Remember the end of the original? Dr. Herbert West was being strangled by a rampaging intestine. But don't worry, he's not dead. The zombie responsible didn't have the guts for it.
Now, five years after the massacre at Miskatonic University, he's in some South American hell-hole in the middle of a civil war using his re-animation serum on dead or wounded soldiers. As soon as the conflict boils over into revolution he legs it out of there with the naive/loyal Dr. Cain and heads back to Arkham Hospital. Where's he's apparently allowed to just take up his old position no questions asked.
Acting as if none of the previous carnage ever happened, they return to their normal jobs. Dr. Cain grows attached to a young girl dying of cancer and West is secretly stealing all the best body parts to make his own complete woman using the heart of Cain's dead girlfriend from the first movie.
A nosy Detective interferes and starts poking around as well as delivering the head of long dead Dr. Hill to Dr. Graves, the new Chief Pathologist at Arkham (there sure are loads of Doctors in this film huh?). Graves reanimates the head of Hill but refuses to do his bidding and chucks it in the bucket. A move he will come to regret.
The hokum goes into overdrive for this sequel. There's more atmosphere and more potential to be really scary. It's never fully realized as the film is too blackly funny to be frightening and feels a little limited in scope, being set mostly in only two places. But there's more going on in the climax as all the factions and body parts come together. The allusion to Frankenstein is much more apparent and the Freudian subtext of 2 men creating life without the use of a woman adds a curious depth to the mayhem. I know that the reanimated corpses are supposed to be darkly comic but I find their wild gesticulations and howling to be curiously upsetting.
You could call Bride of Re-Animator lots of negative words like corny, cheesy, dumb etc. But you'd be missing the point. Yes, it's a bit too pulpy to truly echo H.P. Lovecraft's original work, but the numerous zombies, monsters and demons are something I reckon Howard Phillips would love.
Gore fans will really dig the blood and make-up effects. There's loads of gruesomeness and severed limbs and guts spilled all over the place. It's the kind of thing Fangoria magazine would have had an 8-page feature of. Plentiful amounts of puss and nastiness from the KNB Effects Group and Screaming Mad George respectively. There's a lot of splatter in this house.
A must for fans of the movie, of Lovecraft, of horror, and of the wonderful Jeffrey Combs.
Now, five years after the massacre at Miskatonic University, he's in some South American hell-hole in the middle of a civil war using his re-animation serum on dead or wounded soldiers. As soon as the conflict boils over into revolution he legs it out of there with the naive/loyal Dr. Cain and heads back to Arkham Hospital. Where's he's apparently allowed to just take up his old position no questions asked.
Acting as if none of the previous carnage ever happened, they return to their normal jobs. Dr. Cain grows attached to a young girl dying of cancer and West is secretly stealing all the best body parts to make his own complete woman using the heart of Cain's dead girlfriend from the first movie.
A nosy Detective interferes and starts poking around as well as delivering the head of long dead Dr. Hill to Dr. Graves, the new Chief Pathologist at Arkham (there sure are loads of Doctors in this film huh?). Graves reanimates the head of Hill but refuses to do his bidding and chucks it in the bucket. A move he will come to regret.
The hokum goes into overdrive for this sequel. There's more atmosphere and more potential to be really scary. It's never fully realized as the film is too blackly funny to be frightening and feels a little limited in scope, being set mostly in only two places. But there's more going on in the climax as all the factions and body parts come together. The allusion to Frankenstein is much more apparent and the Freudian subtext of 2 men creating life without the use of a woman adds a curious depth to the mayhem. I know that the reanimated corpses are supposed to be darkly comic but I find their wild gesticulations and howling to be curiously upsetting.
You could call Bride of Re-Animator lots of negative words like corny, cheesy, dumb etc. But you'd be missing the point. Yes, it's a bit too pulpy to truly echo H.P. Lovecraft's original work, but the numerous zombies, monsters and demons are something I reckon Howard Phillips would love.
Gore fans will really dig the blood and make-up effects. There's loads of gruesomeness and severed limbs and guts spilled all over the place. It's the kind of thing Fangoria magazine would have had an 8-page feature of. Plentiful amounts of puss and nastiness from the KNB Effects Group and Screaming Mad George respectively. There's a lot of splatter in this house.
A must for fans of the movie, of Lovecraft, of horror, and of the wonderful Jeffrey Combs.