Eberts Thumb

Dont do Zombie drugs

Return of the Living Dead 5: Rave to the Grave seems to be the spiritual successor to Return of the Living Dead 4: Necropolis. Its part sequel since it has a lot of the same characters as the previous movie but a year older and in college. It can't be a true sequel though since the aforementioned characters forgot everything they learned about zombies, zombie gas, and shooting weapons in that year. Maybe its taking place in a parallel dimension. Don't worry if you haven't seen Necropolis since they reintroduce everyone anyways, and its not like their actual characters matter much anyways.

Rave to the Grave starts off with the evil scientist from Necropolis using one of the last barrels of zombie gas on some dead bodies, forgetting that its zombie gas, and dies from a gunshot wound to the head after a zombie takes a chunk out of his skull. His nephew, who happened to survive #4, finds some barrels of zombie gas in his uncle's attic and decides its best if his chemist friend takes a look at it instead of returning it to the US Army. While getting it examined, the stoner friend decides to taste it and has a serious trip for 30 seconds. The stoner and chemist get the idea to synthesize it and sell it as a party drug, but the nephew makes them promise not to. They must have crossed their fingers since we are treated to a montage of them manufacturing the drug and getting thousands of pills on the streets the next morning. After taking too many "Z" pills, students start turning into zombies. Not too many though since things can't get completely out of control until the big Halloween rave.

Rave to the Grave has a few problems with it. The most obvious is that its incredibly campy. The hitchhiking zombie with a cardboard sign saying "Rave or Bust" tops it off. If you are a zombie movie purist, you might be annoyed that the zombies yell "BRAINS" but only take a bite out of the scalp and move on. Maybe they should yell "HAIR" instead. The biggest problem I had with the movie was the stoner character. The kid they cast must have had a really bad accent so they dubbed over him with a prepubescent boy. Every time he opened his mouth it ruined whatever semblance of suspension of disbelief there was for a campy zombie movie.

The reasons to watch Rave to the Grave though are that it has lots of gore and lots of gratuitous nudity. No complaints in those two categories.

If you like zombie movies but don't like campy movies, you might want to pass on this one. Otherwise, you might as well watch it if you have seen the others in the series.

El Chupacabra

Look out for the governments new solution to raves

If you are a true connaisseur of zombie movies then I recommend seeing this for the simple reason that you cannot truly appreciate a great zombie movie until you have witnessed the worst zombie movies.

In a less than obvious continuation of Return of the Living Dead 4: Necropolis, we discover that some government agents are trying to track down the remaining barrels of zombie gas that were stolen from a military facility. A young college couple, one of whom is the nephew of the man who stole the barrels, find the three remaining barrels in the uncle's house. Despite the large stenciling of "U.S. Army" and the large biohazard symbol on the barrels, the kids decide against notifying the authorities and instead wheel a barrel all the way to the campus chemistry lab where their friend turns what's inside into a designer drug called "Z". At this point, I pretty much hated myself. They sell the drug around campus, but little do they know, taking the drug starts to transform the user into a zombie.

I'm not one of those people who complains as soon as a movie tries something new and departs from established cinematic conventions. I won't go around trolling forums because the X-wing fighters in Star Wars: Episode Three had their ion canons on the right side instead of the left. Trying to innovate, break clichés, and mix genres and styles can sometimes be fruitful and produce excellent results. If being creative with overused genres is too cumbersome, why not combine them in delightful ways like Western Gay Musicals or Science Fiction Chick Flicks (two types of movies I would firmly avoid).

At the same time, there are things that are the holiest of holies in Hollywood.  When a classic idea or concept is originated, movie makers need to tread lightly when introducing change. Perhaps not the best example, but one that rings true is the movie based on the hugely popular video game series Doom.  Doom was a series of games about fighting off legions of hell-spawned demons on Earth, Mars, and Hell itself. Fans of this game knew what to expect and a canon of Doom was well enough established that even Hollywood executives could follow it, right? Wrong. Despite the fact that a movie based on Doom would necessarily be aimed at a specific audience, namely fans of the game Doom, fans who would be the most likely to see the movie, the executives decided to make ill conceived changes. I'm not talking small details, but huge ones like whether it takes place in our solar system or not.  Why did they do this? Who knows, but it was the start of the ruination of what could have been a scary and intense movie (I picture the British production The Descent taking place on Mars). The funny thing is, had they stuck to the video games canon they would have ended up with a product that had wider appeal than what they ultimately released. I would have settled for watching someone play Doom 3 for 90 minutes.

Unfortunately, Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave messed with the sacrosanct portayal of zombies and tried to unsuccesfully mix zombie movie with teenage comedy. The idea that these genres could possible meld makes me cringe, but it has been successfully done before to a certain extent. The movie Idle Hands was a dark teenage comedy featuring undead. Unfortunately, this movie was much too goofy to be able to deal zombies to the viewer and expect them to be scared in the slightest. Shaun of the Dead was a zombie comedy movie, but damnit, the zombies did what they were supposed to.

The next major flaw in the movie was their complete disregard for the laws of zombies:

1. Zombies do not crack jokes and chit chat.
2. Zombies do not jog, run, or dance at raves.

I won't be a purist, I'm open to revisions to these laws as long as they're explained and supported by sensible plot points. Although not traditional zombies because they could run like Prefontaine, the ones from 28 Days Later were completely acceptable because the reason they could run was explained. The zombies in The Land of the Dead were not so good. Hey Romero, I know you want to turn your zombie movies into clever political metaphors, but for Christ's sake, they're zombies, they won't be able to oil that Kalashnikov. Unfortunately, the zombies in ROTLD 5 were way too goofy and watching them run around a rave and eat brains was a lot less entertaining that it sounds.

Altogether, ROTLD 5 just felt too mashed together. It tried to be a zombie movie, a comedy, and a party movie, but failed at all three. The rave scene at the end was perhaps commentary on how drugs are bad, but more likely, the producer just wanted to sucker drunk college kids into renting this.

Crap Bag

Raves are more fun when people are trying to eat the back of your head.

This movie is a squeal to another bad zombie horror movie that was equally as bad.  The main premise is that the bad doctor from the first one is trying to sell a canister filled with a gas that will cause the dead or the living to become zombies.  These zombies however are just retarded people that try to eat human flesh but mostly just end up eating the back of people’s head and a chunk of hair.    The Uncle whom brings the canister dies and the agents that were inspecting the canister leave and go to the Uncle’s home.  The main character and the as well as the uncle’s nephew finds a secret crappy room in his Uncle’s attic that has some more of the kids take one of the canisters to have it examined at a chemical lab and somehow the gas in the canister is now in a liquid form.  The stupid DJ guy in the group of friends decides to taste the liquid on the off chance that he’ll get high or it will taste delicious.  He has a seizure, looks like he died for about 5 seconds and then he wakes up.  The rest of the friends get the genius idea to take this unknown chemical in the biohazard army drum and turn it into a designer drug.  The main character and his girlfriend are against this plan, but as soon as they leave the room the other guys start making pills and give it to the locale drug dealer to sell.  They later discover that if you take more than one pill at a time you will eventually turn into a zombie.  The stupid DJ guy is having a rave at an abandoned coliseum shape auditorium and of course everybody is going to be getting high off these zombie pills.  The agents whom are Italian and are always listening to opera music in their car are tailing the nephew and his friends to see if he has one of the canisters.  They also clean up any zombie related messes by mowing down everyone with machine guns or a rocket launcher.   Back at the chemical lab they find out that the canister actually contains a highly decomposed zombie whose body odour is the cause of the viral infection.   The agents save the kids from the zombie and the zombie is later seen trying to hitchhike to the rave party.  The way the movie ends everybody gets high turns into a zombie and all the ones that aren’t zombies just keep dancing until a zombie eats them.  The agents mow down as many zombies as they can until they call in the US army whom for some reason send in a coast guard rescue helicopter.  They start to unload bullets and missiles into the crowd and then launch a tactical low yield warhead that finishes off the remaining zombies and any possible survivors except for the nephew and his girlfriend as well as the agents. The movie closes with the zombie giving up on hitchhiking and decides to walk down the highway.

Kibakichi's Final Word

Why are they trying to be funny?