Where zombies go to die, cotd.
Maybe I was easy to please after Necropolis, but Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave didn't depress me to nearly the same degree. It's still the second-worst film in the franchise, but only by a little; just a few tweaks and it would be every inch as good as Part II. Which was still a movie I didn't like at all, but at least it didn't put me in as profoundly foul a mood as Necropolis. Part of it is because in a very flaccid way, Rave to the Grave takes the series back to its roots: for the first time since the second film, it's an out-and-out comedy, though a very bad comedy. Butler and Strongoni apparently think that there is no form of comedy richer than slapping two... Italian?... Interpol agents (Claudiu Bleont and Sorin Cocis) into lady opera singer costumes and have them bumble around. Bumbling! Man, how great is it to see unabashed bumbling cops in a movie of relatively new vintage? It's like having a gumdrop tree in your backyard, and the gumdrops all taste like dead baby unicorns.
The two agents are introduced as mobsters that are meeting with Charles (poor damn Peter Coyote, it would have been easy just to kill him in the last film) to buy some of the Trioxin he spirited away last time. His demonstration goes awry, to say the least, and Coyote at last gets to drop out of the project, with whatever dignity he has left. Haha, I kid, he has no dignity left.
Back home, Julian - now a college freshman - gets to deal with sorting out his dead uncle's affairs, which involves finding a hidden room, as he declares to his new girlfriend Jenny (Jenny Mollen) "I've lived in this house 18 years, and never once did my parents even talk about this room". Here and elsewhere, it's very difficult to say whether the gleefully horrible dialogue is accidental or deliberate, part of the "joke". Probably the former, and it's certainly funnier that way.
In this room, Julian finds some Trioxin in large cans, and doesn't figure out what it is. Apparently he wasn't paying any more attention to Necropolis than I was. So he's obliged to take it to the techie Cody (Cory Hardrict), also a survivor from before - then he was a hacker, now he's a chemist, same difference - who can't quite figure it out either, but Jenny's brother, the DJ and all-round drug fiend Jeremy (Cain Mihnea Manoliu) decides that the right thing to do is ingest some of the liquid they've drawn from the can, and declare that it gives him a truly legendary high. It shall be perfect, he concludes, to sell all around the campus. As luck would have it, it's a few days before Halloween, the night of an epic rave that Jeremy is DJ'ing; he annoyingly and repetitively refers to it as a "rave to the grave", and in meeting with the local drug dealer Skeet (Catalin Parschiv) - yes, "Skeet" - dubs the drug "Z", because it makes you feel like a zombie. Hoho, the irony.
So the ingredients: bumbling Interpol agents, a whole lot of college kids ready to trip balls on Trioxin at the Biggest Rave Ever, and in a repeat of the last film, the best scene involves a rat given Trioxin (it's a lab rat named Mr. Stinky this time, not a hobo banquet). Also, one of the Trioxin vats busts open to reveal, for the first time since Part II an honest-to-God Tarman zombie (there's a sort-of Tarman in the third film), who gets saddled with a positively unendurable gag in the last scene, but hey, it's Tarman.
Anyway, you see where all this is going, right? Well, it goes there. The body count is marvelously high, the gore is generally more visceral and convincing than in the last one, and there are lots of topless women. So if your needs are as barbarously low as you can get them, Rave to the Grave will at least prove more satisfying than Necropolis. On the other side, Elkayem had by this point in the production cycle given up entirely on making Romania look like the U.S., the film is overlit and dreadfully flat, and the comedy is played in the broadest, most grating way that it could be.
Even so, at the very least it's got a whole lot more mayhem and carnage than its sibling, which for a solid half of its running time watched as a lot of indistinguishable teens sneak into a lab. Here, a lot of indistinguishable teens get their skulls chomped off, as two Romanians playing Italians with Russian accents tromp about, mangling English. It's cheesy and squirrelly, but at least it's not wretched. If that sounds like the faintest praise with which I can damn something, it's meant to be, and my single response to Rave to the Grave is relief that I have no more painfully diminished Return of the Living Dead knock-offs to weep through.
Reviews in this series
The Return of the Living Dead (O'Bannon, 1985)
Return of the Living Dead, Part II (Wiederhorn, 1988)
Return of the Living Dead III (Yuzna, 1993)
Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis (Elkayem, 2005)
Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave (Elkayem, 2005)
The two agents are introduced as mobsters that are meeting with Charles (poor damn Peter Coyote, it would have been easy just to kill him in the last film) to buy some of the Trioxin he spirited away last time. His demonstration goes awry, to say the least, and Coyote at last gets to drop out of the project, with whatever dignity he has left. Haha, I kid, he has no dignity left.
Back home, Julian - now a college freshman - gets to deal with sorting out his dead uncle's affairs, which involves finding a hidden room, as he declares to his new girlfriend Jenny (Jenny Mollen) "I've lived in this house 18 years, and never once did my parents even talk about this room". Here and elsewhere, it's very difficult to say whether the gleefully horrible dialogue is accidental or deliberate, part of the "joke". Probably the former, and it's certainly funnier that way.
In this room, Julian finds some Trioxin in large cans, and doesn't figure out what it is. Apparently he wasn't paying any more attention to Necropolis than I was. So he's obliged to take it to the techie Cody (Cory Hardrict), also a survivor from before - then he was a hacker, now he's a chemist, same difference - who can't quite figure it out either, but Jenny's brother, the DJ and all-round drug fiend Jeremy (Cain Mihnea Manoliu) decides that the right thing to do is ingest some of the liquid they've drawn from the can, and declare that it gives him a truly legendary high. It shall be perfect, he concludes, to sell all around the campus. As luck would have it, it's a few days before Halloween, the night of an epic rave that Jeremy is DJ'ing; he annoyingly and repetitively refers to it as a "rave to the grave", and in meeting with the local drug dealer Skeet (Catalin Parschiv) - yes, "Skeet" - dubs the drug "Z", because it makes you feel like a zombie. Hoho, the irony.
So the ingredients: bumbling Interpol agents, a whole lot of college kids ready to trip balls on Trioxin at the Biggest Rave Ever, and in a repeat of the last film, the best scene involves a rat given Trioxin (it's a lab rat named Mr. Stinky this time, not a hobo banquet). Also, one of the Trioxin vats busts open to reveal, for the first time since Part II an honest-to-God Tarman zombie (there's a sort-of Tarman in the third film), who gets saddled with a positively unendurable gag in the last scene, but hey, it's Tarman.
Anyway, you see where all this is going, right? Well, it goes there. The body count is marvelously high, the gore is generally more visceral and convincing than in the last one, and there are lots of topless women. So if your needs are as barbarously low as you can get them, Rave to the Grave will at least prove more satisfying than Necropolis. On the other side, Elkayem had by this point in the production cycle given up entirely on making Romania look like the U.S., the film is overlit and dreadfully flat, and the comedy is played in the broadest, most grating way that it could be.
Even so, at the very least it's got a whole lot more mayhem and carnage than its sibling, which for a solid half of its running time watched as a lot of indistinguishable teens sneak into a lab. Here, a lot of indistinguishable teens get their skulls chomped off, as two Romanians playing Italians with Russian accents tromp about, mangling English. It's cheesy and squirrelly, but at least it's not wretched. If that sounds like the faintest praise with which I can damn something, it's meant to be, and my single response to Rave to the Grave is relief that I have no more painfully diminished Return of the Living Dead knock-offs to weep through.
Reviews in this series
The Return of the Living Dead (O'Bannon, 1985)
Return of the Living Dead, Part II (Wiederhorn, 1988)
Return of the Living Dead III (Yuzna, 1993)
Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis (Elkayem, 2005)
Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave (Elkayem, 2005)
