User blog:The Hooded Werewolf/Bride of Re-Animator Review

'''There are spoilers in this review. You have been warned.'''

H.P. Lovecraft's Bride of Re-Animator
Being a huge fan of the original, I was shocked to learn that there was a sequel, and even a third film in this series after doing some research.

Bride of Re-Animator has the same main cast as the original, with the exception of Barbara Crampton as Megan, who (SPOILERS), died at the end of the original film.

The plot takes place eight months after the epic battle between the living and the dead lead by the decapitated Dr. Carl Hill. Herbert West and his associate, Dan Cain are serving in a missonary clinic in South America. Herbert West has been using wounded soldiers as a means of further developing his formula. Suddenly they are bombarded by a bunch of enemy soldiers and they have to flee. It cuts back to North America, so their entire journey in South America was essentially pointless. Odd, but mildly amusing.

Meanwhile, Dr. Carl Hill's inactive head and limbs have been retrieved by the university morgue and are under inspection in the medical labs. A small portion of the serum remains along with the body parts, which have not decayed. An employee injects the Hill's head with the serum, and Hill proceeds to manipulate him, similar to The Brain That Wouldn't Die.

Herbert West and Dan Cain have bought an old funeral home, where they have converted the basement into a lab where they can further their experiments. West has developed a new serum that allows completely different body parts to be fused together and create a new living creature. He demonstrates to Cain by attaching the ends of several fingers together with an eyeball in the center, creating a finger-spider thing.

Meanwhile, a detective suspects West and Cain are responsible for the zombie shenanigans in the morgue due to his dead wife being one of the zombies involved in the fight. He sneaks into the funeral home and is killed in self-defense by Cain and West when he tries to attack them.

West believes that because he hasn't been braindead long enough that the serum will bring him right back to life. It causes the detective to become an angry grunting zombie who gets his arm ripped off and then runs outside screaming.

West proposes the idea of bringing Megan back to life by using her heart that he stole from the morgue. Together, the two collect all of the limbs and organs required for a body to function. West assembles the parts and attaches them with some metal hinges and tubing to allow the heart to pump the re-animation serum throughout the body. Whilst they do this, Dr. Hill's severed head forces the scientist in the university lab to sew batwings to the sides of his head, giving him the ability to move around and fly through the air.

West and Cain try to bring Megan back to life but it doesn't seem to work. They are then greeted by a small horde of zombies, led by Hill's flying bat head. They start to panic, as a large number of strange experiments West has hidden in a tunnel that leads to a crypt in the basement start to attack. There are arms and legs attached to one another, humans sewn to each other's backs, and limbs sewn straight to severed heads. West and Cain begin to panic as Megan comes back to life. She tries to understand her surroundings and then falls in love with Cain.

Cain realizes that it is not Megan and in fact just a corpse. The "corpse bride" (heh heh) then cries out, her heart is broken, so she tears it from her chest and her entire corpse collapses. The living escape through the tunnel into the crypt, fighting off the horde of mutated zombie things. The crypt collapses, seemingly killing West and Hill, but Cain escapes to live another day.

If you're a fan of the first Re-Animator, you'll love this one. It's just as fun (if not more) than the original. I'm shocked that it hasn't received the same amount of recognition as the first, considering it seemed to have been made only four years after the original. The special effects are up to par with the first film.

My only issue is that my DVD copy is the full screen edition. It's very low quality but after some research I know there is an HD copy out there that hopefully isn't Blu-Ray (I don't have a Blu-Ray player).

Bride of Re-Animator is fun, insane, and just as campy and humorous as the first. I highly recommend this film if you like Brian Yuzna's films, Re-Animator, or zombie films in general.