Fern Flower
Published on December 20, 2020

Return of the Living Dead Part II

Movie1988
Zombies
The Movie DataBase
Return of the Living Dead Part II
January 15, 1988
A group of kids discover one of the drums containing a rotting corpse and release the 2-4-5 Trioxin gas into the air, causing the dead to once again rise from the grave and seek out brains.

Description

Return of the living dead 2 is a 1988 American Comedy horror film directed by Ken Wiederhorn. The film is a sequel to the film "Return of the living dead", released in 1985.

Plot

The military transport trioxin in barrels. From shaking on one of the trucks, the barrel-holding attachment weakens. Several barrels fall out of the truck, one of them rolls into the water and floats away with the current.

The barrel gets stuck in an artificial fence near the cemetery and is found by Jesse Wilson (a namesake or relative of Bert Wilson from the first part) with friends who brought him to the cemetery to conduct a mocking "rite of passage" in their society. Jesse's friends lock him in the crypt and go to check the contents of the barrel. They enter the code, and the trioxin bursts to the surface, spreading through the cemetery. Having inhaled toxic gas, teenagers hardly leave the scene.

Jesse is accidentally released from the crypt by the grave robbers, ed and Joey. They hunt for skulls, and along the way remove jewelry from corpses. Joey's fiancee, Brenda, is guarding the car they all arrived in.

At home, Jesse finds a comic book in which the superhero Masterman struggles with something that has escaped from a container similar to the one he saw. After running away from her older sister, Lucy, and a young telemaster, Tom Essex (who turns out to be her former classmate and clearly wants to renew their acquaintance), Jesse, wearing a respirator and diving glasses, returns to the barrel and writes down the phone number indicated on it.

Then he is attacked by a dead man who got out of the barrel, but Jesse manages to push him into the water. As he runs away, he sees the dead rising from their graves. At this time, the grave diggers find themselves surrounded by the living dead and try to escape from them along with Brenda, who came to see why they were delayed.

Jesse runs home and tries to warn Lucy and Tom about the dead, but they don't believe him. His sister locks him in his room, but Jesse escapes, faking a fire, and locks himself in his parents ' room, where there is a phone. Jesse dials a phone number from the barrel and tries to report it to the military. The connection is cut off at the very moment when Colonel Glover (who in the first film gave the order to bombard the site of a trioxin leak with a nuclear projectile) picks up the phone, because ed, Joey and Brenda, in an attempt to escape in Tom's van, knock down a telephone distribution booth, leaving the entire block without communication. In search of help, they run into the Wilson house. At first, no one believes them except Jessie, but then ed takes the animated head out of the bag. The heroes begin to strengthen the house, but soon realize that there is no hiding from such a huge number of dead people in it. Together, they go to a neighbor, retired doctor Mendel, to leave the scene in his car and bring help.

Arriving at the police station, they find that it is empty, and the streets of the city are completely occupied by the dead. They then decide to go to the hospital to help ed and Joey, who are developing signs of severe poisoning. The hospital also turns out to be empty. Dr. Mendel decides to shake up the old days and personally examine the sick. He soon comes to the conclusion that the patients are dead, and advises them to pack them in bags.

Ed and Joey disagree with the diagnosis, and Brenda takes them away to find another doctor. She drives up to the military and asks them to let her out of the city. When she is about to negotiate with them, ed lashes out at the military. After taking Joey away from the scene, Brenda is then forced to run away from him as he wants to taste her brains. But soon she stops resisting and agrees to fulfill the desire of her lover.

The others, accompanied by the doctor, are sent in a medical car to leave the city, but the military does not let them pass and opens fire. Running away, the heroes see how one of the dead men dies from an electric shock. This gives them the idea to lure the dead to the power plant with the help of calf brains from the meat processing plant and finish them all at once.

Zombies

The zombies in the film are virtually indistinguishable from the living dead shown in the original 1985 film. They turn both dead and living people under the influence of a dangerous chemical substance.

As before, the zombies are fast moving, and their main goal is the absorption of the brain. Unlike the first film, in which they fed exclusively on human brains, this time the zombies attack animals as well. They show signs of intelligence: they talk on the police radio, make complex sentences, make action plans, show solidarity with their fellow men, drive a car.

Killing zombies is very difficult. Head shots, dismemberment (including beheading) and other injuries do not stop them. Parts of bodies, separated from the zombies, continue to live and function. If in the original film, to kill zombies, they had to be burned, then in the second part, electric current is used as the main method of destruction.