Return of the Zombies: Zombie 3 Review
Editor’s Note: Today’s ZRC movie review comes from our special guest reviewer Jef Porkins. This movie goes by several names, including Return of the Zombies:Zombie 3, Beyond the Living Dead, Dracula the Terror of the Living Dead, The Hanging Woman, La Orgia dei morti, Terror of the Living Dead, The Orgy of the Dead, and Zombie 3: Return of the Living Dead.
I picked up this movie, along with several others, for $2 at Hollywood video when they were thinning out of their VHS collection. My version was called Return of the ZOMBIES: Zombie 3. The cover had a blurry picture of a zombie looming over some headstones below it with “It’s ZOMBIE Feeding Time!” scrawled across the top. The back has a blurry picture of four zombies, seemingly lurching and shambling with this description above it:
“A graveyard…tranquil, secluded…for one woman it’s the perfect place to take a walk and unwind…Not this time! It’s ZOMBIE TURF! This time she’s unwound – and left swinging from a tree. A detective finds himself in a race against time: the Zombies are ravenous – it’s feeding time! These Zombies are the worst yet: they’ve developed more than a taste for flesh – they crave their victim’s souls!”
The opening of the film is a funeral set in a tomb. During the funeral it starts to rain and for some reason it terrifies the funeral goers. The funny thing about the rain is that it’s bright and sunny out, yet it’s raining cats and dogs. And it’s not that late-in-the-day-sunny-rain, it’s high fuckin’ noon rain. Yet the rest of the film is over cast and dry.
Here’s a short recap of the bulk of the film: This man, Serge Chekov, comes to a remote Scottish town in the 19th century to claim an inheritance from his dead uncle. He ends up discovering his cousin’s body hung from a tree outside a cemetery, this leads him to frantically bang on doors of the village asking for help. Of course no one does because he’s already been told by the local codger that “strange things happen after dark”. Finally, one of the doors is answered by his dead uncle’s butler. After meeting with an investigator about the dead girl, who isn’t having his story for moment, he finds out that he has inherited his uncle’s estate, much to his aunt’s chagrin. She promptly seduces him into bed, much to the chagrin of the young blond maiden who is the daughter of the doctor who has a laboratory in his uncle’s house, you know, like ya do. The young maiden tries to persuade our hero not to sell the estate so that her father can continue his work – electrocuting frogs back to life.
How does she try to persuade him? By showing her breasts. They become friends and the aunt gets creepy and dies by the hands of zombie uncle that appears out of nowhere during a seance trying to reach his cousin in the afterlife. This is the first zombie of the movie, 58 minutes in.
There are about 5 more zombies in the film that just kinda walk slow and do the doctor’s bidding. You find this out when the hero and the doctor have a Scooby-Doo moment together. After the doctor is established as the bad guy in the film, they seemed to kinda forget that he was the bad guy and went about treating him as the young maiden’s father again. The film is a tangled web of boring bullshit, shaky camera work, bad lighting, 60′s soap opera acting and a revolver that holds 12 bullets (9 if you think that maybe he reloaded while running off camera).
The portrayal of women in this movie is ridiculous. The aunt’s seduction of Chekov serves no purpose in the film, but to show her naked. You’d think it might push the plot along some, but it doesn’t. The young maiden persuading Chekov not to sell the house is another laughably gratuitous boob shot that lingers way too long. Not to mention she faints at the sight of a zombie coming out of a coffin right next to her, then the damn thing doesn’t even go after her.
Zombie feeding time indeed!
Some of the zombies are actually not bad looking for how bad the rest of the film is. Now, that’s ‘not bad looking’ everything else about them is atrocious. They walk around with their eyes closed and kinda feel their way about. At first having their eyes closed sort of worked. The way their make up was done, it almost looked like they had bugged out, white eyes and it looked real creepy. The ones that look cool are the ones that are zombie versions of the characters that die in the film. The rest, or the other two, wear sheets wrapped around their heads and bring to mind a child in a diaper trying to look like a mummy by wrapping their head in a bath towel.
At first I thought that someone had somehow switched the video and just stuck the label on it, but the title on the screen told me different. The description and the pictures on the box had absolutely nothing to do with the movie inside. There are no flesh eating zombies or soul-sucking zombies, just zombies that suck. This was an obvious case of someone repackaging it to try and squeeze a few more dollars out of their recently acquired movie rights.
I’ll never watch this movie again, so I guess after I swat a few more flies with it, I’ll trash it so no one else feels compelled to watch it either.
-Jef Porkins
