Not only is Return of the Living Dead Aftermath disgraceful A.I. slop, it’s LITERALLY a criminal act
I’m not being hyperbolic when I say Return of the Living Dead Aftermath is the worst piece of shit I’ve ever seen as a movie reviewer.
But it’s MUCH worse than being objectively bad. The person who “made” it — and the term “made” is being used as loosely as you can imagine — is a shameless con artist who has the audacity to charge idiots $20 to watch what amounts to 80 minutes of felony level copyright infringement. Return of the Living Dead Aftermath isn’t a movie, it’s a criminal record the dumb MFer is charging people to witness.
Which isn’t much of a surprise, since the so-called director of this travesty is LITERALLY a convicted fraudster who spent three years behind bars after robbing the actors involved in his vanity projects blind. I suppose Return of the Living Dead Aftermath is the next logical step in his trajectory of a professional criminal. Why underpay actors when you can use dog shit A.I. programs to steal their likenesses and profit off it?
Aftermath isn’t just a mockery of the Return of the Living Dead series, it’s a mockery of humanity itself. The same sorry son of a bitch who “directed” the film also takes a writing credit, which is surprising to me because I didn’t know ChatGPT could read crayon. There’s no plot here, just random things happening that a soulless abomination would mistake for storytelling in a ghoulish attempt to appear human. It’s not just awful, it’s unconscionable. I’ve watched autopsy footage as a court reporter and I can tell you point blank, I felt less nauseous and uncomfortable viewing THAT then I did this pathetic imitation of filmmaking.
If you’re part of some Satanic software firm that thinks A.I. filmmaking is the wave of the future, watching Return of the Living Dead Aftermath is your Frankenstein’s monster moment where you ought to recognize the error of your ways. Never mind the staggering number of technical issues — i.e., the resolution of the screen itself constantly changing, people’s facial features transforming in mid-sentence, the distorted signage that looks like it’s made out of Zodiac Killer messages, etc. — there is no coherency and connectivity in this dreadful thing at all. It’s so beyond being an “Uncanny Valley” problem at this point — not only do the characters look waxy and artificial, but the way they move, talk and even look forward makes you feel like you’re watching some sort of horrific digital puppet show. There is NO humanity or personality or conviction with any of the performances, to the point it might as well be a Twitch stream of some early 2000s shooter video game. There people responsible for this garbage not only lacked a basic understanding of the very thing they were bastardizing, it’s apparent that they don’t understand how human beings should act, look and sound in real time.
It’s an unbearable experience. There are bad movies that bore you to tears, and then there are a very special breed of bad movies that makes you feel like a lesser human being for witnessing them. Return of the Living Dead Aftermath, if you’re even generous enough to describe it as a real movie, is certainly the latter. It’s a sad commentary on technology and art, when you have bona fide criminals spending god knows how much bandwidth to churn out something so stupid and juvenile. It’s like a kindergarten’s flip book, with a bunch of squiggly lines and blobs etched all over the paper — it’s absolute nonsense, but the kid who made it is convinced they’ve made something profound and significant. That’s pretty much Aftermath in a nutshell; a lifelong remedial math student taking a dump on a copy of Fangoria and taking credit for all of the shit-smeared photos afterwards.
Yes, it’s a crude analogy, but for something as heinous as Return of the Living Dead Aftermath there’s really nothing I can say that truly speaks to its awfulness as a wannabe motion picture. I genuinely feel that the world is a worse place with it existing and I don’t just want to tell the “director” off, I’m legitimately ready to fist fight him in public whenever he’s ready. Aftermath is an insult on so many different levels, I’m thinking Satan is going to have to construct a couple of more rings of hell just to adequately punish the criminal responsible for it when he finally dies.
Oh, you get the “likeness” of actors from the original and beloved 1985 film here, including the visage of some people who have been dead for years. I’m going to go on and assume that none of these actors were compensated for the theft of their bodies for this egregiously stupid stunt. Furthermore, the movie violates international copyright law by shamelessly reusing scenes from the original film, which makes me wonder what MGM thinks about all of this. I take it a mere “cease and desist” warning won’t suffice for theft of this magnitude — if we’re going to put people in prison for pirating Marvel movies, maybe the parties responsible for this abomination are deserving of the electric chair.
I didn’t pay to witness this crime scene. Nobody in their right mind should. Even seeing it for free on YouTube I felt unclean and pissed off. It’s one thing to use A.I. and squander electricity and water to make some stupid bullshit, but it’s another to use said “technology” to desecrate one of the most hallowed names in horror history. Everybody associated with this thing should be ashamed, but then again to even think this scam up would require a total lack of shame in the first place. I’d argue that whatever money they make off of this con job is blood money, but I suppose calling it shit money is far more appropriate.
I’m sure some people are going to have some morbid curiosity about this thing. Human nature being human nature, you might want to see it just to see if it’s as bad as I make it out to be. You only have yourself to blame after all of the warnings I gave you up front.
Return of the Living Dead Aftermath isn’t just a black eye for “filmmaking,” it’s tantamount to a terrorist attack on art itself. If this is the wave of the future, maybe now’s a good time to pull a page out of Sarah Connor’s playbook — it’s artificial, alright, but it’s lacking intelligence of any variety.
