MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Living Dead 3’: A Return to Familiar Turf

If you would much rather watch zombies in the movies than real people--is there any difference these days?--you’ll have an OK time at “Return of the Living Dead 3” (citywide). It’s not even necessary to have seen “1” or “2.”

It’s not necessary to see “3” either. (The R rating is for--big surprise--horror, violence, gore, language and sexuality.)

This is a zombie flick with “heart,” which is ironic since hearts are just about the only body part you don’t see. Curt (J. Trevor Edmond) is a motherless Army brat whose stiff-backed father (Kent McCord) is dabbling in a top-secret military experiment to revive cadavers and mummified corpses with the chemical Trioxin (which was introduced in “1”). When Curt’s girlfriend Julie (Mindy Clarke) is killed in a motorcycle accident, Curt douses her in Trioxin, and, presto-chango--it’s reanimation time!

Curt, demonstrating a Romeo-like ardor, refuses to back off from Julie when she starts snorting and drooling. You get the (perhaps unintended) impression that Curt may actually find all this zombie flesh-eating stuff a little . . . well, kinky.

Julie, good sport that she is, doesn’t want to chomp other people, unlike just about everyone else in the ever-mounting cast of zombies. So she pierces herself instead. Julie carries the piercing craze among teens to surreal new heights. In the movie’s most garishly imaginative moment, she appears fully punctured with earrings, shards of glass, nails. She’s horrific yet eerily beautiful, like a demonic religious icon.

Steve Johnson, who did the effects for “Aliens,” is responsible for Julie’s look. The director, Brian Yuzna, who also produced some of the best Stuart Gordon movies, including “Re-Animator” and “From Beyond,” supervised five different special-effects experts--one for each category of glop.

The script could have used a few experts, too. The action is too serious for a genre that can no longer be played seriously. The New Zealand “Dead Alive,” a summer release, was such a hilarious high-style zombie film that it was definitive; no one who makes a zombie movie from now on can hope to top it. And what “Dead Alive” also demonstrated is that, if you do it right, the funnier things get the scarier they get. “Return of Living Dead 3” isn’t bad for what it is but it’s the genre itself that needs reanimation.

‘Return of the Living Dead 3’ Mindy Clarke: Julie J. Trevor Reynolds: Curt Kent McCord: Col. Reynolds Basil Wallace: Riverman

A Trimark Pictures presentation. Director Brian Yuzna. Producers Gary Schmoeller, Brian Yuzna. Executive producers Roger Burlage, Lawrence Steven Meyers. Screenplay by John Penney. Cinematographer Gerry Lively. Editor Christopher Roth. Music Barry Goldberg. Production design Anthony Tremblay. Running time: 1 hour, 36 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (horror, violence, gore and for language and sexuality.)