It’s dumber and deader.

Return of the Living Dead: Part II is Return of the Living Dead with a Part II shoved on the end. If you’ve seen the first movie then congratulations you’ve seen the second film. They are so much the same goddamned person, I would say to them “you want ice cream cone?” Both of them would say yes.

The first Return of the Living Dead starred James Karen and Thom Matthews as two shlubs who get exposed to Trioxin and spend most of the movie slowly dying before turning into zombies. In Return of the Living Dead Part II, James Karen and Thom Matthews play two shlubs who get exposed to Trioxin and spend most of the movie slowly dying before turning into zombies. If you liked the jokes from the first movie, well most of those jokes are back and slightly altered to be technically not the same thing. Thom Matthews does get to eat a girl’s brains.

So what happened? The 80s were chock full of great movies that had crappy sequels that were just rehashes of the original while retaining some of the cast. Dan O’Bannon had nothing to do with the directing or screenplay, that was the work of Ken Wiederhorn who basically just took the script from the first movie, scribbled some extra words here and there, and presented it as his own work.

The plot is very similar to the first; a barrel of Trioxin is released into a cemetery and the dead come back to life. The zombies in this movie are far more humanlike in their behavior. They are smarter, capable of doing things like driving cars and operating telephones with pretty precise movement and thoughts. They interact with televisions and understand enjoying women in exercise pants. They can do many things, while also hungry for brains.

But at the end of the day it is just a lame ripoff of Return of the Living Dead. Anything you could want in this film was done better the first time by Dan O’Bannon. None of the kids in this film had much of a career in film, probably ruined by this movie. Neither did the director for that matter.

Rating: D