Return of the Living Dead III (1993)

RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD III  (1993)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Brian Yuzna
    Kent McCord, J. Trevor Edmond, Mindy Clarke,
    James T. Callahan, Sarah Douglas, Basil Wallace
This starts out with a couple of teenagers sneaking into a military research facility where Lt. Col. Kent McCord is running experiments aimed at turning zombies into bioweapons - unkillable soldiers who can be dispatched over and over to fight future wars. It's about what you'd expect from a sequel to a sequel to a sequel, and then it gets interesting. First you meet the "Riverman" (Basil Wallace), a black guy from New Orleans who's somehow ended up living in an old pump room deep in the bowels of the Los Angeles sewer system. He's a genuinely interesting character, and you don't come across many of those in movies like this. Then one of the teenagers, the girl played by Mindy Clarke, starts to engage in progressively more extreme acts of self-mutilation to fight off the infection that's turning her into one of the undead. You don't see that in a lot of zombie movies, either. Then, somewhere in there, it kind of sneakily becomes this sweet little zombie love story, where the teenaged guy won't let go of his zombie girlfriend no matter what, while she keeps piercing herself in every place imaginable to counter her craving for brains. So I don't know. It still might not be a very good movie, but it's not a total throwaway, either. A sequel to a sequel to a sequel, you take what you can get.