Return of the Livng Dead: Necropolis (2005) and Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave (2005)

I was born in 1990.  That might not seem like that big a deal.  But it is.  You see, the 1990s were a transitional period for media.  Home media would become increasingly more common.  VHS and Laserdisc would become household fixtures by the beginning of the decade and give way to DVD less than ten years later.  The channels available on television were booming outward, allowing more shows to become accessible.  One of the big successes in all of that was horror.

There were a couple reasons for that.  The first was that kids who couldn’t see horror in the theater would find a way to see it at home.  They could rent from blockbuster, record a late night showing on television, or borrow a movie from a friend who had it.  It was as easy as getting a porn magazine and hiding it from your parents.  I remember being a young child, maybe six or seven years old, sneaking downstairs early in the morning when I was having a sleepover with my cousin, and watching The Rocky Horror Picture Show.  It wasn’t hard to watch horror or horror-like things when there was now more access to them.

Then there was television, where horror was blossoming on the cable channels that were popping up.  Late night horror movie shows with hosts like Elvira and Svengoolie presenting all kinds of horror tales would play across North America.  Mystery Science Theater 3000 started up, with people poking fun at bad horror and science fiction movies.  Tales from the Crypt was going strong, while Friday the 13^th: The Series and Freddy’s Nightmares were wrapping up their runs.  And for a child like me, there were shows like Tales from the Cryptkeeper, Are You Afraid of the Dark, Goosebumps, and Freaky Stories that would bring about the horror tales.  If those shows weren’t the building blocks for my interest in horror tales, then I don’t know what would be.

I could go into some of the defining horror watching moments of my life, and there sure are a few that I can think of right now, but I’m going to skip past all that and go forward a few years.  And when I say skip past it, I mean to a point when I was starting to watch anything I could get my eyes on.  That’s a phase that I’m kind of still in.  If you know me, you know I’ll watch pretty much anything.  Good or bad, I’ll watch it.  It was during this phase where I checked out a couple movies in the Return of the Living Dead series.  I didn’t know it at the time, but they were the fourth and fifth installments in a long running franchise of zombie movies.  I just wanted to see some zombies.

Even back when I first saw them, nearly fifteen years ago, I knew they weren’t good.  I wasn’t as deep into movies as I am now.  I watched them for entertainment but didn’t think of them as much else.  I was looking to be entertained by the two zombie sequels and was disappointed with what I got.  Something felt off in how they were trying to bring the excitement.  Maybe it was a lack of consistent rules.  Maybe it was the performances.  I didn’t look too much into it at the time.  I was in the binary movie world of like or dislike, and I disliked.

A few years later, during an October horror run, I ended up watching through the whole Return of the Living Dead franchise.  All five movies.  There were things I liked about each of the first three movies.  Yet, I was still hesitant on the last two.  Something about them still didn’t sit right.  I was able to better articulate it that time.  The television quality was obviously a problem, since it was made for the Sci-Fi channel.  Their output in 2005 wasn’t the greatest.  Mostly, though, it came down to the character work.  The writing of the characters and their portrayal by the actors killed any of the sympathy that could be had for them.

Now that I’ve seen them for a third time, I’m finding it much easier to articulate my thoughts about them.  It might not seem that way.  We’re 700 words into the post and I’ve only written about having seen the movies.  I haven’t gotten down and dirty with them in a breakdown of what makes them tick.  Don’t worry.  That’s about to happen.

Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis was the first of the two made-for-television movies that finished off the franchise.  A group of motorcycle riding friends were having fun one day when Zeke (Elvin Dandel) was in a fatal accident.  The friends would find out that he wasn’t actually dead and was instead taken to a laboratory run by Charles (Peter Coyote), the uncle of friend Julian (John Keefe).  Julian rallied his friends to go save Zeke and they unknowingly became involved in a zombie outbreak caused by the Trioxin chemical.

The movie felt ripped right from 2005, which it was.  The thing is, it tried to be so with the times that now, only fourteen years later, it feels as dated as it could feel.  The motorcycles, the music, the style in which the zombie attack happened… It was very of the time.  There was a montage set to a Godsmack song, and the “boss level” zombies were zombies with saws and guns for appendages.  Even watching it back when I first saw it, I could probably sense how the timelessness wasn’t there.  It wasn’t going to age well.  It would be an artifact of 2005.

Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave was a direct sequel that took place a year later.  Julian (John Keefe) was now in college.  When he found out that Charles (Peter Coyote) had died, he searched his uncle’s house and found a large canister filled with Trioxin.  His friends took the canister and made a new drug from it, not knowing that the drug was going to turn people into zombies.  When the year’s biggest rave happened, the people taking drugs turned into zombies and the rave became a mass grave.  Hence the title.

Both of the movies were set in America and filmed in Romania.  In the first film, the Romanian roots only came through in the look of certain scenes.  There’s a specific way that many movies made in Eastern Europe look.  The motorcycle scene had that look.  Rave to the Grave had much more of that Eastern European look.  The cheerleaders had the feel of that area.  The rave was filmed in a location that looked very Eastern European.  It’s not a movie look that has ever sat right for me, and I think that, from a younger age, I could sense that without putting words to it.

The worst part of both movies, above all, was the writing.  The writers seemed to want to have fun with the zombies and the teenagers, but never put enough focus onto either of them to make the elements work.  The teenage main characters were basic archetypes that weren’t fleshed out enough to create any sympathy for what happened to them.  The acting didn’t help them either, with the actors hamming it up.  Their facial expressions were too much for what the script called for.  The writing for the zombies wasn’t fleshed out enough to make them a threat.  They could easily be killed by a headshot or, in many cases, a series of body shots.  The quick and easy way that the zombies could be taken out made them a threat only when there was a one-on-one, face-to-face fight.

I would like to say that my distaste for these two Return of the Living Dead sequels was because of how things had changed in the franchise.  I know that’s not entirely true.  The first time I saw the final two movies in the franchise, I hadn’t seen any of the others.  I didn’t know the context of them.  My judgement of the movies being bad was based solely on my having seen only those two movies.  That hasn’t changed on subsequent viewings or context with the other movies.  Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis and Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave have always made for bad watches.

Horror got a big boost in the 1990s.  The older franchises were dying out, but the newer ones were bringing in new fans of the genre.  Being born in 1990, I was one of the new fans.  I grew up watching Freaky Stories, Are You Afraid of the Dark, and Goosebumps among other spooky children’s shows.  It was an interesting time for horror and helped me grow into someone who has always enjoyed the genre.  Good or bad, I always enjoy it.

I usually enjoy my notes as well:

• Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis and Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave were suggested by @ImPABLO_i_WRITE, who also suggested Cabin Boy (week 173), Thumbelina (week 286), and The Wash (week 303).
• Toma Danila was in Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis, The Devil Inside (week 13), and Anaconda: Offspring (week 80).
• Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis featured Claudiu Trandafir, who was also in The Devil Inside (week 13), and Transylmania (week 297).
• Four actors were featured in Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis and Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave.  They were Aimee-Lynn Chadwick, Peter Coyote, Cory Hardrict, and John Keefe.
• Claudiu Istodor was one more actor in Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis and The Devil Inside (week 13).
• Cleve Hall had a role in Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis, after having a role in The Summer of Massacre (week 26).
• Finishing off Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis was Cristian Popa, who was in Transylmania (week 297).
• Sorin Cocis and Ionut Grama were in Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave.  They were in The Devil Inside (week 13) as well.
• Finally, Jenny Mollen joined the cast for Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave.  She had been in the movie D.E.B.S. (week 111).
• Have you seen the two made-for-television Return of the Living Dead movies?  What did you think of them?  Did you grow up on horror like I did?  Let me know these things in the comments.
• The comments and Twitter are places where you can reach me if you want to suggest something for me to watch for a future Sunday “Bad” Movies post.  Give me suggestions of movies that I might not know.  It broadens the variety of movies I cover.
• There’s an Instagram for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  It’s been slow the past couple of weeks because I’ve been busy with school, but it should pick up soon with all the bad movie stuff you could want.
• I also have a Snapchat that’s not Sunday “Bad” Movies based, but I do share clips of the bad movies I watch on there, if that’s your thing.  Add me (jurassicgriffin) if you want to see some bad movie clips.
• Well, here we are, looking at another week of the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  It should be an interesting one.  I’m going to be checking out a movie called King Cobra.  It’s about a gay porn star involved in a murder.  I’ve not heard the greatest things about it from one of my friends who has seen it, but it has Christian Slater, so I’ll give it a shot.  Plus, this is a blog about bad movies, so it should fit.  I’ll see you next week with a post.