then see the hospital, which the characters left, where a zombie is passing with an armful of jars of brains. The revenant either sets down or drops the load and goes to the radio. We get a good look at the face, which is shriveled and putrid but still quite expressive. As in the original, the zombie takes control of the radio console, which is easily the most complicated piece of equipment we see them use in either movie, and says, “Come to the hospital.” The kid seems ready to accept this at face value, even though they were already there. Then the doctor takes the mic and asks who’s president. Up to this point, it’s been debatable whether it would have been better to leave the zombie unseen for an element of suspense. However, it’s unquestionably worth seeing the nuanced expression of the undead as it ponders. Finally, it answers, “Harry Truman.” The doc turns off the radio, just before the kid asks, “Who’s Harry Truman?”

In closing, what remains on my mind is the decision to wrap up this feature. The present movie was part of what I count as the end of the “vintage” zombie movie era, and perhaps the single most representative example of how and why the genre went dormant. As with many retrospectively pivotal movies, it was far from the last, but still a clear indicator that things would not be the same. It’s all the more fitting as an endpiece to the lineup for this feature. It won’t be my last zombie review, but with this review under the belt, I can say I have done what I meant to do. That’s a good enough to wrap this up and thank any and all who have stayed with me from the beginning. “You never know…”