Well if anything “Return III” doesn’t remake the first film as part II did. And it introduced us to the red haired goddess we know as Melinda Clarke. “Return III” is a goofy and kind of odd twist on the original film, but it packs in a pretty interesting romance, as well as staging the furnace scene from the first film again except with two people devastatingly in love.
“Return III” is set in a post “Return” world where the military are, of course, trying to use the trioxin to bring back dead soldiers and control them and their hunger for brains with robotic parts that can ensure they be indestructible re-conditioned drones in war. The zombies are difficult to control and there’s that whole appetite for brains they tend to have. When madly in love Julie and Curt crash their motorcycle in to an oncoming truck, Curt steals his dad’s key card to the local top secret military base, and decides to use Trioxin to revive his love once more.
Nothing could go wrong, right? At first, all seems well, but Julie inevitably begins to form a hunger that’s insatiable. Soon she not only has to endure the pain of being undead, but also has to try to restrain the urge to feed on people’s brains, which is the only cure for her aches as she is forced to shamble around with her boyfriend. From there director Brian Yuzna doesn’t have much to do with the characters, so there’s a lot of filler added.
Curt and Julie run afoul a Mexican gang that takes them hostage, and Julie goes on a rampage, biting and eating a few of the gang members, while Curt tries to desperately restore her to former self. She becomes a self loathing feeding machine centering on self-mutilation, and seeks to do whatever she can to satiate her appetite, as the couple soon become hunted by the government who want to capture Julie, as well as her victims. Much of “Return III” misses the point of the first film, as all of the “Return” sequels do, this time turning the zombies in to Bub clones from “Day of the Dead.”
They’re not so much decrepit brain hungry ghouls as they are war victims subjected to living again and being forced into combat by the government. This leads in to a sequence where Curt frees the zombies, and eventually has to figure out how to free Julie of her cursed re-animation. Yuzna delivers a somewhat solid zombie film that at least tries for something new and unique. When all is said and done, it may not be a masterpiece but it almost comes close to creating a sympathetic zombie victim in Julie, as Melinda Clarke offers a portrayal of a suffering and twisted monster slowly losing grasp of her humanity. It may not measure up to the original, but it works as a Gothic romance with a somber ending.