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December 18, 2005  I realized the other day that for all my pontificating on the films of Golan-Globus, I haven't written nearly enough about Charles Band and his special world of b-films. Sort of the Roger Corman of 80s and early 90s direct-to-video genre films, Band's productions of Reanimator, Puppet Master, Trancers, The Pit & The Pendulum, Doctor Mordrid, Meridian, Crawlspace, and many others were very formative films for me. Unlike Corman, Band took a very active interest in assuring the ambitiousness and quality of his films, most of which look like they cost probably 10 times what they did. I'll write more on the general topic later. This post is about Brian Yuzna's Beyond Reanimator, the 2003 sequel to 1990's Bride of Reanimator, which was itself the sequel to Stuart Gordon's oft-imitated but never equaled 1985 classic. Yuzna produced the first film and directed the last two, and although I have a soft spot for the second film, I was somewhat disappointed in this last installment. The Reanimator films, of course, chart the adventures of Dr. Herbert West, a brilliant but insane scientist in Massachusetts who invents a glowing green liquid that brings living things back from the dead. Unfortunately, when they come back from the dead they're not exactly back to normal; they are generally drooling, violent zombies. The first two movies are wonderfully gory fun, endlessly inventive, and are centered around magnificent performances from Jeffrey Combs as Dr. West. The third film, however, strays from the Lovecraftian roots of the first two and gives us Dr. West performing experiments while incarcerated. The film was shot in Spain with an all-Spanish crew, sort of like Yuzna's production of Stuart Gordon's Dagon, an infinitely better film actually set in Spain. Beyond Reanimator is rather inept in trying to shield its foreign origins, and seemed to me like a huge missed opportunity. Jeffrey Combs is still great as Dr. West, and although it's a blast to see the character back in action, the whole enterprise is a bit forced, and especially forced is the way this film tries to shoehorn in conventions from the first two films. Too much of the action takes place on generic prison soundstages, West's new sidekick is unimpressive and unconvincing, and not enough happens. The other films were able to horrify with both the concepts and the effects; this seems more like a gorefest. It knows the sounds of Reanimator but not the language. |