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From my favorite movies..

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

When I was a kid I had the poster to this movie on my wall. Not just that, I also had a 4x3 foot cardboard stand from the local video shop that stood proudly in the corner of my room.I also had a miniature cardboard display next to a 5 foot RoboCop, a 4 foot Crocodile Dundee and a 6 foot Robin Williams from Good Morning Vietnam.Liking this movie was a given, I had stacks of Fangoria magazines piled next to my graphic novels that were cushioned next go my porn collection. Comics, gore, porn.... everything a growing teenage boy needs, but why is it that I can't remember anything from this movie, yet I could recite lines from the original verbatim?25 years on I got the Blu-Ray of the first 3 ROTLD movies and decided to spend a whole Sunday watching them back to back with hot winter food and alcohol, but 5 minutes into this....effort, it all came flooding back. It's appalling.I'd like to say it's like a lifeless corpse of a movie in some ironic attempt at thematic humour but it's just a pale imitation, a copy bereft of charm or wit, a typical studio failure to replicate an original premise that had vibrancy, heart and soul. From the awful staged sequences of the badly directed kids 'fighting' at the beginning.Cringe-worthy music that sounded like it was taken from a TV movie sound library.Shocking editing, as the 'gas' creeping through the graveyard is blatantly shot on 2 completely different film stocks and it just looks woefully poor. Yes, the original movie suffered from certain budget restraints and I could write a list of deficiencies as long as my arm but that makes it all the more memorable and charming and re-watchable. All of these years later, watching Return Of The Living Dead again, just hours ago was fun filled, laugh a minute entertainment. This film is everything the first movie isn't and everything we dread about sequels.I have no idea what Ken Weiderhorn thought he was doing but pissing on the legacy of a great concept. I switched this film off 15 minutes.I guess I must have done the same when I was a kid, before tearing the poster off my wall and ripping the cardboard stand to pieces.All of these things, utterly forgettable.

Joining up with friends in a cemetery, a kid's discovery of a long-lost barrel of military-test chemicals finds that the release of the chemicals brings the dead to life and stalking their home-town forcing them to hold off the creatures as they find a way of stopping them.This here was a pretty descent sequel with some fun stuff about it. Among the better features here is the really exciting and enjoyable opening here, which features some nice action and some creepy visuals together for a fun time here as the sprawl through the cemetery and being chased by the bullies where he gets backed inside the mausoleum where he encounters the dead bodies in their caskets and leads into the fantastic resurrection scenes as the billowing cloud slowly works out from the drainage pipe into the cemetery where the gnarled hands break free from the heaving earth in the middle of the pouring rain. The later scene where he confronts the tar-man in the tunnel before the bigger mass-grave exhumation filled with hilarious gags and cheesy music makes for a great blend of suspense and cheesy action, which leads nicely into the race to get out of the cemetery as the swarming hordes of zombies overrun the graveyard in a really enjoyable time here. Even the suburbia scenes here are quite fun with them initially driving around and meeting with the two, the house attack which leads to their hilarious escape attempts and finally sneaking through the neighborhood to escape in the car which has some really fun and enjoyable moments here. Likewise, the film has a really enjoyable and exciting finale here with the soldiers confronting the zombies in a massive shootout before they begin chasing the group through the streets in several different attack scenes while they lead the creatures to the power-plant which has some fantastic action in the mass swarming on the truck that locks them inside, the eventual escape and chasing around the facility both inside the truck and out on foot before utilizing a comically cheesy yet oddly creative and effective disposal method of the zombies that really ends this on a high note. Along with the great zombie make-up and fun cheese, these here make for a really fun time here against the film's few flaws. The film's main problem here is the convoluted and clumsy mid-section here, built entirely around the absolutely tired ploy of nobody believing anything he says here without any reason why which continually leads them into encounters with the zombies when a fair bit of smartness would've prevented endless running around. That would've avoided the time-wasting scenes in the hospital, dealing with the infected friends and their adventures through town which are just unnecessary here and ruin the flow of the film. The other problem here is the rather overbearing sense of cheese here from the jokes, the goofy situations and non-threatening nature of the zombies in their actions here. While it makes the film fun, this one does come off more of a cheesy version of the genre.Rated R: Graphic Violence, Language, children-in-jeopardy and questionable child activities.

The first Return of the Living Dead was and still is a hugely enjoyable film, that's clever, immensely fun and very scary, and is and always will be the best of the five films in this particular series, the only film to be above good standard. This first sequel is nowhere near as good, but it's passable stuff and is one of the better sequels in the series (certainly much better than the horrendous Necropolis and Rave to the Grave).Visually, Return of the Living Dead Part II is not a stunner but it hardly looks amateurish either. It's shot with style, the lighting does evoke a spooky atmosphere and the effects are above average. The soundtrack is haunting and has a charming 80s feel, while not quite being as good as that of the original it doesn't date the film like it did with Necropolis and Rave to the Grave. James Karen and Thom Andrews return, and do great jobs carrying the film, Karen in particular is hysterical. The zombies are at least well-utilised, and while not very threatening at least exude some personality.On the other hand, while the production values are mostly good the zombie make-up is very much mixed, some of it is okay (while never on the same level of the make-up in the first film, it's never as pathetic as Rave to the Grave) but at other times the zombies look like Thriller-rejects. There is a lot of bad acting here in a film where Karen and Andrews give the only good performances, Suzanne Snyder is particularly annoying as Brenda, one of the series' most obnoxious characters. The characters in general here are very bland, and there's little engaging or endearing about them. The direction is sometimes efficient but sometimes rather languid, while the story is basically just a very predictable and sometimes repetitive re-hash of the first film's but with few of the ingredients that made its predecessor work so well. The film's biggest problem is that it has more emphasis on comedy than scares, this may not seem a problem at first but unfortunately the original achieved a much better balance between comedy and scares whereas this doesn't do very well with either. Scares are barely there in fact and the gore gets tiresome, and worse the comedy is incredibly strained in places with some of the better (if not by much) moments being completely unintentional.In conclusion, passable first sequel but its predecessor is so much better. 5/10 Bethany Cox

Confession time; I never was really fond of the first "The Return of the Living Dead" in the first place. I know I'm a minority on this but the humor was very childish and simplistic to me, as was the script, while the movie itself seemed to think that it was being a very clever one. Can't really say they improved any of this in this first sequel.I can see how this movie got mostly catered toward teenagers at the time and perhaps I would had liked this and the first movie better if I had grown up with it in the '80's. This is a problem I often have with popular '80's movies that are made for youngsters; I just don't get what's the appeal of them. This is of course not the case with just any movie but this does seem often the case with movies that are being regarded as cult-classics now days.But luckily I'm not all on my own this time. Generally speaking "Return of the Living Dead Part II" is not a very well liked movie, which does seem a bit surprising to me, since I just can't really see how this movie is worse than the original. As a matter of fact; I honestly liked this movie a bit better than the first one, simply because I didn't felt as annoyed with it this time.It's obviously not a great movie. It takes a far too simplistic and cliché ridden approach with things for that. The story is pretty much non-existent. Things just happen in this movie and most stuff seems very random. It doesn't follow a clear main plot line, which makes it feel like this movie is just going on and going on forever, even though the movie in fact is only about 85 minutes short. I was just pretty much fed up with all of it about an hour in already. I just couldn't care less about anything that was happening and I never got into any of the characters. I don't even remember any of their names and was actually more annoyed by most of them. The little kid is annoying (I hate it when they don't let children act like real children) but so was the screaming and shouting girl, as well as the old guy who was supposed to be funny but just never really made me laugh.The effects are also only half successful in this. At times all of the zombie and gore effects are fantastic and quite convincing looking, while at others it's just way too fake. It's very uneven, just like the entire movie basically.It's harmless and silly enough to still entertaining plenty of people I guess, just don't mistake it for a good movie as well.5/10 http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/