Verdict
Summary
Even gorier and more insane than the original film from Stuart Gordon (but not necessarily as inventive or fun), Brian Yuzna’s Bride of Re-Animator is a well-made horror movie with truly disgusting and gross scenes of gloppy gore effects and uncomfortable moments that will have you squirming in your seat.
Plot: Doctors Herbert West and Dan Cain discover the secret to creating human life and proceed to create a perfect woman from dead tissue.
Review: The doctors West (Jeffrey Combs) and Cain (Bruce Abbott) have been busy since first discovering the re-animating agent that brought the dead to life at Miskatonic University: They’ve relocated to South America, to the front lines of a dictatorial war where they can experiment on fresh corpses. When the war is over, they return home together, closer than ever at perfecting their serum and giving new meaning to creating life. They’re both stationed at the same hospital, where Dr. West is fiendishly collecting bodies before they end up in the crematorium, while Dr. Cain is saving his dead girlfriend Meg’s heart for a new transition into a body the two doctors are assembling from various corpses. In the forefront of their periphery is an intrepid detective (played by Claude Earl Jones) who has his eye on the two young doctors, and their former arch nemesis Dr. Hill (David Gale), who even as a severed head still poses a threat to the machinations of their crazed experiments. As the two young doctors finally create their grotesque “bride” with their glowing green serum, so too does their abode at the local cemetery become a busy freakshow of their botched previous attempts to bring the dead back to life.
Even gorier and more insane than the original film from Stuart Gordon (but not necessarily as inventive or fun), Brian Yuzna’s Bride of Re-Animator is a well-made horror movie with truly disgusting and gross scenes of gloppy gore effects and uncomfortable moments that will have you squirming in your seat. It’s basically more of the same, but amped up and stronger, but it’s still not as “fun” or as sexy as the first, classic film. It’s a good follow-up, though, and fans of extreme horror films or movies from Yuzna (whose films Society, Return of the Living Dead III, and Rottweiler all deserve a look) should feel right at home.
Arrow Video released a premium, loaded unrated edition of Bride of Re-Animator last year, and it’s literally the ultimate edition of the title. The previous DVD from Pioneer had long been out of print, and so this release is a must for fans of the film. It contains two audio commentaries (one of which was newly recorded), lots of great features and behind the scenes footage, as well as deleted scenes, and much more. The newly commissioned artwork is reversible against the original artwork.