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| Images courtesy of Found Footage Fest |
Writer-director Scott Zakarin who did a number of video
films over the years including Stan Lee’s Mutants, Monsters & Marvels as
well as co-producing Mark Hamill’s Comic Book: The Movie, will never be
able to live down his 1989 straight-to-video short children’s film Creating
Rem Lezar no matter how hard he has tried.
A bizarre cultish musical kids video involving a pair of kids who create
their own imaginary spandex shielded superhero, the film was lost for years
before being unearthed by the guys running the Found Footage Fest who
took it upon themselves in 2022 to digitally remaster the video supplied by the
director himself and film new extras bringing back lead star Jack Mulcahy of The
Brothers McMullen, writer-director-actor Zakarin and composer Mark Mule. An absurdly, almost pathological mindblower
whose catchy earworm songs singing the praises of Rem Lezar will melt your
brain out through your ears, this indescribable artifact of home video kiddie
lore feels like something you’d find on after hours cable television when channel
surfing for oddball televangelists.
Two children who have never met before, Zack (Jonathan Goch)
and Ashlee (Courtney Kernaghan), have the same dream about a blue-caped
gold-armed purple-haired superhero named Rem Lezar (Jack Mulcahy) and the proceed
to cobble together parts from a mannequin in the hopes of bringing him to
life. However, once he transforms from
mannequin to man, he is without his life support system in the form of a
Quixotic Medallion. Meanwhile the trio
are taunted in broad daylight by a floating bobble head monster named Vorock
(played by Zakarin himself) who has hidden the Medallion in the depths of New
York City, promptly a search through Central Parks and the Twin Towers. All of this is interspersed almost
scene-by-scene with songs that get steadily weirder with a kind of mercurial cultish
almost religiosity that would make Marshall Applewhite blush.
The kind of thing you stumble upon by accident that defies
the eyes, ears and cranium with its increasingly weird sing-songs, late-80s digital
video effects that render this a time capsule and a one-of-a-kind ‘hero’ that
doesn’t do a whole lot aside from cavorting around telling the two kids how to
love while looking for the Quixotic Medallion, Creating Rem Lezar is
like having your drink spiked or your food poisoned. You don’t know what hit you or how to process
the impact of what you’ve just witnessed.
Sure it is just another strange accident aimed at kids, but somehow Creating
Rem Lezar sidesteps even those expectations as it careens even further into
orbit towards outer space. Much like the
recently reviewed The Cornshukker, the movie was shot on film before
being further edited with additional video effects with differing frame rates,
making it an even harder-to-process affront to the eyeballs.
Incredibly the film was shot by renowned Natural Enemies and
Dark August cinematographer Richard E. Brooks, two of the most
underrated horror films of the 1970s, though you honestly wouldn’t know it here
without looking him up first. Mark Mule
on the other hand, despite the impossible to forget songs (like or loathe it),
wasn’t as successful with this being his only screen credit to date. Jack Mulcahy, donned in the ridiculous Rem
Lezar costume designed by Rosemary Ponzo, went on however to have quite the
career as a character actor including but not limited to the lead role of
Edward Burns’ film The Brothers McMullen and even the voice of Alfred in
the Warner Brothers Batman short film The Caped Crusader.
Previously unavailable outside of a few VHS tapes the proud few
owned until popular demand from Found Footage Fest and the director’s
own gracious participation, Creating Rem Lezar comes back to home video
for its 35th anniversary with quite an array of extras including a making-of
featurette including early character sketches for the titular hero. Reissued on VHS tape, DVD, blu-ray and and/or
digital download, maybe the weirdest, strangest, most thoroughly confounding ‘kids’
movie ever made now has a chance to infiltrate the homes and minds of
moviegoers who will come away from this changed if not better people…maybe. Jokes aside (RiffTrax recently covered this
film in 2024), this digital restoration of Creating Rem Lezar is a minor
celebration and a testament to the power of popular demand to resurrect and
reinvigorate the things we’ve tried so hard to forget from late night cable
television.
--Andrew Kotwicki
