It's official, 2005 can go down in the record books as the year two well loved zombie franchises were raped. As if the atrocity that was Day Of The Dead 2: Contagium wasn't enough, along comes the Romanian-shot low-budgeter Return Of The Living Dead: Necropolis, which purports to be the fourth entry in the series (with a fifth, badly subtitled Rave To The Grave, made back-to-back with this) while having very little to do with the first three - if you don't count the canisters and the fact our gut munchers prefer "brainnnsss." It's so bad; I'm almost beginning to wonder why I continue to watch undead movies at all.

The way things start out (with the cheesy commercial for chemical company Hybra Tech); it looked like they were going to keep the tongue-in-cheek approach of the movies before it. Sadly, this was not to be. In fact, things here are played so seriously, that it only helps to magnify all the faults it has. And that's sort of surprising since director Ellory Elkayem made the goofy giant spider flick, Eight Legged Freaks, three years prior.

Busy character actor Peter Coyote plays scientist Charles Garrison, who's headed off to Russia with a few small time crooks in order to buy the last surviving canisters of 'Trioxin 5', which have been kept hidden in the ruins of Chernobyl. There's only six barrels left, and after one leaks on one of the thugs (turning him undead and making him bite into the melon of his partner), Garrison dispatches him and takes the barrels back to America - to the lab of his employer, Hybra Tech.

At the same time, his nephew Julian (John Keefe) is out with friends having fun pulling off stunts on their dirt bikes. Taking a cue from the third entry in the series, one of Julian's friends ends-up having a major accident and instead of being sent to the hospital, like they thought, he ends-up going to Hybra Tech to be a test subject of Julian's not-so-innocent Uncle.

Now it's up to Julian and his buddies to break into the Hybra Tech building (which shouldn't be too hard considering one of them works security there) in order to save their injured pal from certain death.

There's plenty to complain about in this atrocious sequel and the first thing is the script by William Butler and Aaron Strongoni. The story here isn't just dumb, it's quite nonsensical as well. Throughout the movie things just feel to be happening at random and, I guess in order to keep things moving quickly, events just seem crammed too close together (it goes from accident to rescue mission without anyone even giving it a second-thought). Throw into it that this thing is loaded with groanable dialogue (the worst moment comes when one of the security guards exclaims "nice pooper" when looking at his female co-worker's behind), it's limited on zombie action until the last twenty minutes or so, and it decides to have two "Zombie Super Soldiers" that have been created by Coyote's scientist (and are Julian's parents) only to make them so easy to kill it's almost pointless even putting them in this.

As for the acting, Coyote drifts in-and-out of the movie seemingly when appropriate and sports a shit-eating grin for the duration, while the rest of the cast, with the exception of a few twenty-something American unknowns, are local European actors who either have hard-to-take accents or are dubbed badly. But the worst of the worst has to be Toma Danila as Carlos who's just too annoying for words.

But perhaps the most disheartening thing about this is that director Elkayem has fallen so hard. Eight Legged Freaks might not've been a box-office hit and wasn't a comedic monster movie on the level of Tremors, but it was still fun. If Return Of The Living Dead: Necropolis is any indication, maybe it was that film's cast and script that made it work decently and not the direction.

Sadly, Rave To The Grave is reportedly even worse. (Chris Hartley, 12/20/06)

Directed By: Ellory Elkayem.
Written By: William Butler, Aaron Strongoni.

Starring: Aimee-Lynn Chadwick, Cory Hardrict, John Keefe, Jana Kramer.