BEYOND RE-ANIMATOR DIRECTED BY BRIAN YUZNA LION'S GATE THE RE-ANIMATOR series must ...
THE RE-ANIMATOR series must represent one of the slowest-moving franchises in film history. The first film came out in 1985; the second, Bride of Re-Animator, in 1990; Beyond Re-Animator, 13 years after that. Do you realize how many Amityville sequels can be churned out in 18 years?
Jeffery Combs again returns as Dr. Herbert West, the mad scientist intent on perfecting his fluorescent green formula for reanimating the dead. The story begins with a young boy witnessing his sister's murder at the hands of one of Dr. West's experiments, and West's subsequent arrest. We then jump ahead 13 years to find West serving a life sentence for his shenanigans.
Enter Jason Barry as Dr. Howard, the new prison doctor who specifically requests West as his assistant. Moments after they meet, we learn that Dr. Howard was the kid who witnessed his sister's murder, and who's since been obsessed with West's research.
Well, before you know it, the two have set up a lab in the prison infirmary and are jump-starting corpses-rats, prisoners, whatever they can find. And West, we learn, has tweaked his formula with a new ingredient, which he hopes will make his experiments more than just mindless, bloodthirsty, flopping carcasses.
Add to the plot a nosy blonde reporter, a sadistic warden and most every other prison film cliche you can imagine, and you've got? Well, a Re-Animator movie set in a prison.
I wanted to like this much more than I did. (I was surprised at how clever and lively Bride was.) Here, the shadowy, dreary cinematography is appropriate to the setting, there's some snazzy editing, and Jeffery Combs, as always, is great. But after a 13-year hiatus you'd think they'd be able to come up with something more inventive. Despite ignoring plot elements from the first two films and adding one minor twist to West's experimental results, it's really just more of the same, but toned down considerably. While Yuzna was clearly hoping to emphasize the comedy over the horror here, apart from a few sharp one-liners, the comedy is just kind of dumb. A drug-addled prisoner gobbles whatever pills he can get his hands on; the warden has his dick bitten off, etc.
Yuzna (who produced the original and directed Bride) filmed the picture in Spain, with a Spanish cast and crew. In fact, the "behind-the-scenes" featurette-one of the only extras apart from a music video-is mostly in unsubtitled Spanish. As far as I'm aware, Beyond Re-Animator never received a U.S. theatrical release, being instead dumped straight to cable. While that no longer implies the death of a franchise, in this case (insert your own joke here about formulas and reanimating corpses).