return of the living dead 2 impulse

Horror, as a genre, is infinitely adaptable; meaning the same story can be repurposed by different filmmakers with entirely different results. For example, Impulse (1984) and Return of the Living Dead Part II (1988) share a government-conspiracy, environmental disaster plot line that is nearly identical. Yet the style, tone and execution of each script veer in wildly different directions.

Produced well-before the cinematic zombie renaissance, Impulse feels like the illegitimate love-child of George Romero's The Crazies and Cronenberg's Shivers mixed in with a few chapters of Stephen King's The Stand for good measure. But despite those better-known inspirations, director Graham Baker's film has a leg up on all of them by virtue of its superior cast and production values.

Arriving in the small town of Stubbenfield, big city power couple Jennifer and Stuart immediately notice that something is amiss: people are becoming emotionally unhinged, acting upon their baser instinct with no regards to the consequences. Sex, violence and murder run rampant while mysterious government vehicles prowl the streets. By the time Jennifer and Stuart realize that their once-peaceful community has been cut off from the rest of the world, it may be too late for them all!

Impulse builds from a now-familiar apocalyptic concept towards something much more interesting than flesh-eating zombies. The slow breakdown of society is truly frightening to behold (one particular road rage incident is only too prescient) and Baker's patient handling of the material is first class. But it's the cast that really sells the reality of the situation, including Meg Tilly, whose eccentric and oddly exotic presence is sorely missed in genre films.

In 1977, director Ken Wiederhorn made Shock Waves, one of the most unique zombie films of its era. Ten years later he was back at work among the undead, helming the sequel to the surprisingly successful horror spoof, Return of the Living Dead. But where the original film was a hard-R blend of E.C. comics gore and punk-rock sensibility, Wiederhorn's approach is like The Goonies meets Night of the Living Dead, full of late '80s slumber party nostalgia that definitely falls into the "you had to be there" category.

After accidently flooding the neighborhood with re-animating gas, 10-year-old Jesse Wilson dodges a cemetery full of zombies (including an undead bully) intent on eating the brains of his aerobics-obsessed sister and her cable guy boyfriend. In tow are a pair of grave robbers (James Karen and Thom Mathews, who appeared in the original as different characters) and the town doctor who join forces to stop the zombie horde.

A full-on comedy with only brief snippets of gore (how this got an R-rating is hard to imagine), ROTLD2 is best viewed as an entry-level horror title. Shifting the focus to a young protagonist creates an entirely new experience; Tobe Hooper's Invaders from Mars offers up a similar mix of innocent but flawed thrills. Wiederhorn works overtime to introduce new jokes and catchphrases that, for older audiences, will probably just feel like fan-pandering. But, in the film's defense, it delivers a non-stop mix of goofy gags and colorful characters set in a Spielbergian cinematic universe overrun with the undead. How cool is that?