Return of the Living Dead Part II

Return of the Living Dead Part II

Released: 1988

MPAA Rating: R

Genre: Zombie

Nuts and Bolts: A top secret US army canister winds up in a drainage ditch in a small suburban community. A group of kids unwittingly open the container releasing a gas, which spills out into a nearby cemetery reanimating the dead! These zombies crave only one thing; warm juicy BRAINS!

Summary: Young Jesse Wilson is about to be initiated into a very exclusive club. For the low low price of an old issue of Peter Parker the Spectacular Spider-Man, he gets indoctrinated into the clubhouse run by a local punk named Billy. (Okay, already I don’t like this kid. What kind of idiot would get rid of his only copy of Spectacular Spider-Man #53 in exchange for membership in some dipshit Bad News Bears gang? What is this guy a freaking’ retard? Doesn’t he realize that that issue is going to be worth about forty-five bucks some day? Bah! Fucking kid deserves to get eaten by a zombie. Oh well, back to the summary.)

Jesse and the two punks go down to a mausoleum nestled inside of a neato-keen cemetery in the suburbs of Westvale California. This is the clubhouse. Jesse gets kind of creeped out and decides that he wants to revoke his membership. (Bet ya learned your listen now about giving your comics away, didn’t you, ya bastard!) He runs off and hides inside of an old drainage ditch. The punks catch up to him and together they find a large metal drum with US Army markings on the side. Smearing some muck off a glass window, they see the rotting remains of a human corpse staring back at them. Jesse takes off screaming but the punks catch up to him locking him inside the mausoleum. They then start fucking with the canister until the top pops open releasing a noxious gas into the atmosphere. The gas spreads out and settles over top of the cemetery. As the chemicals seep into the soil, it succeeds in resurrecting the bodies of the buried dead. The zombies claw their way out of the ground hungry for human brains. (Yummy.)

Meanwhile a young stud named Joey gets hired for a gig that pays one hundred dollars a night! (And he doesn’t have to sell his ass on Main Street either!) Actually, he is assisting a fifty-eight year old man named Ed who robs graves. Joey’s girlfriend doesn’t care for Joey’s new occupation however. What does this bitch care? She should be happy her man’s got a fucking job period. Details details details. Always crying over the details.

Anyway, Joey and Ed go down to the mausoleum where that comic-selling little prick Jesse is currently holed up in. As they enter, Jesse runs past them screaming. The two pop open a casket and begin rifling through the corpse. Ed takes the head from one body and puts it into a bowling ball bag. As Ed is talking to Joey the corpse behind him begins to rise. Joey freaks out and brains the fucker with a crowbar.

Meanwhile, Jesse races past the cemetery, which is now coming alive with zombies. He runs back to his home where his sister Lucy is doing aerobics in front of the television. As Jesse runs upstairs, there’s a knock at the door. It’s Tom Essex the cable TV installer. Tom tries to score with Lucy but she shoots him down. Jesse tries to explain that there are zombies attacking him but no one believes him until they bust up into the fucking house!

Meanwhile, Ed, Joey and Brenda are trying to escape. They steal Tom’s cable truck and try to get out of town. They run down a few zombies, and dumbass Joey steers the thing into a power box while trying to avoid hitting a motherfucker that’s already dead. As the zombies converge upon the vehicle, the three head back to the Wilson house. They bust up in there just as Jesse is trying to call the army. This plan goes south however because dipshit knocked out the telephone lines when he hit the power box. At this point, the head in Ed’s bowling ball bag begins wriggling about. Ed chucks it into a corner and Tom stabs it with the screwdriver. More zombies bust up into the house and the group is forced to flee. At about this time, Joey begins to feel a little ill.

Needing a vehicle (thanks to prick-lip Joey) they decide to commandeer one from their neighbor. Doctor Mandel doesn’t care for the idea of a bunch of strangers borrowing his car so he insists on accompanying them. Together they all head to the hospital. Ed is starting to feel under the weather as well and Doctor Mandel lays both Joey and he down on a hospital bed. After performing a few cursory examinations, Mandel concludes that they are dead. It takes a few minutes, but Brenda eventually figures out that the doctor’s prognosis must be incorrect. After all, Ed and Joey are still talking and moving about. While Brenda argues with Mandel, the others go to Lucy’s grandfather’s house to collect some guns. Even Jesse the comic-book bastard is armed. They all return to the hospital to meet back up with Ed, Joey, Brenda and Mandel. No sooner than they get back into the building then a brainless zombie attacks Jesse in the ER. (And no I’m NOT talking about George Clooney either.) Just as the deadhead prepares for a four-course meal of brains-ala-cart, Lucy comes into the room and blows the fucker in half with a shotgun. The legs continue to walk about aimlessly while the top portion of the corpse continues to try and gnaw on Jesse. But our friendly neighborhood zombie never gets the chance to chow down on he-who-would-sell-his-comics-for-friendship because the little fuck sprays him with a gout of hot steam from a water valve. Bastard.

At this point, the group splits up. Brenda needs to get Ed and Joey to a real hospital so she steals Mandel’s car and heads for the border. The road is blocked off however and the streets are lined with army personnel. Ed becomes a complete zombie now and attacks one of the soldiers. Brenda and Joey leave him to his fate and turn around. While driving away, Joey finally succumbs to zombiehood himself. He chases Brenda into a church exclaiming about how badly he wants to eat her brains. Brenda is either a really stupid fucking retarded bitch-whore or else she just really loves the guy. Realizing that she can never say no to darling Joey, Brenda LETS HIM EAT HER FUCKING BRAIN!!!!! (Although I doubt that it would’ve filled Joey up.)

Back at the hospital, Tom, Lucy, Jesse and Mandel try to figure out a way to defeat all of the zombies. Knowing that they require fresh brains as a source of nourishment and vitamin A, they decide to try and lure the deadheads away from the city. Stealing an ambulance, they drive down to a meat packing facility. They collect together tubs of frozen calf’s brains and load them into the van. As Tom drives the ambulance away, Mandel stands at the back door chumming out chilled brains to all the hungry masses. (How charitable!) The zombies follow the trail of brains until it leads them to the Westvale Power plant. Jesse closes off the main gate while Tom continues to chuck brains onto the muddy ground. Tom then turns off the power and begins placing live electric cables across the ground into the mud puddles. (Hey, he IS a cable TV repairman after all! He knows what he’s doing.) The zombies break through the gate and begin picking up the brains off the ground. Jesse turns the power back on and a wild arc of electricity erupts from the cables and begins linking all the zombies together. A few minutes later, they are all toasted.

Now, do you know what the moral to this story is kiddies? No? Well, I’ll tell you then. NEVER SELL YOUR FUCKING COMICS NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU MAY THINK IT’S WORTH IT AT THE TIME!

Acting/Dialogue: Okay, what can we really expect from the cast of a movie called Return of the Living Dead Part 2? Be that as it may, James Karen and Thom Matthews (Ed and Joey) really take the cake in this. Just like in ROTLD 1, these two clowns whine and cringe and cry their way through practically every scene. James Karen really hams up his role when in the middle of a zombie infestation he falls to his knees and starts praying to God. Phillip Bruns is quite amusing as well in the role of Doctor Mandel. His aloof behavior and lackadaisical reluctance towards urgency adds just one more comedic layer to an already humorous setting.

Gore: You only get anatomy lessons like this in biology class! Heaps and heaps of good gooshy fun! We see zombies munching on people’s brains! We see zombies getting their heads hacked off! We see zombies blown in half! We see disembodied limbs that move independently! Exploding zombies! Burning zombies! Zombies with missing parts! This is just a smorgasbord of post-mortem morsels of moldy munchables! It doesn’t get much better than this!

Guilty Pleasures: Another great horror flick sans titties. (Sigh) However we do get to see an attractive looking aerobics instructor bouncing around on the telly. On the non T&A side of guilty pleasures, this film satisfies in every way possible. Hell, this whole movie is one big guilty pleasure. I’ll get into that later in the Good column.

The Good: This film kicks ass! This movie is stupid in all of the best ways. Partially meant as a comedy, Return of the Living Dead 2 brings us one of the most invigorating and colorful takes on the zombie genre ever. Now while the second installment of this trilogy is not nearly as entertaining as the first, it still manages to tickle our funny bones while grossing us out all at the same time.

There are so many awesome moments in this film I don’t even know where to begin. When the zombies first begin to rise from the Earth, one of the hapless ghouls just CAN’T seem to get his decomposing ass out of the ground. He has his fingers stepped on repeatedly and one of his partners-in-grime- even steps on his head. Poor guy.

At the Wilson house, Tom stabs a disembodied head with a screwdriver. The head comes to life and begins yelling at Tom screaming, “Get that damn screwdriver out of my head!”

Then there’s the part where the rest of the zombies begin invading the house. One deadhead attacks Tom and the two go sprawling over the couch. He begins choking the shit out of him not realizing that Tom’s shoulder is resting on the remote control. As the ‘play’ button is depressed, the aerobics instructor pops back up on the tube. Both Tom and the zombie stop struggling and begin ogling the aerobics chick. Even the other zombies in the house stop moving and begin watching the tape. I half expected them to start working out.

As the group exits Mandel’s home, they climb into his car. There is a zombie on the roof that begins reaching his hand inside the window to attack them. Lucy rolls up the window cutting the zombie’s hand off at the wrist. The thing falls down into her lap and the group engages in a game of hot potato. They finally chuck the dismembered digits out the window onto the street. As the car pulls away, the hand gives them the middle finger.

Later on, Brenda drives her fist into the gooey face of one particularly ugly looking fucker. She caves the guy’s face in and his lower jaw falls off. He begins feeling around for his missing features and can’t quite seem to understand that he no longer has a nose.

Then there’s the clown at the hospital. I love watching his legs wandering about while the guy’s top half scrambles to catch up with them. He can never quite seem to reach them though. Poor old sod.

At the end of the film, all of the zombies are standing side by side as arcs of electricity begin shooting through them. They are spastically twitching all over the place and one of the zombies looks a LOT like Michael Jackson during his Thriller days. This is probably one of the funniest parts in the whole dang flick.

I liked how director Ken Wiederhorn decided to re-cast James Karen and Thom Matthews. As mentioned earlier, the two played similar roles in Return of the Living Dead. In this movie, they play two entirely different cornballs, who coincidentally enough suffer the same fate as their predecessors. They even repeat some of the same dialogue from the first film. At one point, Joey even mentions how it all feels like some massive amounts of déjà vu. Ed also makes a comment in which he states that he will never be buried in a coffin, he will be cremated. (In the first film, Karen’s character committed suicide by crawling into a crematorium.) I thought this was a nice tip of the hat to the first movie.

No true fan of horror movies can watch this film and NOT sit back with a smile afterwards. It’s the kind of thing that just puts a nice warm feeling in your tummy.

The Bad: Okay, how is it that Jesse didn’t get turned into a zombie? He was in the same toxic laden cemetery that Ed and Joey were in. And for that matter, how did Brenda escape from being turned into a zombie? She would have been perfect! She’s more or less dead from the neck up to begin with.

Ed and Joey’s crying gets a little tiresome at times, but it’s fairly easy to laugh your way through it.

Billy the punk is one UGLY little motherfucker! Despite all that however, I still wished that he had beaten the snot out of Jesse. (Yes, I’m still bitter.)

I thought the characters of Tom and Lucy were useless and boring. They had zilch as far as camera appeal and to be honest, the corpses in this flick had more personality. And of course, the film ends with the stud and the hottie getting hooked up. I don’t know about you, but if I were stuck in the back of a blood-soaked ambulance with brains and guts all over the place and a few hundred loud flesh-eating zombies nipping at my heels, I wouldn’t be feeling all that romantic. Why do the characters in horror movies always have to slurp face after defeating the monster? If that were me, I’d probably be pushing the bitch off of me screaming, “Yo, back da fuck up! Let’s get cleaned up first, and then we’ll talk.” I’m sorry but I just don’t feel particularly randy after having had a guy I don’t even know, trying to eat my gray matter with a spoon. That’s just some dumb shit.

Great Lines:

“Get that damn screwdriver out of my head!” --A headless zombie suffering a serious cranial injury.

“You’re supposed to be dead!” --Joey yelling at a zombie just as he drives a crowbar down on top of him.

Overall Rating: 7 out of 10 severed heads.

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