When Even Zombies Deserve Better
The Return of the Living Dead franchise started as punk rock splatter cinema—rebellious, funny, and unapologetically gross. By the time we get to Necropolis (2005), the fourth installment, all of that is gone. Instead, we’re treated to a made-for-Sci-Fi Channel “horror” movie that feels like it was filmed in someone’s Romanian basement with leftover props from Power Rangers. The punk is gone. The satire is gone. The gore is watered down. What remains is a zombie movie so bland it makes reheated cafeteria meatloaf look like a Michelin-star meal.
Zombies, But Make Them Boring
The first problem? The zombies themselves. These are not the punk-rock brain munchers of Dan O’Bannon’s original. No, these are dollar-store extras painted gray, stumbling around like they’re looking for the bathroom at a nightclub. Their supposed menace is so laughable that when two hobos get attacked by a reanimated rat, I found myself rooting for the rat. It had more charisma.
Later, we get “uber-soldier zombies” with chainsaws for arms and mini-guns bolted to their wrists. This sounds amazing on paper, the kind of over-the-top madness this series was built on. In practice, it looks like the filmmakers raided the clearance aisle at a Halloween store and glued props onto actors who had given up on life. Even the zombies look bored to be in this movie.
The Setting: Chernobyl, But Not Really
The movie kicks off with a trip to “Chernobyl” to collect the last barrels of Trioxin, the series’ infamous zombie gas. Chernobyl, of course, is played here by an abandoned Romanian warehouse that probably doubles as a tax break. For a series that once thrived on subversive American satire, it’s weirdly appropriate that the franchise died while squatting in a fake Chernobyl.
The Characters: Walking Corpses (and Not the Good Kind)
Julian, our lead, is so bland he makes white bread look spicy. He’s supposed to be a troubled teen, but mostly he’s just a guy who looks like he forgot his lines and decided to wing it. His friends are stock characters from a CW pilot that never got picked up:
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Becky, the plucky blonde.
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Cody, the token tech nerd who hacks websites like it’s 1995.
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Katie, the girlfriend/security guard whose main job is to yell into a walkie-talkie.
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Zeke, the friend who dies, comes back, and then turns into a zombie with relationship issues.
Even Uncle Charles, played by Peter Coyote—an actual actor with a résumé—looks like he’s regretting every second on set. He spends most of the film in a lab coat, monologuing about science while trying not to visibly cash his paycheck on camera.
The Plot: Escape Room From Hell (Literally)
The story, such as it is, involves Julian and his Scooby-Doo gang breaking into the Hybra Tech facility to rescue their friend Zeke, who’s being used as a test subject. Of course, things go wrong, zombies get out, and everyone gets picked off one by one in ways so uninspired you could set your watch by them.
The group sneaks around in ventilation ducts, finds an armory, accidentally sets off alarms, and somehow keeps splitting up despite having seen horror movies before. It’s less “Return of the Living Dead” and more “Return of the Straight-to-DVD clichés.”
By the time Julian discovers his parents are being turned into cybernetic super-zombies, the movie isn’t horrifying—it’s hilarious. His mom has saw-blades strapped to her arms. His dad has wrist-mounted mini-guns. It’s supposed to be tragic. It plays like a rejected RoboCop spin-off.
The Action: Sci-Fi Channel at Its Cheapest
Ellory Elkayem, the director, once gave us Eight Legged Freaks, a cheesy but fun B-movie about giant spiders. Here, he delivers something with none of the fun and all of the cheese. The action scenes are edited so poorly you can’t tell who’s being eaten, shot, or just tripping over the Romanian set dressing.
When the SWAT team finally shows up at the end with a tank, it feels less like salvation and more like the director realized they needed to wrap things up. The tank explodes zombies in a scene so anticlimactic it might as well have been stock footage.
Zeke: The Worst Zombie Boyfriend
One of the movie’s big “emotional” arcs is Zeke, who dies, comes back, and still has enough brainpower left to get jealous of Julian kissing Katie. That’s right—the movie gives us a jealous zombie boyfriend. Instead of eating brains, he’s arguing about who kissed who. If Romero gave us metaphors for consumerism, this movie gives us undead Jerry Springer.
When Julian finally kills Zeke with a grenade, it’s supposed to be a dramatic climax. Instead, it’s like watching someone finally unplug a malfunctioning Roomba.
The Deaths: PG-13 Gore in an R-Rated Franchise
The Return of the Living Dead series was built on outrageous gore and black comedy. Heads exploding. Brains slurped like milkshakes. Here? We get sanitized, TV-friendly kills that wouldn’t shock a toddler. A character gets decapitated off-screen. Another gets dragged away by zombies in shadow. Even the supposed “money shots” look like they were filmed with the blood budget of a ketchup packet.
It’s like the filmmakers wanted to make a zombie movie for people who don’t like zombie movies.
Sci-Fi Channel Strikes Again
There’s a special kind of disappointment that comes from realizing you’re watching a Sci-Fi Channel original. The lighting is bad, the sets are bad, the CGI is bad, and the acting is—well, you get the idea. Necropolis feels less like a film and more like a tax write-off that accidentally got aired.
Even worse, it was filmed back-to-back with Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave. Yes, they made two of these disasters at once. That’s not filmmaking—that’s punishment.
Final Judgment: Return of the Franchise’s Tomb
Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis is the cinematic equivalent of reheating a corpse in a microwave: messy, unnecessary, and guaranteed to make you sick. It betrays everything the series once stood for, stripping away the satire and punk energy until all that’s left is a dull, lifeless husk.
If you’re looking for brains, gore, or laughs, this movie has none. What it does have: endless hallways, boring teenagers, and zombies so incompetent they make Shaun of the Dead’s extras look terrifying.
