Whoops! This one’s a little late, but here it is. Anyway, Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis is the fourth movie in the Return of the Living Dead franchise, filmed at the same time as the fifth film, Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave. And they’re both certainly movies that exist! They’re not good by any stretch of the imagination–none of these movies really are–but they’re still marginally better than Return of the Living Dead: Part II. Now I’m imagining that faint praise on a movie poster…
A group of teenagers get wrapped up in an evil megacorporation’s experiments with Trioxin-5. Isn’t it supposed to be 245 Trioxin? Maybe it’s a different formula and that’s why the zombies in this movie are slow and easily killed. At least they say, “Brains…” Anyway, out of the ensemble cast only five matter enough for me to name them: Julian (Mr. John Keefe), Becky (Aimee-Lynn Chadwick), and Cody (Cory Hardrict) are main enough characters that they appear in both this and the next film; Katie (Jana Kramer) because she was also supposed to be in the next film but couldn’t because of a real life medical issue; and Zeke (Elvin Dandel) because he’s the asshole friend who turns into a zombie and is an even bigger asshole. Anyway, the kids find out something is up when Zeke is taken to a lab instead of a hospital and manage to infiltrate the facility right as several zombies are running amok. Julian finds out from his evil uncle Charles (Peter Coyote) that his parents were dug up after the car accident that killed them and turned into super zombies of mass destruction–Dad has a chain gun arm while Mom has a buzzsaw hand. In the end the zombies are pretty easily defeated, Charles runs off with the remaining Trioxin-5, and Katie dies out of nowhere. She’ll be replaced next movie by a new actress filling the exact same role.
So these are the zombies everyone thinks of: slow shamblers with no real intelligence and a craving for brains. Zeke is a smart zombie, partly because he was alive and turned due to a bite bite but also because he’s a secondary antagonist so he needed to do more than just shuffle along at a medium pace. So we’ve finally combined the two franchises into something recognizable to the average person! Which is a little hilarious since no one has seen these movies. Okay, probably not no one since these got toned down for a SyFy Channel release, but this is effectively Return of the Living Dead 4. No one cares by this point unless they’re fanatics or insane. I’ll let you figure out which one I am.
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