Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis (2005) Reviews

• silly kids zombies can kill you

  draven5282005-10-15

  I just saw ROTLD 4: Necropolis and I have to say if your a fan of the series, stay away from this one. The Sci-Fi channel premiered the movie tonight along with it's sequel "rave from the grave". Where to start, first off the actors suck, all of them, even peter coyote was bad. The script was unbelievable and the characters were all the same type of characters you'd expect in a low budget horror movie. The way the movie started looked promising but right when it got into the story about the teens looking for their friend, that's where it went all down hill. There were only two things that pleased me during the movie, the violence/gore was good. It wasn't anything like you see in a big budget horror movie, but it was okay. The second was that the little brother died. Yes somebody finally had the guts to kill a younger sibling. Anyway stay away from this one.

• Just saw the Sci-Fi Channel premiere.

  FleshAndTheFiends2005-10-15

  With nostalgic thoughts of the original 1985 comic horror classic lurching through my head, I approached Return 4 with a little more excitement than your usual sequel. Hey, it didn't HAVE have to be bad. Return of the Living Dead III, also a direct-to-video/cable release, was actually quite good and developed a strong and deserved cult following. Unfortunately, my joy was quickly extinguished only a few minutes into this truly boring zombie crap-fest. I should have known, given it is a Sci-Fi Channel 'original' movie. Has the Sci-Fi Channel EVER made a good movie? On the plus side, this movie does not stick by Sci-Fi Channel's typical horror offering of giant, toxic-waste exposed, killer snakes, dinosaurs, bugs and duckbilled playpi. On the down side, it sticks by the same exact formula (trapped people facing off against something wanting to eat them) and has the expected bad writing, bad acting and stupid story. Return of the Living Dead, Part 2 (1988) disappointed many fans of the first. After recent zombie offerings like this and All Souls Day: Dia De Los Muertos, Return 2 is actually starting to look good by comparison. Here are ten things you should know before viewing... 1. Nothing of interest happened during the first hour aside from lots of talk. Not interesting talk, just time-killer talk that amounts to nothing and generates no interest for either the story or the characters. Snooze city, baby. 2. The zombie military-unit theme was carried over from Return 3 but nothing of interest is done with it. 3. A bite to the back of the head from a zombie will result in blood gushing out like it's being shot from a waterhose. 4. Why does every teenager in a movie like this know advanced karate? The part where the guy drops his gun and says "It's game time!" before kung fu-ing a zombie reminded me of everyone's favorite movie, House of the Dead. If that isn't a bad sign, I don't know what is. And while I'm on it, how come every teenager is some kind of expert on high-powered weaponry? Just hand them any kind of huge gun or blowtorch and they automatically know exactly how to use it and their aim is always perfect. 5. Dialogue like "They're making uber zombies!" and "Do you ever feel like drilling a hole in your head to let the screams out?" just doesn't sound natural, even when spoken by someone semi-undead. 6. Male zombie-cyborg hybrids look like RoboCop with gangrene. 7. Grey-blue photography throughout does not make your film look sinister and dark, it makes it look cheap and bland. Nor does using one boring location for the majority of the film automatically make it seem scary and claustrophobic. The whole presentation of this movie was terrible. 8. When a zombie appears, make sure to cue a lame late-80s 'hair band'-style rock song that sounds like it would even be rejected from a Warrant album. 9. Watch and you'll notice that someone's gun malfunctions and/or runs out of ammo in this movie at least FOUR TIMES! And it always happens right when a hundred zombies are closing in. Of course. 10. Female zombie-cyborg hybrids go to the same hairdresser as Predator. Well, that's my take on this future dust bin dweller. The make-up was pretty good, I especially liked the head-crushed-by-tank-wheel effect, but the rest was formula zombie movie at its most boring and unimaginative. The level of humor, in case you're interested, reaches its peak when a man is reluctant to shoot a zombie because, "I lost my virginity to her!" Give me a break. My vote of 2/10 is both generous and kind. As of this writing, the film has 9.2 rating. I expect that to plummet by the end of the week.

• so bad it's...awful

  brennan792005-10-15

  THIS is what we waited for? THIS is what we've been given after more than a year of hype? I can't believe how bad this was! It's not funny, it's not scary, it's not even "so bad it's good", it's just "so bad it's really bad"... We are talking about some grade-z bad direction, I'm not sure what was worse: watching everyone don mining helmets to explore a research facility or watching 2 of the characters test their walkie-talkies while standing five feet apart in the same shot! No wait, the worst was the fistfight (?!) between the talking (?!) zombie and the human...or any scene with the girl in pigtails. Speaking of the characters, this movie has the most unlikable group of (horrible) actors you could possibly imagine. Most of them seem to think they are in a high-school play and overact accordingly, with ridiculously exaggerated expressions of (insert emotion here). The others can barely muster up enough inflection in their voices to break past monotone...and when they do, it's only at the end of the line, so everything they say sounds like a question. I'm not usually one to speak too badly about films because it takes a lot of work to make one. In fact, I usually give more credit than is probably deserved and therefore end up liking (or at least not minding) films everyone else hates. I thought "House of the Dead" tried too hard but was mildly entertaining and found good points to "Cry_Wolf"...that should pretty much put my movie viewing into perspective. With this film, there just isn't anything to speak highly about. Originally, I gave this film a rating of "1" but changed it to a "2" after seeing part 5. I didn't think it possible, but part 5 is worse than this one. As a matter of fact, the only positive thing I can say about this film is that it is slightly more bearable than part 5 and I guess that's worth something. I thought it was hysterical when they put a preview for 'Land of the Dead' with this movie...it's like they couldn't make it look bad enough on it's own, they had to give us something for comparison!

• The writers never watched the first movie!

  jsauce2005-10-17

  Yes it's pretty clear when people make sequels today they never bother to actually watch the original movies. In this case ROTLD 4 is again one of these movies. The movie begins by giving us a glimpse at Hybra-Tech through a commercial. The commercial tells us how this powerful chemical company is responsible for all the delights of the modern world from food products to zombie cleanup. ( First this is nothing more than stealing portions of the plot of Resident Evil. The Umbrella corporation anyone? Get some new material. You should also know that at the end of both ROTLD 1, 2, and 3. There was no indication of an outbreak the Government wasn't able to control.) So we continue, enter Peter Coyote who is interested in buying the last canisters containing trioxin 5. (Sorry again its called 2-4-5-trioxin.) For what reason? Who knows yet. But apparently the last canisters are contained in Chernobyl. So some Russian mobsters take him to the canisters and so it begins. One of the mobsters while moving the canister, gets some green crap on his hand and becomes a zombie. (Sorry again, just getting trioxin on you will not infect you. Kids from ROTLD1 were all in the rain and only the one who died in it became a zombie.) So this dead Russian mobster appears and kills the other one by grabbing onto his head and taking a chunk out. Then Peter Coyote's character uses a pistol to put one in the zombie's head. The zombie falls down, dead again. (OKAY WTF! Did any of these writers even watch the original movies? You cannot kill an ROTLD zombie by shooting it, not in the chest, not in the head not anywhere. The only way to kill an ROTLD zombie is to reduce all of it to ash so there is nothing left of it.You cannot simply kill something that is already dead. ROTLD zombies are not alive they are reanimated.) The rest of the film is the same except rather than exciting us with the tension created by unstoppable zombies chasing kids to their death, we get an hour of boring nonsense. And then when it gets good the swat team shows up and shoots them in the chest to kill them. Bad movie! It was hyped up as being a sequel, please don't call it that. It's not worth your time.

• Zombies with Russian accents?

  jayce22792007-01-15

  If you're a fan of the first Return of the Living Dead movie, please don't watch this one. You'll loose ten years of your life from aggravation. The film is supposed to be set in the United States, but was actually shot in Romania and most of the actors' accents are worse than Jurgen Prochnov's on a good day. The Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis won't even qualify as a "good bad cult movie" 20 years from now. Parts 2 and 3 were already pretty bad, but this one is just embarrassing. Trash, Suicide and even Julie Walker will roll over in their graves. I wonder if the makers have even bothered to watch the first three films. Unlike Romero's walking corpses, the Return of the Living Dead zombies are not supposed to die when you shoot them in the head! Nor do they give speeches or box. The movie does have one thing going for it, though: it proves that all those B actors they got playing KGB agents in cheap 80s crime flicks got their accents right after all.