Don’t Be So Sure That You Liked It
by Chuck Bantam
I’m aware that in general I have pretty bad taste. I listen to terrible music, I don’t know how to dress, and when I tell people my favorite movies their faces scrunch up like they just inhaled ammonia. But if Kim Basinger is a great actress and Eminem is an artist then I must have shit on my shoes because something stinks when I think about that. I like what I like and that’s that… I think. I thought anyway. I’m not sure anymore after a recent mistake I made with a two-hour waste of time called “Return of the Living Dead Part III.”
Let me just begin by saying that the first of the series, entitled “Return of the Living Dead,” was brilliant. No sarcasm here, just my bad taste. Seriously, I worship this movie. It isn’t just a cult classic comedy/horror movie with a killer soundtrack to me so much as it is a part of my life. I once waited up until 3 am when I was 13 years old to tape it off HBO on a school night. It has always been a part of my life and will always be. I think it is important for you to know this because it really should put an exclamation point on my confusion about this movie’s two sequels.
The second movie just failed to interest me because basically they just rehashed jokes from the first one, but changed the punchlines. It isn’t that important for me to waste time explaining why I didn’t like that one, but the third one slapped me into a 180 and shoved something cold up my ass. Now I’ve got something icy and wet dripping down the insides of my thighs, making me extremely uncomfortable because I once believed this was a good film.
It was so strange how it happened. My mind simply told me that I liked it. Maybe I did, I was a different person way back when I saw it for the first time. I remembered some of the characters and the things that had happened to them but I remembered them all wrong. I knew that some guy had gotten his head torn from his body in such a fashion that it left him with his spine resembling a really long neck, but I didn’t remember that he was mexican. I didn’t remember any of the mexicans for that matter, and what the fuck was that all about? Halfway through the movie some white people playing mexicans knock over a gas station and shortly after are in pursuit of the main characters. I didn’t remember that at all. I remembered that the main actress dies but is resurrected by her boyfriend. I remember that instead of eating brains like the dead do in the first two movies, she discovers that she can inflict pain on herself that relieves her pain of being dead. I remembered all of that but I didn’t remember it sucking. I didn’t remember it looking so fake and the lighting being so bad. I didn’t remember the acting coming off like a high-school play or the dialogue being written by someone who didn’t realize that in a movie of this genre no one cares about the characters’ personal lives, and that death needs to rain down in heavy doses. They didn’t realize that no one gives two shits about Johnny, or whatever-the-fuck-his-name-is, having dreams of playing his guitar and riding into the wind with his girlfriend. One could turn that movie on in the middle and watch a good forty-five minutes and not realize it was part of the Living Dead series at all. That movie wasn’t about the Living Dead, it was about crime.
Damn! that was a hard lesson that I had to learn. I actually bought that piece of shit on DVD because I remembered liking it. Now I have a 15-dollar beer coaster. So save yourself the trouble if you are anything like me and you just spend money because you are bored and you have it to spend. You may remember something from a while a back, but don’t be so sure that you liked it. Rent first or if possible borrow it from a friend. Spend money on anything else but please don’t support bad films.
