In 1993 horror fans were greeted with the release of Return of the Living Dead 3. This third film in the Return of the Living Dead series produced by John Russo ends up being a very good zombie movie and actually has genuine horror that the second film lacked. What ROTLDIII, its writers and directors seem to have left behind was the comedy side of the series which made them cult-classics to begin with.
Taking up directing duty this time around was genre-veteran Brian Yuzna (Beyond Re-Animator) who films this third entry purely on a horror standpoint. This film is serious horror from start to finish. This time around the military is still trying to find a way to use 2-4-5 Trioxin as a way to create zombie soldiers, but ones that could be easily controlled by them. To say that this project hasn’t met with success is an understatement. But it’s the story of the son of the military project director and his girlfriend who dominate the film’s plot. As portrayed by J. Trevor Edmond and Melinda Clarke, these two star-crossed lovers find themselves enmeshed with the dark secret of the project being held in secret. Son soon uses the Trioxin gas to try and ressurect his girlfriend who gets killed early on during an accident. What he gets instead is an undead girlfriend whose hunger for live brains (for some reason the zombies in this ROTLD sequel also feed on other bodily parts) can only be controlled when she causes herself bodily pain through extreme forms of piercing. The rest of the film deals with the father trying to save his son not just from himself and his undead girlfriend but from the hordes of escaped zombies in the facility.
The horror in the film was actually pretty good and this was helped a lot by the gore effects work which surpasses anything the first two films in the series had. The acting was decent enough with Melinda Clarke as the zombified girlfriend putting on a sexy, albeit creepy performance. If it wasn’t for the brain and flesh-eating she sure would’ve made for quite a poster girl for teenage boys.
In the end, Return of the Living Dead 3 continues the series admirably. Despite not having much humor and comedy in the film, this third film in the series more than makes up for it with high levels of gore and a definite sense of horror the first two didn’t much have not to mention a bit of romance which seemed to work.
Through the Shattered Lens 
I read your reviews for all 5 installments of the series (nicely done), and watched the trailers (which I usually prefer not to do prior to watching a film). From all of that information, I decided that # 3 was probably the only one I might have much interest in, since I don’t like camp or cheese (or worse, campy cheese; or worst, cheesy camp). So I watched it tonight.
Not bad. A bit of a “Day Of The Dead” theme to it. It was at least a sincere effort. Not really scary, but gruesome and serious enough to be effective.
This series seems to have at least originally been aimed at teenagers. The third film transcended that a bit. I guess I prefer zombie flicks for adults, which are relatively few. I doubt that I will watch any of the others. But this one was fairly entertaining. And once again, you were right about the femme fatale (or in this case, femme fatality). The red-head zombie was hot, dead or not.
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You should still check out the first one. It’s actually the one that I’d call the scariest even with the camp added to it.
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Duly noted. As a fan of the genre, albeit a selective one, I should probably watch the first in this series, since they are usually the best, or at least aren’t repeating things from earlier installments.
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