Return of the Living Dead Part II (1988)

Episode 162, 2 Guys and a Chainsaw Horror Movie Review Podcast

Todd: Hello and welcome to another episode of 2 Guys and a Chainsaw. I’m Todd.

Craig: And I’m Craig.

Todd: Well, Craig, we’re wrapping up our month of sequels with a movie that I was actually really looking forward to doing. It’s Return of the Living Dead Part 2 came out in 1988. We saw Return of the Living Dead and it’s an earlier podcast. I know we both enjoyed it. I think I probably enjoyed it more than you did, but it is a pretty bizarre movie, fun, and kind of a horror comedy. Well, it’s very much a horror comedy written and   directed by a guy named Dan O’Bannon, who was responsible for the Alien movie and other movies we’ve done on here like Night of the Creeps, Dead and Buried. This sequel he had nothing to do with. In fact, most of the people involved in the original except for a few of the actors also bizarrely didn’t want to have anything to do with the sequel as well. They didn’t even like the script and so I didn’t really know that before watching this movie so I was able to kind of come into it and judge my own opinion. I   was excited to see that a couple of the main actors were coming back again to do roles that were completely different, which is a little strange to have a sequel to a movie and have 2 characters, actors come back but play completely different characters. But they had good chemistry in the first movie. And… True. Well, I don’t know. For what it’s worth, I watched this film and I did not really enjoy the experience as much as I had hoped. Let’s just put it that way. Just lay all our cards on the table. How about you, Craig?   I hadn’t seen this before. How about you?

Craig: Oh, man. No, I hadn’t seen it either. And I don’t know. I wouldn’t say that I loved the first 1, but you recommended it and it was fun. It had, you know, its moments and Linnea Quigley was in it and we love her. That was a lot of fun and she was really good in it. And so I didn’t really know what to expect. I mean, I didn’t have like really super high expectations or anything, but okay, I’ll set it up like this. Okay, so I was really busy the day before we were supposed to do   this and I didn’t have time to watch it during the day and my partner and I were performing in this deal and we were busy all that day or whatever and then he said, It’s okay, don’t worry about it, we can watch it together.” And I said, well, it’s not going to be 1 that you’re going to like. It’s going to be pretty stupid. And he’s like, it’s fine, we can watch it together.

Clip: It wouldn’t

Todd: be the first time, I’m sure he said.

Craig: Right, right. And so I put it on and we started watching it together and half an hour into it, 23 minutes into it actually, I said, I can’t do this. I can’t make you do this. And he was really nice about it. And then the next day I was watching it and I finished it and he was like, well, so what did you think? And I was like, it was awful. And he was like, I know, Thanks for not making

Clip: me watch the whole thing.

Todd: Well, when you’re watching a movie like this, and especially when you have some hopes for it, at least, some preconceived notion, and you want to enjoy it, you get about 20, 30 minutes in and you start to have these feelings, which were very similar to me. Like, oh, this is going to be funny, like the first movie. And then it’s like, oh, it’s really kind of slapsticky. And oh, This is really kind of trying to be like Steven Spielberg at the same time with the kid angle and yeah And then it just seemed to be a   bit of a mess You really hope that by the end of it, maybe the movie’s gonna redeem itself You know if I just keep watching a little longer, maybe by the end I’m gonna come around to it and it just goes off the rails and stays there I think. At the end of the day it’s not really fun to watch. It’s just, I don’t know man, I think the original movie had such heart to it. I went ahead and watched a documentary on the making of Return of the Living Dead and Return of the Living Dead   Part 2, which you can see on YouTube, which I highly recommend, especially because the part about the first movie is way longer than the part about the second movie and they get almost all of the original actors and the special effects people from there talking about it. You know, the story behind the first movie is really quite interesting. This whole series, Return of the Living Dead, has 5 movies in it now. I think the last 2 were released straight to DVD. This 1 was theatrically released and was received poorly. The first 1 was received quite well   and continues to be received well. I’ve heard that the second 1 has a bit of a cult following now. I really don’t know why. And then there was the third 1 that kind of took a different direction and I don’t think did so well either, but maybe was a notch above this 1 from what I hear. I don’t know if we’ll ever get to watching it. But you know, the original producer of the first movie, Russo, was 1 of the co-producers with George Romero of the original Night of the Living Dead movie. And they decided to   part ways after that, but they both wanted to do some additional movies. And so they had this agreement that if George Romero could take his films and use dead in the title. So he has Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, you know, all that. Yeah. And then Russo could take his and put Living Dead in the title. And so that’s why we have Living Dead. This is all Return of the Living Dead. And so there’s spiritual successors in that, even in the first movie, it references George Romero’s movie, basically saying the movie exists   in that universe and then they say, but that’s not the real story, this is really how it happened and that’s kind of what we get. But Dan O’Bannon with the first movie, and I think it’s worth talking about here just because we got to make the comparison. This was summed up very eloquently by 1 of the actors in the film, is that he really made a horror movie first that also had comedic elements. Like, the whole movie is pretty silly, and it’s pretty fun, and it still has some pretty scary moments.

Clip: The special

Todd: effects are really good. That Tar monster, Tar zombie or whatever in the beginning who goes, brains, you know what I mean? Yeah. So cool. And this movie tries to recapture that magic and it tries way too hard. It kind of takes everything to a 3 stooges level of comedy and it turns it from playing it straight to being overtly trying to be overtly funny. Not as far as like an airplane type movie where there’s a site gag in every frame, but definitely compared to the first movie, it just feels like they’re trying way too hard and   it shows and it removes a lot of the heart and the fun out of it. And the horror kind of takes a backseat. Even though the special effects guys and the makeup guys from the original movies went on to work on this movie, despite the fact that nobody loved the script. I mean, nobody did. So the special effects are great in this film, actually, I think. Yeah. There’s some good moments, just like there were in the first movie, but it’s just not enough to overcome a really lame script. And it just feels like a slog to   get through. It feels like it’s way too long and it just doesn’t have that heart. And the funny thing is, and I read this in the trivia as well as you probably did, but then on this documentary they keep talking about how the director himself who wrote the script didn’t even seem that invested in it. He was another 1 of these guys who came in, even though he wrote this script, he doesn’t really like horror movies. He was doing this and everybody involved said, you know, great guy as a person, but on the set, his lack   of enthusiasm just infected everybody else. At 1.1 guy said, I’m not even sure why I’m here doing this. I think all of that pretty much comes across on the screen.

Craig: Yeah, I don’t know. It was weird. It has a weird feel from the beginning. And I don’t know, you know, I’m not a filmmaker, so I can’t really speculate. But I don’t know if, you know, when filmmakers go into making a movie, if they have a target audience in mind, but this felt to me like if there was a target audience in mind, this felt like it was a movie for 13 year olds at a sleepover. Yeah. I can kind of see how if you were 13 and you had a bunch of guy friends or girlfriends   over and you were just wanting to goof, maybe it would be kind of fun. I don’t know. It did feel weird. It felt like it was made for kids. But at the same time, I don’t know, you know, in the 80s was a, this came out in the 80s, right? What was the year on this? 1988. Yeah, late 80s. You know, filmmakers were doing that in the 80s, making horror movies for kids. And that’s what this felt like to me and it’s rated R I really don’t think that it should be rated R and I heard   that heard and hear anything I read that it wouldn’t have been rated R had it not been for 1 scene where a zombie gets cut in half and then both halves of the body are like running amok or whatever. It would have gotten a PG-13 if they had pared that down a little bit. But even that, I mean, it’s not like it looked real or anything, you know? It was very special effects-y and not particularly gruesome. I don’t see how merited an R. And it just, ugh, God, I don’t want to be a Debbie Downer, but   it just really didn’t work for me. I love horror movies that are made for kids. Love them.

Todd: Yeah, we’re big fans.

Craig: Yeah, huge fan. But this 1 just didn’t work. It wasn’t, I don’t know, it was dumb.

Todd: I just think it existed in this ether somewhere in between you know it really couldn’t commit to any 1 of these ideas because I don’t feel like there was much direction behind it It really isn’t a solid horror movie. It’s not a solid funny comedy. It’s not really a good action adventure kind of film because it’s got huge pacing problems there and urgency issues. And it doesn’t really commit either to this sort of kids. I mean, there’s kind of, it’s almost bookended by the kids involved, but it’s not like a Goonies type or Adventures in Babysitting   type romp through the zombie world at all. It still is mostly centered around adults. And even though 1 of the main villains, it turns out, I mean, to call him a villain is kind of tough because he starts in the beginning and comes in at the end, but he’s a kid. And there’s, you know, the kid who’s a thread through the movie but hardly has much to do. It just kind of floats around and you just you can’t hook your mind into it in any way that’s terribly engaging I think. And so it’s just 1 of   those movies where for me anyway I’m just sitting there watching the action unfold and waiting for it to be over.

Craig: Oh absolutely. It would be worth it to kind of set up how things start. I mean it starts out with this you know voiceover exposition.

Clip: In the fall of 1969, the Darrell Chemical Company under contract to the US Army conducted a series of secret experiments with a new biological weapon called 245-Trioxin. According to reports, the chemical was a catalyst in genetic reactification. What this meant and why trioxin was useful has never been revealed. But 1 thing is certain. Trioxin was soon considered too dangerous and volatile, even for experimental use. Interest in the lethal compound was abandoned several years ago. The army will not comment other than to say all tri-oxen has since been destroyed.

Craig: So we see these military trucks carrying these big barrels that are supposedly you know carrying this incredibly toxic substance but they’re just like in this open truck with like a nylon strap around them or whatever. 1 of the barrels falls out, of course, or a couple of barrels fall out and they fall into this river or creek or something. And then we cut to suburbia and we meet this kid, this little kid Jesse, who’s gonna kind of be the main kid throughout. He’s this young blondish kid. He’s like the good kid and then there are a   couple of like bad kids that are, I don’t know, trying to initiate him into some kind of club but it all seems like maybe they’re playing a joke on him or something. I don’t know.

Clip: It’s not

Todd: like he’s walking down the street and he’s getting bullied. He sees these kids out the window, he grabs 1 of his comic books and he runs down like he’s trying to appease them?

Craig: Yeah, like he wants to be in their club or something, but they’re the mean kids, I don’t know.

Todd: But then he says he doesn’t want to be. I mean, then it’s like they’re pushing him to be in their club and I’m like, what? What was your goal here? I didn’t I didn’t get that it seemed it seemed clunky

Craig: They try to push him into this mausoleum and they say it’s their playhouse or whatever and they’re gonna initiate him But he doesn’t want to go in there so he runs away and he runs into this drainage pipe to try to hide, but they find him, but they also find this big barrel, and they take like the lid off or whatever, and we see 1 of these creepy gross zombies in the barrel. And then, this is where it gets, I suppose it could be funny, and I’m not sure what they were trying to do. I guess   trying to appeal to fans of the first movie. But then we meet these 2 other characters, Ed and Joey, who are both actors from the first movie. Ed is played by James Caron and Joey is played by Tom Matthews. And they are playing virtually the exact same characters that they played in the first movie. They just have different names and they’re supposed to be different people.

Clip: Yeah.

Craig: And it’s it’s so weird. It is. Ed has hired Joey to help him like in his grave digging endeavors or whatever.

Todd: This is the thing about this movie too is that part of what’s so unappealing about it is it almost seems to be ripping off of the first movie. In some ways it’s almost telling the same story. Yes! Because these 2 are working together, right? Ed is the leader, that’s exactly what we had in the first 1, and Joey’s the guy who’s kind of going along with it but kind of unsure, the greenhorn, and they’re still doing something with medical stuff, but Ed’s robbing graves because he’s got to unearth skulls because people will buy skulls, but they’ll   only buy them if they’re like freshly buried. So they’re going into a mausoleum to get these and then they spend hours in the mausoleum. And in the meantime, they’ve got a woman named Brenda who is I guess Joey’s girlfriend or? Yeah, yeah. And she’s sitting out in the van waiting for them. So broad daylight these guys are just popping into the cemetery by the side of the road and robbing graves for skulls. And again, the same kind of dynamic and the same thing happens to

Craig: them. They even repeat some of the same lines from the first movie. Like, Ed says something like, if you like this job, you’ll do this or whatever, and the other guy’s like, if I like this job, like it’s verbatim from the first movie, which is so weird. Jesse, the little good kid, escapes the mausoleum, but then the bad kids go back and let this swamp gas out of the barrel or whatever. Then again, we have the same thing from the first movie but it’s just so fast and so clunky. Like the swamp gas like brings on   a storm and brings on like all this smoke that rolls into the graveyard and then okay so we’re probably what like I don’t know 10-15 minutes into the movie at this point and then it’s just thriller for the next hour. Like, that’s literally all it, like it’s thriller and then cut to our characters doing some things that are really unimportant and then thriller again and then cut, like seriously, like every other scene is just a shot of these hordes of zombies walking towards the camera, backlit with all this smoke and fog and they’re doing their zombie   thing. And that’s it. That’s the whole movie. And they just, like they chase these characters around from set piece to set piece, and that’s it.

Todd: Like that’s literally the whole movie. Yeah, which could be cool, you know? I mean, we like that sort of thing, And we’ve seen it in other movies and we’ve praised it. You know, we liked the Midnight Hour, how that kind of threw back to thriller in a way with the different kind of zombies coming out of the ground and whatnot. But here, they also try to add a lot of slapstick to it. Like 1 zombie guy is coming out of the ground, he’s reaching his hand out and another zombie comes by and steps on his hand.   He’s like, ooh, and then he tries reaching his hand out again and another zombie steps on his hand. He’s like, ooh, and then he thinks he’s coming all the way out and another zombie comes and steps on his head and pushes him down into the ground. And once again the first movie had comedy but it wasn’t like this.

Craig: No, it wasn’t that slapsticky.

Todd: No, it sort of arose out of the situations, Right? And here it’s just trying very hard to be slapsticky. And so there are all these gags with the zombies. And some of them are cool. I mean, you know, if these things existed in a better movie, we’d probably be laughing at them. There’s a point where a woman gets bit by a zombie and she ends up tearing his jaw off. And, you know, there’s that whole sequence you referred to where they’re trapped in a hospital and the kid goes off alone and he gets attacked by the   zombie and the sister comes in and blows it in half and then it’s like lower half is looking for its upper half and it’s walking around. We even got something like that in the first movie where they had to saw that zombie’s head off and so there was that headless corpse walking around. But again, it just organically seemed to come a little better, a little more natural out of the situations. Whereas here it just feels like they’re trying really hard. Like what you said when they released the gas, they have an encounter with our iconic, you   know, slime. I mean, they’re even doing this again. They’re doing this tar zombie creature again. But the second time around, it just doesn’t look as good.

Craig: Nope, it doesn’t look as good. And you know all that like when so when the zombies are you know rising out of their graves there are all those jokes you know with them getting pushed back into the grave or I don’t know, all kinds of goofy stuff going on. And the first time I was rolling my eyes, I was thinking, okay, I get it, hardy-har, that’s funny. But then it just went on like that through the whole thing. And like it’s, It was funny for a second, but I’m not amused anymore. And I had no idea   what the, I don’t know, I talk about the rules. The rules, what are the rules? What are these zombies? Some of them are just like, groning zombies, but then some of them are like stand up comedians. They can talk and they are shooting off 1 liners and heads are saying things like, get that damn screwdriver out of my head. Yeah. What? Why are some of you entirely sensible and have consciousness, and then the rest of you are just mindless brain-eating

Todd: corpses. And once again we had this in the first movie but it worked there. The thing about the zombies And and this is 1 thing that was neat about this movie that we I really praised anyway about it Is that it did go a little bit of a different direction from Marrow zombies to zombies are a little bit quicker They had an intelligence about them and they did occasionally talk But it was It was not through the whole movie. And when it did happen, it was funny. There’s the zombie going brains into the camera, which is   just at 1 point, it’s like half terrifying and half drop dead hilarious. Then there’s that really great scene where they have the half zombie woman strapped to the table because they realize she can talk and they want to interrogate her and find out why are you doing this? Why are you eating brains? And it’s not like she suddenly can talk like a normal person. She’s struggling to speak but you know and she’s speaking really slowly and it seems really painful and she explains, oh well, it’s pain, the pain, the pain. They eat the brains to dull   the pain or whatever of being dead. That’s a cool scene. There’s even a gag in the first 1, which I remember, which I was totally able to let slide because it was so funny where I think some cops get killed and then they send in more cops and they get killed and then the cops come over the radio and 1 of The zombies picks up the radio and says, send more cops. Yeah, yeah. And it’s hilarious.

Craig: Well, and there’s a throwback to that in this movie where at some point all the characters, I mean, like we’ve got this core group of characters. There’s Jesse is the good kid, he’s got a stuck up sister named Lucy, she’s got a love interest named Tom, and then there’s Ed who is the Grave Digger and Joey who is his assistant and Brenda who is his girlfriend and they all kind of run around together all the time. At some point, some of them are dead and blah blah blah but Some of them have hijacked an ambulance and   they get on like the walkie or whatever it’s called on the ambulance and they’re like, is anybody there? Is anybody there? And the zombie in the hospital picks it up. Come to the hospital.

Clip: Show me right there!   Hold it, hold it. Ah, pardon me, but could you tell me who the President of the United States is?   Harry Truman.

Craig: I just don’t get it. Like, some of them, it’s almost like some of them are still almost like regular people. And I could almost deal with that if it were consistent, but it’s not like, if it were consistent that fresh zombies, like people who had just died still retained some of their consciousness which I feel like is kind of what they were going for but it was inconsistent Because sometimes it would be old crusty gross old zombies that would be talking. It just didn’t make any sense

Todd: And once again, it was just too much, you know, too much of that. Everything we’re listing off, there’s a throwback to the first movie. Here they’ve recreated similar situations from the first movie, except they’ve done it more poorly. There’s even a scene where, of course, the same thing is happening to Joey and Ed which happens in the first movie Which is if you’re exposed to this dioxin and you’re alive it slowly turns

Craig: right but in this movie It seems totally unexplained like if you’ve seen the first movie it makes sense But if you haven’t like did we ever see a scene where they were exposed to the gas? Is it just because they happened to be in the mausoleum?

Todd: Yeah, that’s kind of what it has to be. You have to see that they were, yeah, it happened to be in the mausoleum, which doesn’t make a lot of sense because what about Brenda? She was outside the whole time and this was creeping through the cemetery. I mean, in the meantime, there’s all that inconsistency of like, here are all these zombies popping up left and right and the graveyards filled with them But when Brenda pops out of the van to check on them, she only sees 1, right? And so they go through the same transformation where   their skins turning white and they’re going through this rigor mortis and they’re in the back of a car and Joey turns to Ed and even says this feels so familiar like this has happened before.

Craig: That was really the only part of the movie that I enjoyed. Just because it was so obvious. And first of all, their acting is so hammy. Either they weren’t directed at all. And the guy who plays Joey, his name is Tom Matthews, he was in the first movie, he was 1 of the stars of the first movie. I read that he hated making this movie. It was just miserable. He just absolutely hated it. He said the only thing that he liked about it was the craft services. Yeah. But like they and it was hammy in the   first movie too. But for whatever reason it works there, but their acting is just so hammy, they’re like, oh, like, you know, they’re groaning and they’re in such pain and like it’s so vocal and so melodramatic. Again, in the first movie it kinda worked, but here it just seems, it almost seems like parody.

Todd: Yeah, it’s like parodying their first performances, isn’t it?

Craig: Right, right. And how can you, you hardly can call it parody when it literally is the exact same thing. And like you said, I feel like we’ve been here before and you were there and they were there and oh Like yeah, I know I saw the first movie too. I don’t know what’s going on either like so and the exact same thing happens to them again, they die. They go through all this agony forever and ever and ever. Brenda, the girlfriend, just like the girlfriend in the first movie, is desperately clinging to the boyfriend, trying to   get people to help him and, you know, hoping that things will work out. And eventually, you know, he dies, which we see by him closing his eyes for a second, and then he opens them again. And he chases her into this church and it’s almost an identical scene. Now it doesn’t go on for nearly as long. I feel like in the original movie the chase in…was it a church in the first movie? It was something very much like a church.

Todd: Oh gosh, it sure feels like it. I don’t remember, but I remember thinking the same thing. I was like, there was a scene like this in the first movie.

Craig: Yes, where the infected boyfriend chases the girl for an hour and he’s like, I love you, why won’t you let me eat your brains? And it went on for longer in the first movie. In this 1, he chases her for like 5 seconds and he’s like, your brains smell so delicious and spicy. And she’s like, spicy? And he’s like, yes. She’s like, okay. And then she just lets him eat her brains. And that’s it. That’s the end. That’s the last we ever see of them.

Todd: Oh, that was so annoying. She just literally just sits there and goes, oh, okay. Well, have at it.

Craig: And he bites into her head like an apple. She just sits there.

Todd: What? Oh, God. I couldn’t stand that bit. And even just like in the first movie, they go and they end up finding a doctor. And in the first movie, the doctor was quite a quirky character. He was more of a mortician, I guess, and he actually helped out. He became kind of 1 of the team trying to escape the zombies and survive. But, you know, he also interrogated that woman, strapped her down, and came up with theories about what was going on. In this movie, they meet up with a doctor, and the doctor in this movie   is played by a very prolific character actor named Philip Bruns, whose performance is really out of another era. Yeah.

Craig: You know? He’s got a Groucho Marx kind of

Clip: thing, like, ha ha.

Todd: Yeah. Just completely ambivalent to what’s going on, more yuck, yuck, yuck about everything that’s happening around him and aloof.

Craig: Always looking for booze, like that’s his primary concern. I don’t know, to be frank, thank goodness for him. I actually found him kind of amusing. He’s such a minor character, but at least, you know, like when he’s examining the guys who are dying but are not dead yet and like he’s like, stick out your tongue and Joey does and he takes the stick that the doctors use to hold down your tongue and he just like pushes the tongue back in like, oh, I don’t want to see that. Like, I mean, it was very goofy and slapsticky,   but I don’t know if it’s because this guy was older and he came from a different era, but at least he sold it a little bit.

Todd: Yeah. He committed to what he was probably instructed to do. If you could kind of like draw a little bubble around him and just consider his performance as not really being associated with what’s going on around him. You’re right, it was more entertaining than maybe anything else that was going on around him. But it didn’t fit, you know? And again, they’re trying to make this funny. Oh, it doesn’t fit, you know, hearty har har, but it just didn’t work.

Craig: Yeah, yeah. As far as plot is concerned, like, they run to the hospital first, and there’s the whole shoot a zombie in half, and I don’t know how they did that. To be fair, I guess the effects there were pretty good, where you’ve got the legs walking around and the upper half trying to reconnect with the legs.

Todd: I liked that bit, actually. I thought that was fun.

Craig: I thought that it was a nice touch that there was like a stump of the spine sticking up out of the waist of the lower part of the body. That actually, you know, As far as special effects are concerned look pretty good. The special effects overall aren’t bad some of The zombies at times are clearly wearing masks.

Todd: Yes, that was a little distracting

Craig: Yeah, and and so it’s it’s not always great, but it’s not terrible either. I just was thinking as I was watching it, I hang out with theater people, and a lot of my friends were theater majors in college, and I kept thinking, my friends could do this. You know, like stage makeup. You know, like, it looked like stage makeup. And that’s not to say it doesn’t look bad. I have some very talented friends, but I don’t know. On film, it just didn’t always read. Some of it looked okay, some of it didn’t. And some of like   sometimes the zombies were like lumbering around, and then sometimes they were walking really fast. Like it was just really inconsistent.

Todd: Well, a lot of them were played by the same people.

Craig: Yeah.

Todd: What they did was the special effects guy went in and made a whole bunch of different masks basically different cheeks, different forehead pieces, different chin pieces and things so that they could kind of create almost an endless combination of different zombies for different shots and still use a lot of the same people. So actually Scuz from the original movie Return of the Living Dead was a number of the zombies in this movie. He played quite a few of them, including the Michael Jackson zombie who makes an appearance at the end, which we can talk about later.   But yeah, you’re right. The overall effect was, especially when compared to the really great animatronic zombies that you get, like that zombie head and the crusty, even the not so good but still acceptable like Tar Zombie, they just look very different from these other zombies who were obviously people wearing masks made up.

Craig: Right and and there were some that were really good like you already mentioned it at 1 point Brenda gets attacked and the zombie like bites her fingers and she rips the lower part of his jaw off. That looks cool. It looked like they spent time on it and it looked good. There was 1 zombie lady who had… With the worms? Oh my gosh. Coming out of her face and the worms moved around. That was fantastic. That looked really

Clip: cool.

Craig: Yeah. That was

Clip: awesome.

Todd: It was like so many worms, she’s almost like a medusa with worms coming out of her face.

Craig: So you know in there there was some really good stuff but it was kind of few and far between.

Todd: There’s another scene too where they’re in the car and I think this is before the 2 guys turned completely but there’s a zombie on the roof and it reaches in and they roll the window up on his hand and it chops his hand off and there’s a long kind of again 3 stooges esque scene or Evil dead whatever you want to call it where they’re fighting with the hand that’s crawling around back there like thing. Yeah. You know, and it’s pretty obvious that they got just a hand with a stump attached to it and maybe the   rest of the arm is painted black that they’re running around on these people. But it was shot in such a way that it was done pretty well. But I was, I don’t know, by that point I was kind of groaning at these sort of gags. I thought, oh, here’s the hand loose in the back of the car. Ha ha ha, you know?

Craig: And it’s gonna grab the doctor’s wiener. Like, you know, as soon as the doctor says, I don’t know why everybody’s freaking out. It’s just a severed hand. And so then it grabs his wiener. And they’re like, ha ha ha. Like, that’s the joke. OK, throw it out of the window now. Yeah. Punchline, done. Ha

Todd: ha ha. And Jesse, the boy, and his sister Lucy, I think at 1 point also run into an abandoned house. 1 thing that’s really strange and, you know, is an unanswered question for quite a bit of the film is why where is everybody else? I mean, yeah, only we only have these 6 or so characters and they’re running through town and they’re driving up and down and There’s nobody there and At first it was really distracting. They even go into somebody’s house. They break in and they grab some guns out of this gun cabinet that’s sitting   there. I guess there’s supposed to be this big hilarious reveal that Lucy is a sharpshooter, but it’s not really as cinematic as it was probably intended to be. So, okay, she’s a sharpshooter. It’s not like she’s a total badass or anything, you know, during the movie. And then finally, when they get to the hospital and the hospital’s empty is when the characters start remarking, hey, you know, where is everybody? That’s kind of strange. And there’s 1 line that basically explains it. We start to see the army, which, I don’t know, is an interesting addition to the   movie. I don’t understand this at all, really, because we get a couple shots of the army from the beginning. We get the original scene at the beginning, like you said, that sort of sets up the loss of the canisters. A little bit later, not too long after that, we get another scene that shows that they’ve recovered 2 of the canisters, so they know 1 is missing, but they don’t have a clue where it is. And then later on in the movie, Jesse actually goes back to that canister after those kids open it and sees that it’s   open. That’s when he has the encounter with the zombie, I think. But he copies the phone number for the army off of the canister, which I think is kind of funny because in the first movie, you know, they’d also had these phone numbers on the canister like, call the army here. You have this thing.

Craig: Right. Nobody did anything. It’s like a 1-800 number. Like if you find, if you happen to come across this zombie canister, Call this number. Right. It’s like

Todd: a lost phone or a backpack or something. It’s funny. It’s kind of a cool bit because he calls from their home. And this is in the 80s, you know, we didn’t have caller ID or anything.

Clip: He

Todd: calls from his phone, finally gets patched through to this army general out in the field and he picks it up, he says hello and before Billy could say anything, a couple of the other characters who were driving that van drive it into the telephone line for the neighborhood or something and it cuts off all of the phones in there so he can’t even get a word out.

Craig: And once again that phone call is verbatim. Yes. A phone call that was made in the first movie. That’s right.

Clip: That’s right. I guess they

Todd: think they’re being clever here or. I guess. I don’t know. So sometime between that unsuccessful phone call and about 2 minutes later, I don’t know, what we find out is the army has cleared out the town. Now, A, why did they know that was the town? Because the phone call was unsuccessful. B, say they were able to track the phone call anyway and so they made it to that town. Why weren’t any of these characters who by this point are running around the neighborhood between these houses getting rounded up in this? I mean it’s not going   to be easy to evacuate all these people out of a town. But there’s a throwaway line by a couple military guys sitting on a Jeep downtown.

Craig: I’m telling you, Sarge, we cleared out the town. We should be way over here. Well, and that’s another thing too. I know you’re a military kid and I’m certainly not. I have respect for the military, but I don’t have any connections to them or whatever. But It paints the army or whoever this is supposed to be as being totally stupid in that. It’s just so dumb.

Todd: From the very beginning. The guy who’s driving that first truck is listening to stereo on his speakers and smoking a joint. I mean, come on. Yeah. Right. He doesn’t

Craig: even care about it. Right. Then there’s 1 point where these 2 good-looking, at least, like soldiers are sitting in a jeep and like The thriller horde comes around the corner as they have every 4 minutes for the whole movie. I joined the army to see the world, not this!

Clip: Get hold of yourself son, you’re an American soldier. We’ve got a firefighter in our hands.   And the   enemy’s already dead. Beautiful.

Craig: And then they start shooting the zombies and the zombies just get up and kill them. If I were military, I might be a little irritated.

Todd: It’s over the top, total cartoon, you know, just like The Doctor really. It’s just a cartoon performance by these supposed military people. It doesn’t, again, it’s trying to be funny by creating these stereotypes and using these parodies But it just doesn’t really work because none of it makes a lot of sense in the context of the movie I thought there you know there was a scene though in the empty town that I thought was probably gonna gonna make you turn over and cry

Craig: Oh It wasn’t graphic enough, but I was a little perturbed.

Todd: The zombies broke into a pet store and started eating all the pets. Yeah,

Craig: I mean, but it just looked like they were ravaging stuffed animals, so it didn’t really bother me all that much. But it was funny to me because it was like that was like the straw that broke the camel’s back for Tom. I know, right? Like Tom, like Tom the hot hero, like he sees this and he’s like, I’m just not going to take it anymore. And he like chases down this zombie like they’re driving an ambulance at this point because why not and He he’s like I I know they’re already dead, but I’m gonna get 1   anyway And so He like rams it into this huge electric sign and it electrocutes the zombie and the zombie dies, which I didn’t pay any attention to. And then later on when they made their way to the power plant, I’m like, Oh, I see what they’re doing here.

Todd: Basically, they can’t leave the town because although the military has taken great pains to clear it off all the people, apparently after that, if you’re a person still left in the town, you’re screwed because they drive down, I guess down the only bridge that leads out of town. There’s a tank and a whole battalion of people just standing there waiting to shoot at anything that comes by.

Craig: That was 1 of my favorite lines actually. They try to get out over that 1 bridge out of town or whatever and the military, like a whole, like 20 soldiers with machine guns are shooting at them, but they’re fine and the ambulance is fine. Like the tires aren’t even flat or anything, and they drive away, and then the doctor’s like,

Clip: interesting situation. Soldiers in front, zombies in the back.   Speaker 6: Maybe we should slip off the side and have a cocktail   or… No?

Craig: I think that was the smartest thing anybody said in the whole movie.

Todd: So their big idea is to go to the meatpacking plant and get all of the cow and calf and lamb and sheep brains, pork brains, whatever they can grab. And then from the back of the van that they’re driving, the ambulance or whatever, They’re tossing these brains out like Hansel and Gretel, luring the zombies down a path through the city to the big power plant. And there’s a spot between the big generators or whatever they are, Transformers, that is also a little wet. And Tom rigs up some, basically destroys, pulls the wires out from the Transformers.   It’s all movie stuff, you know? Yeah, yeah. Throws the wires down in the water and then their goal is that they’re going to have the doctor, once they call him, I guess on the radio from the inside, turn the power switch on, which is going to electrocute all of them between the Transformers. But of course, that doesn’t quite go right because he leaves his radio there, so the doctor can’t get called quite in time. And the zombies break through because the evil boy zombie Billy climbs over the fence, comes to the other side, opens up the   gate for all the zombies to come through. So they’re trapped in the van and then they’re not. I guess there’s a fight sequence basically, kind of a final battle between Billy and Jesse. Billy ends up electrocuted, the doctor helps out with that, and then they flip the switch just in time for all the zombies between the 2 breakers to get electrocuted.

Craig: Right after Lucy and Tom make out for a second. Yeah,

Todd: that’s right. There’s always time to pause and make out.

Craig: Right, but like the zombies are like they’re in the back of this big meat packing truck or whatever and the zombies are breaking in and when they first encountered 1 another like he was coming to repair her cable or something and he’s like, don’t you remember me? I used to go to school with you and she’s like, no, I don’t remember you. And then in this moment when they’re about to die, she’s like, I did remember you.

Clip: And then they make out.

Todd: It was dumb. And then speaking of dumb, at the last minute, also during 1 of our final shots of the zombies getting electrocuted, a zombie dressed exactly like Michael Jackson from Thriller leaps up into frame and jolts a few dance moves before he falls down.

Craig: Not a bad dancer. No, not at all. Well,

Todd: that was our guy. That was our guy Brian Peck. And it turns out that that was like a total last minute thing on the set. Brian Peck had actually, when they were standing around filming these final zombie scenes, had noticed that 1 of the extras had come with a replica Michael Jackson jacket on, like I guess as a joke. He pointed this out to the special effects guy and he said, hey, follow me. So they took the jacket and he spent like at least a couple hours while they were shooting or doing something else, putting him   in this Michael Jackson makeup and he brings him out and the director takes 1 look at him and says Absolutely not All the producers there are like shaking their heads no no no no no and he said I see he said I seriously I sat there for 11 or 12 hours in this makeup waiting for all that to finish and finally by the end It’s like the director just had the sudden change of heart and just like okay. Okay, fine fine Just go in there go in there He gets the shot rolling and then he’s like,   alright go up do your thing and he said I I didn’t believe it was ever going to make the final cut of the movie. So they were all very shocked, obviously, that that bit made it into the movie when they finally saw it.

Clip: It was

Craig: 1 of the best parts of the movie. Thank God it did make it in. It’s literally like maybe 5 seconds, but it was fun. And again, like that’s another 1 of those things. Like this, it felt like a sleepover movie. Like that’s hilarious. Like it’s 1988 or 1989. It’s Michael Jackson. Like that’s, it’s great. It’s 1 of my favorite parts.

Todd: Well, you know the thing that I liked so much about the first movie, it was so punk. It did these neat things with the zombie. It had this killer soundtrack. Yeah, it was over the top and stereotypical. You had this group of kids who would never be hanging out together in real life. You had these preppy, the jockey, the nerdy, the Linnea Quigley characters naked for half the movie, and the guy with the earrings and the just total punk. But they just had an edge to it. It had kind of a fun edge and really it   moved. That movie was driving and moving and the comedy came out of the situations. I thought the acting, even though it was really campy, was really fun. And this movie is just campy in a totally different way. It’s trying to be campy. And I think I’ve kind of discovered that when you’re trying to be campy, most of the time the results are not so good.

Craig: It just depends. You know, when you said when you’re trying to be campy, it doesn’t always work. Well, that’s not always the case. I mean, not always. What did we watch with poultry geist? Like obviously, like that was going for the camp and it succeeded in that way. I didn’t love that movie but I appreciated it for what it was, like it was going for gags and laughs and that’s fine. But this was, it was just really uneven And like even at the very end, like the last thing we see after all, you know, all of   the zombies, they do, they electrocute them, all of them, and they all drop dead. And the last thing we see is our final survivors, Lucy and Tom and Jesse and the doctor, you know, walking away and the doctor’s still talking about getting a drink or whatever, and they walk out of frame. And then it’s the military going and burning all these corpses. And then there’s just this 1 head that’s like,

Clip: Oh, come on, guy. Back off of that thing. I got this. Don’t hit a girl when she’s down.   000.

Todd: Ah.

Clip: Ah. Okay, no more brain. You win for now.

Craig: And That’s the very last, like all of a sudden you’ve got this jive talking zombie head, and it’s not the first talking zombie head we’ve seen, so it’s not like this is new or anything. But it’s just so silly, and it just felt really uneven. I saw that people, I read online that people said that it was like an ET copycat, like what? I don’t see that at all. ET was a great movie about kids, and that was super fun. And I mean, I guess if you’re talking about going for the kid audience, I understand that,   but it just felt really uneven. It wasn’t sure what it wanted to be and it was in parts kind of trying to be scary but in other parts just being over-the-top ridiculous and it just it really really didn’t work for me.

Todd: You know I think maybe just over time people overanalyze and dissect these movies so much that they find these, you know what I mean? I think that’s where comments like that come from. There’s some fan of this movie out there, probably who saw it as a kid and really had fun memories of it because, you know, we have movies like that, right? Oh yeah. We’ve done a couple recently where we love them as kids, we don’t appreciate them so much as adults, but we’re still colored by our initial feelings for them. They probably then look at   it and start making these ridiculous comparisons to ET and saying that it’s a genre masterpiece or a cult classic. It’s not gonna show up in my list as a cult classic by any means. I love the original. You know, we can’t finish this episode without mentioning a special appearance in this movie by Forrest J. Ackerman.

Clip: I

Todd: don’t know, do you know who Forrest J. Ackerman is? No. He is, was, super famous. He’s the guy who basically coined the term sci-fi. 1 of the largest collectors of memorabilia in history had a house that was basically like a museum. And he was a literary agent for tons of science fiction authors like Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov. Wow.

Clip: A lot

Todd: of people call him like the godfather of sci-fi. Like he was the biggest supporter, biggest fan of the genre, and not only was he an agent, but he was a magazine editor, he wrote science fiction himself, he’s done appearances in like at least a hundred movies, you know, like this, just kind of little cameos because he’s so beloved by people.

Craig: Who was he?

Todd: He was that zombie who broke into the garage. Remember when the doctor points out the neighbor that he knew?

Craig: Oh, yeah, yeah. And here’s

Todd: the funny thing. This is like how clueless this director is. He had him take off his glasses and this is a guy like, you know, it would be like telling Groucho Marx to take off his glasses. Like that’s his trademark. Like that’s how you recognize him and he didn’t even know that. So here’s this this really famous guy he’s put in this movie to put a reference to and he’s had him take off his trademark glasses for the role. You know, it’s kind of dumb. Yeah,

Craig: it’s too bad.

Clip: But he’s

Todd: in this movie, it’s kind of interesting.

Craig: Yeah, what you said, if I had seen this movie when I was 11, I might have had fond memories of it, but I’m not 11 anymore. Like that time has passed. So we liked the first 1, we gave the second 1 a shot. I’m not in any huge, even though, you know, I guess the third 1 supposedly kind of takes a new direction or whatever. I would certainly hope so because overall I got to give, and I don’t do this very often folks I try to be optimistic about things, but I gotta give this 1 a   big thumbs down Well,

Todd: I think they made a big mistake They brought the wrong actors back if they had brought back Lenny a Quigley to dance around naked a little bit Then I would have yes movie much higher rating. Guys in a chainsaw. You can also search for us on Facebook. Leave us a comment there. Tell us what you thought of this episode. We are done with our sequels for this month. We’re gonna go back and pick up requests again. We’ve gotten a few extra requests that came in during a request month in January that we want to honor and   so we’re going to be picking and choosing a few of those. It’s definitely not too late to submit your requests. We will do them either now or in the somewhat near future. Until the next time we see you, I am Todd and I’m Craig with 2 Guys and a Chainsaw.