Once a series starts tumbling downhill it is hard for it to regain it balance and begin its climb back toward the top, yet this is exactly what happened with Return of the Living Dead Part 3.  After the disaster that was Return of the Living Dead Part 2 it seemed like the brilliance that had brought us the first movie had been laid to rest and that horror fans all across the globe would once again watch as countless directors rehashed the same story over and over again.  Thankfully the third movie didn’t go this route and instead of giving us another story in a graveyard where a canister is released, we get an interesting love story, one which sees a female zombie

trying hard to hold onto her humanity while suppressing her hunger with pain, all while her boyfriend frantically tries to find a place for them to live -- a doomed, yet noble quest.  Puppy love at is finest.    

I first saw this installment many years ago on Joe Bob Brigg’s Monster Vision (I think) and remember falling asleep during it several times due to the lateness of the viewing, and therefore wasn’t really sure what to expect when renting the DVD the other day, my mind only able to conjure up a few images of a military lab experiment gone wrong and then scenes of the girl zombie mutilating herself in a sewer.  Of course, even if I hadn’t fallen asleep I wouldn’t have gotten the full effect of the movie because I’m sure TNT edited a lot out, especially the scenes where the female zombie has completed her own self body modifications and starts attacking the Mexican punks that are after them -- modifications that made it look like she could take part in an intensely hardcore bondage / fetish film during her breaks, especially with the way her mutilated breasts and nipples were displayed.

Now I haven’t seen any more of the movies in the Return of the Living Dead series so I don’t know if they continued to try and experiment with their stories of if they just went back to the graveyard -- something that isn’t bad as long as it isn’t the same story over and over again.  From everything I’ve read, however, people say that the following part 3 this series gets really good and that some of the movies actually are better than the first, though I find this a bit hard to swallow.  I do know that both my brother and I enjoyed this movie and will certainly add the DVD to our collection.  At the same time I was a bit disappointed that there wasn’t any type of barricaded standoff, which is something I always enjoy with movies like this.  I also found it hard to believe that the kid in the

film would be able to maneuver himself through a military base so easily, especially one that is conducting top secret experiments on the dead.  Then again all the military bases I have visited have been in the post September eleventh years so maybe the security wasn’t as intense back in the early nineties, who knows.     

One thing that did upset me about this movie was the look of the zombies from within the containers.  The zombies that come out of the containers in the first two movies -- the “tarmen”  -- looked great and were even a bit scary, but the ones that came out during this movie just looked like stupid monster models that had layers of paint and fake blood added to them.  Many people may disagree with me here and say they looked good, and that at least they were CGI (which I would agree with), but I still would have liked having the tarmen instead.  From what I gather from the forums about this movie, I am not alone in this opinion.

So, what do you think?  Was this a good direction to take this series in or would you have preferred another army of dead zombies coming out of their graves and attacking a handful of characters who barricade themselves into a building of some kind?  Also, do you agree that the series only gets better and better from this point on, or that the people who wrote that on the forums and in reviews don’t know what they are talking about?