Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Bride of Re-Animator

(1990) ***1/2

It's eight months after the Miskatonic Massacre and Doctors West and Cain spent their summer vacation doctoring in the middle of a vicious South American civil war. We see West, having made another amazing discovery involving his green juice, insist that the research must continue despite the hospital tent being stormed by angry men with machine guns. He's all about the work.

The two buddies head back to Arkham to work at the hospital, where Dan flirts inappropriately with the girl patients and West starts accumulating body parts for the basement lab. A suspicous cop who looks like Skipper from Gilligan's Island's fatter, uglier brother noses around West's affairs and winds up corpsified. "What are we gonna do?" whines Cain. "Well...we could get him walking around." There's always a reason. Dan, sick of this argument, just sits disgustedly with his head in his hands while West fires up the syringe. And whaddaya know! Things go south. The cop rips a leg off of Dan's new girlfriend's dog and lurches into the night.

Meanwhile the bumbling Dr. Graves has been investigating the human debris from the first movie's massacre. He finally gets around to using the juice on the evil head and, although just a head, it soon takes over and even gains some bat wings.

Meanwhile meanwhile, did I mention that the boys wonder were building a woman in the basement? This is somehow West throwing Dan a bone, although once she's revived (see the touching scene below),

It doesn't take Dan long to change his mind.

Add flying head, hench-corpses, and several buckets of blood and you've got yourself a movie. I saw this with JPX when it came out, and I recall us being a tad disappointed. It's a bit too goofy a spin on the characters and premise to quite measure up to its predecessor. The reanimated corpses don't have the same freaky level of rage. But it's got Herbert West! They don't come madder. Or more fun.

More required reading: Johnny Sweatpants's review of Bride from last year. A review so good I had trouble writing this one.

1 comment:

DKC said...

That is really a hideous picture.

I have to be careful whenever I pull the blog up when the kids are running around because the 4 year old inevitably comes over to check it out which means I'm constantly moving the page up and down so he doesn't get completely freaked.

Malevolent

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