From the director of Eight Legged Freaks comes Return Of The Living Dead – Necropolis, a straight to video follow up (well, technically it premiered in a toned down version on the Sci-Fi Channel first, but we're splitting hairs…) to Dan O'Bannon's fantastic 1985 zombie comedy. While O'Bannon's film will always hold a special place in the heart of many a horror movie dork, thanks in no small part to Linnea Quigley's cemetery strip tease, this film proves to be as forgettable and completely disposable as they come.

The film begins when an American shows up in Russia to buy some barrels of the toxin from the first film that was responsible for re-animating the dead. We soon learn that this guy is Charlie (Peter Coyote who has had bit parts in everything from E.T. to Deadwood), and that he works for an evil corporation called Hyber-Tech that provides 'chemical solutions for the entire world.' What would a corporation want with six barrels of toxic waste? Well, when it can turn the dead into zombies, it might prove practical for their covert biological weapons development program, code named Necropolis.

Unfortunately for Charlie, his two nephews, Julian (John Keefe) and his younger brother who goes by Pyro, start to meddle in his affairs when their pal Zeke (Elvin Dandel) falls off of his dirt-bike and is whisked off to the hospital. When they show up to visit Zeke with the rest of their pals, the doctor tells him that he's dead but thankfully Zeke's ex-girlfriend Katie (Jana Kramer) works at Hyber-Tech as a security guard and while monitoring the cameras she sees him whisked into the compound on a stretcher. When she tells Julian that Zeke's alive and in the building, he and the rest of his teenage cohorts get on their dirt bikes and break into the multi-billion dollar corporate headquarters to get him back, but when they arrive, they're greeted by a few flesh eating zombies.

Amazingly enough, the kids are able to get into the compound without getting themselves killed or arrested but once they do, Uncle Charlie discovers them and reveals to them Hyber-Tech's plans in typical super villain fashion. What the kids learn proves to be pretty eerie stuff and reveals what really happened to Julian and Pyro's parents a year or so ago. When a security glitch results in hordes of zombies being unleashed from their cells, let loose upon the world of the living, all Hell breaks loose…

Shoot in Romania (back to back with the upcoming Return Of The Living Dead 5, this one has more than a few problems that are obvious from the start. First off, for most of the film Romania is doubling for somewhere in the United States, which might work if so many of the supporting actors weren't played by people who are obviously from Eastern Europe and who cannot hide their accents. Second, the very idea of a gang of high-school kids getting into a high tech corporate office as easily and as painlessly as they do in this movie (they start off by hacking into their computers using a DOS prompt and typing in 'launch.exe'…) is completely retarded. They don't run into any security issues as Katie has them covered from the security room – meaning, this massive corporation has entrusted the security of their entire operation to one girl roughly seventeen years of age. To make matters worse, the zombie continuity in this one is completely screwed up. In a lot of zombie movies, you have to shoot a zombie in the head to kill it – and this rings true with the first zombies who go after our group. But once they make their way into the compound, apparently they can kill the zombies by shooting them in the stomach, which doesn't really make much sense. If these zombies are weaker or different somehow, we're not told, and because of that we're left scratching our heads.

Add to that the fact that all of the 'kids' in the film (I use the term 'kids' loosely as a few of these actors are very obviously in their thirties and they look it) are clichés of some sort. We've got the nice nerdy girl, the smart girl and the slutty girl. We've got the computer hacker, the tough gang banger type, and the smart sensitive guy. They're all cookie cutter characters who could have come from anywhere and fit into pretty much any movie, and we're really given no reason to care about them.

There are a few things that the movie does get right – the pacing is pretty decent and the build up isn't bad, neither is the idea of tying the outbreak into an evil corporation bent on world domination. The barely touched upon idea of using reanimated zombies as super soldiers (which takes up about two minutes of the film but which is highlighter on the cover art), while not completely unique, is at least an interesting thought. Some of the gore effects are sufficiently nasty as well, which makes for some good kill scenes here and there. Sadly, however, none of that is enough to get past the horrible script, the piss poor characterization, the bad heavy metal soundtrack, and the completely ludicrous plot.

Video:

The 1.85.1 anamorphic widescreen on this disc is pretty nice despite an abundance of edge enhancement in some scenes. Black levels stay strong throughout, only showing mpeg compression in a couple of spots (which is good seeing as so much of the film takes place at night or in dark places) while aliasing and line shimmering are kept to a minimum. Flesh tones look lifelike when they're supposed to and sickly and zombie-esque when the script calls for it. There's a pretty decent level of both foreground and background detail present in the image pretty much throughout the movie though some fine detail does get lost in the shadows from time to time but thankfully this only happens sporadically and it isn't a regular occurrence. Overall though, Return Of The Living Dead - Necropolis does look pretty good on this DVD.