1993 – Melinda Clarke – Return of the Living Dead 3

The most sexiest zombie ever? Probably. Known at this point in her career as Mindy Clarke, the then 24-years old actress made quite an impression on the horror scene as an attractive but still deadly zombie, who seemingly can keep a bit of her wits as she’s still attracted to her boyfriend regardless of her sorry state.

Born in California in 1969, Melinda Clarke began acting in the daytime soap opera Days of Our Lives and then got her start in movies that gravitated around the sci-fi/horror genre. She was seen in Spawn, the bizarre Spanish horror movie Killer Tongue and on Xena: Warrior Princess. Offered a part in Scream, she declined, preferring to distance herself from fantasy projects. Her most recent high-profile work was as a regular in The O.C. TV series. Of course, she has the most amazing pair of pale green eyes.

As the third in the Return of the Living Dead series, this 1993 movie dropped the comedy angle and remained true to director Brian Yuzna’s bizarre vision of messy body modifications, following Society and Bride of Re-Animator. Intense and quite bloody, this episode follows a teenage couple who decides to fool around a secret military base, where strange experiments with the dead are being conducted. Yes, the army is trying to reanimate dead tissue! When young Julie suffers a motorcycle accident, can her boyfriend really decide to take her back to the base… and try the serum that could get his love back on her feet? But what kind of hunger she would try to fight off? Human meat for sex or… for food?

With this intriguing premise, we have Melinda Clarke as a deadly punked-up Gothic lass with a body jewelry fetish. Actually, piercing her cold flesh with pointy object is a temporary solution to calm her zombie appetite. This turns about to be a an unexpected and touching love story, take my word for it, with an amazingly tragic ending. With a of lot of parallel zombie action, don’t worry about the amount of gore content, which is plentiful.

So what make this movie intriguing is the basic premise that works its way around some basic horror conventions and the impeccable work of a young actress who reached some levels of despair and of ferocity in her performance like as if she has been doing it for decades. Her Julie Walker character walks about like the sexiest nightmare ever, so she successfully gave all kind of chills to the fanboys in the audience. I know, I was one of them, when the picture was released around Halloween of 1993 and I met one of the best female movie monster of all time.

Our next and last installment: The face that… no, the hair that launched a thousand shrieks.