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RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD PART II
Rating: 
USA. 1988.
Director/Screenplay – Ken Wiederhorn, Producer – Tom Fox, Photography – Robert Elswit, Music – J. Peter Robinson, Makeup Effects – Kenny Myers, Art Direction – Dale Allan Petton. Production Company – Greenfox Productions.
Cast:
James Karen (Ed), Thom Matthews (Joey), Michael Kenworthy (Jessie Wilson), Marsha Dietlien (Lucy Wilson), Dana Ashbrook (Tom Essex), Suzanne Snyder (Rita), Brian Peck (Doc Mandell), Thor Van Lingen (Billy)
Plot: Two canisters of zombifying gas fall from the back of a military convoy as it passes through a small town and roll down into a drainage culvert near the town’s graveyard. There two bullies initiating a young kid into their gang accidentally open one of the canisters and become infected. Soon the town is overrun as the dead start coming back to life.
The original Return of the Living Dead (1985) was a distaff spinoff of George Romero’s groundbreaking classic Night of the Living Dead (1968) due to a complicated split of copyright on the story rights. As opposed to Romero’s zombie sequels, Return of the Living Dead came with a cheerful punk cynicism and tongue firmly planted in cheek and was one of horror’s freshest injections of originality in its year.
However, this sequel to Return of the Living Dead is witlessly conceived on all counts. It comes without any humour or originality – you realize just how far down into the barrel this one is reaching when a film has to count among its highlights gags about zombies treading on each other’s heads as they make their way out of the grave. Few zombie films of the 1980s have such cheesy looking makeup. James Karen and Thom Matthews reprise their roles from the first film but end up repeating what they did all over again scene for scene – dying while still alive, rigor mortis diagnoses, even down to a repeat of the scene where Thom Matthews chases his girlfriend around a chapel begging for her brains. Director Ken Wiederhorn is simply not adept at comedy – James Karen’s gibbering performance in particular gets on one’s nerves in a big way. When a film ends up posing as a sequel to a film (Return of the Living Dead) that was posing as a real-life sequel to another film (Night of the Living Dead), you know that the genre has reached a point of creative impoverishment.
Director Ken Wiederhorn did make one good zombie film – the Nazi zombie effort Shock Waves (1977). Wiederhorn’s other genre films are the uninspired likes of the slasher Eyes of a Stranger (1981) and the summer camp/alien visitor film Meatballs Part II (1984).
The Return of the Living Dead series was subsequently continued with Brian Yuzna’s much better Return of the Living Dead III (1993) and followed up during the zombie revival of the 00s with Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis (2005) and Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave (2005).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1999-2012
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