Review: Bride of the Re-animator
Director: Brian Yuzna
Herbert West is up to his old post-mortem tricks again and has been collecting body parts and corpses for his rigors experiments, with the help of his gigolo –Igor Dr. Dan Cain. They steal, feel, saw, chop, sow and squirt around with the fluorescent re-animation serum.
The disturbing, surreal mutations (which tend to be as funny as they are bizarre) build up throughout the movie. Going from an eyeball-finger thing to a zombie doggy with a human hand.
The climax is of course the ‘bride’ in true Hollywood Frankenstein-sequel mode, plus the buckets of splatter fun !
This is of course NOT H.P. Lovecraft’s story, just as The Bride of Frankenstein was not authored by Mary Shelly.
That being obvious (but unfortunate not to all, hence the above re-statement), you shouldn’t go out and hunt for this one if you want to see something with an actual plot or logic.
Ironically, Jeffery Combs manages to give more life and credibility (well…kind of) to his character and manages to create some very nice twisted drama sequences. The control that West wields over dr. Cain is more apparent and it also brings out the truly uncompromising obsessive mind of the ‘mad doctor’.
To fill in the gaps between corpse smuggling and playing with dead things, there is a policeman running round that wants to get dr.West because he suspects him re-animating his wife which he beat to death the night before. And, oh yes and an old enemy of dr.West literally ‘rears his ugly head’ again.
It’s strange that is took eight year for a sequel to show up, considering what a hit the original Re-animator was. But, luckily it paid off. Bride of the Re-animator has more obsessions to it, more off-beat visuals (note the head with bat-wings).
I may upset some people by saying this, and, rest assure it’s not my habit of glorifying sequels, but Bride of the Re-animator really is a good sequel ! It’s just as funny as the first one (if not more) and what it lacks in naked re-animated corpses, it makes up with plain weirdness. The finally is nice, but as is often the case, it pales in comparison with the original.
Never the less, you could do worse with sequels,.. allot worse ! And mr.Yuzna manages to show he has more gore up his slimy sleeves than what the brought forth in ‘Society’.
Reviewed by: LordLeviathan, added October 14 2005
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Other reviews of Brian Yuzna's Movies.
Beyond Re-Animator | Return of the Living Dead part III
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