Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

The poster catches your attention. It is a painting of a woman standing against a deep red sky; a bloated orange moon can be seen through the trees that lurk behind her. She is wearing a torn blue velvet top, fingerless gloves, and ripped jeans. She has a ring through her nose and two through her pouting lower lip. On the tips of her fingers are twisted homemade claws, fashioned from scrap metal. A gleaming chain weaves through a series of gaping wounds in her arm. These wounds are fresh and bloody, as are those around the many large shards of glass embedded in her face and arms in carefully arranges patterns. She is clearly a strikingly attractive woman, and somehow these mutilations enhance her beauty, attract as much as they repel.

"Return of the Living Dead 3" is the apex of Brian Yuzna's directorial career to date. Yuzna is an intelligent, provocative horror movie director. "Terror is psychological, horror is biological," says Yuzna. "Horror is when you see the flesh." And his movies really deliver in that department. He started out producing and co-writing director Stuart Gordon's legendary H.P. Lovecraft adaptations, "Re-Animator" and "From Beyond", which took body horror to new extremes. His first movie as director, "Society", was a clever, if muddled, parable on the dangers of Reagan-era consumerism, but what everyone remembers about it is the guy getting fisted up to his eyeballs and turned inside-out. And the more recent "The Dentist" spotlights more mouth-oriented sadism than most viewers can handle.

All of Yuzna's movies show great visual imagination, but his early movies have weak scripts, usually by Woody Keith and Rick Fry. His collaboration with John Penney on "Return of the Living Dead 3" was the turning point. For the first time, Yuzna had strong characters to abet his distinctive take on body horror.

The first "Return of the Living Dead" was written and directed by Dan O'Bannon, from a novel & screenplay by "Night of the Living Dead" co-scripter John Russo. O'Bannon turned Russo's straight original into a fresh, funny and scary parody-cum-homage to George Romero's zombie movies, with fast-moving, articulate zombies chasing punk teenagers through graveyards and cemeteries, and managed to make a movie that was funny and scary at the same time. The second, from writer/director Ken Weiderhorn, went the "Evil Dead 2" route and remade the first as an outright comedy, with disastrous results. No one expected a third installment to be made at all, let alone to turn out to be a serious, intelligent and emotionally rewarding gem.

The opening scenes, depicting military efforts to control the walking dead, are deliberately misleading. When the focus switches to Julie and her army brat boyfriend, Curt, Yuzna and John Penney start taking the zombie movie into areas it's never been before.

Julie's accidental death and Curt's use of his father's access card to reanimate her come as no surprise. But Julie isn't a mindless hungry corpse from a George Romero movie. She craves fresh, juicy brains, but she retains full consciousness. The remainder of the running time is devoted to Julie's degeneration into a monster, despite - and in fact largely because of - of Curt's efforts to freeze time and keep things how they were before.

The real genius of the movie is in its depiction of poster girl Julie. In the opening scenes, she is shown as a tempestuous, strong-willed young woman with a zest for life and a love of danger. As a zombie, she slowly comes to the conclusion that she would have been better off left dead. After her suicide attempts inevitably fail, she first of all tries to please Curt and to be what he wants her to, trying not to mention her ravenous hunger for brains and even pretending she can still feel something when he kisses her.

But finally, she realises that she can never be the person she used to be, and reinvents herself. The montage of mutilation where she adorns herself with the most lethal and grotesque piercings available is the most commented on in the movie, usually for its gruesomeness and its bizarre sexual beauty. But even more notable is that this is the sequence where Julie takes command of her own death. When she emerges writhing and hissing, all broken glass and twisted metal and shredded flesh, on one level I was justifiably repelled, but on another equally strong level, I was entranced.

Most horror movies depicting the mutilation of women are on some level misogynistic, with male antagonists rending female flesh for the excitement of a predominantly male audience. Many directors, both low-rent and shoddy like Don Gronquist or high-budget and genuinely artistic like Brian De Palma, actually seem to get off on it; "Unhinged" and "Body Double", to name some extreme examples, are basically just violent porn. "Return of the Living Dead 3" also sexualizes female mutilation, but in a wholly different fashion. In this version, Julie is the predator, and to be honest the prospect of males being devoured by females during mating seemed like a less unappealing scenario to me after watching this movie.

Yuzna's movies have always been notable for their strong female leads, from the coven in "Silent Night Deadly Night 4", who render the men in the movie irrelevant to the cop hero of his segment of "Necronomicon", rebelling against the tyranny of biology, with her male partner and lover reduced to the status of victim to be rescued. Even the underused love interest in "Bride of Re-Animator" is a South American revolutionary with more common sense and a stronger moral center than the male leads. But Julie is his finest creation, a complex, wonderfully human monster who engages our sympathy even when she is killing off the other sympathetic characters.

The modern zombie movie was born in 1967, with George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. Almost every zombie movie since then has concentrated on a small group of survivors besieged by hungry corpses. Even Romero himself, in his subsequent explorations of the theme, focused on small groups of trapped individuals. This is perhaps Return of the Living Dead 3's greatest innovation; the focus is switched from people besieged by zombies, to a single zombie and a single person trying to work things out, almost oblivious to the rising carnage they're causing.

Romero's last zombie movie to date, "Day of the Dead", featured what was probably the world's first sympathetic flesh-eating zombie, a trained specimen named Bud who can vaguely remember his previous life and even shows some affection for the scientist who keeps him as a lab rat. Bud was big and dumb and affectionate. He even did tricks, pretending to read and listening to music and even reassembling a gun. But he wasn't portrayed as a reasoning, intelligent being, and I cared about him like I'd care about the family dog in a Disney movie.

I didn't care about his motivations, and I didn't ascribe emotional depth to him. He wasn't a character to me; he was a plot device. He wasn't tragic or lonely.

And he certainly wasn't sexy.

Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Good Date Movie
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age