Return Of The Living Dead 5 – Rave To The Grave
Picture:
C+ Sound: B- Extras: D Feature: C-
Back in
1985, the first Return Of The Living
Dead arrived the same year as George Romero’s Day Of The Dead (reviewed elsewhere on this site) and Romero tried
and failed to stop it with a lawsuit.
Though Romero’s film was very good, the competitor explicitly spoofed
the franchise in a way that stuck and filmmakers in the Horror genre started
catching up to Romero. Return Of The Living Dead 5 – Rave To The
Grave has a funny title, good attitude, sense of morbid humor and the like,
but does not know what to do with it.
Kids go
to a rave and get attacked by brain-eating zombies and they bite into the back
and sides of living humans. The opening
sequence has a crackpot science type (Peter Coyote) making the mistake of using
a gas to revive one of them and an army arises instead. Unfortunately, the script has nowhere to go
and now all the Horror Comedy productions have caught up with this
franchise. Even Romero has a fifth Dead film on the way. For completists only.
The
anamorphically enhanced 2.35 X 1 image is thankfully more colorful than most
Horror releases of late and this works to its advantage, but is still too soft
for its own good. Depth is also a
problem. The Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo
mix has some fairly good Pro Logic surrounds and is actually a tad better than
some so-called 5.1 mixes we have encountered recently. There are no extras.
- Nicholas Sheffo