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| Images courtesy of Visual Vengeance |
While Brian Yuzna and Stuart Gordon were busy with adapting
H.P. Lovecraft’s 1922 serial short story Herbert West – Reanimator into
the hit Re-Animator comedy-horror franchise of unrated gore heavy shockers,
that tale of a medical student turned mad scientist who develops a serum that
can re-animate dead body parts, The Abomination and Highway to Hell SOV
(shot on video) filmmaker Bret McCormick was mounting his own iteration of the
newly popularized Lovecraftian saga.
Working under the pseudonym Judith Priest and one of three movies technically
directed by McCormick that year, it feels a bit like a grimy collegiate
intermediary between Highway to Hell and the more overtly polished Repligator. One thing all of these films have in common
is their releasing label Visual Vengeance, that company behind so many
unearthed and rereleased regional shot-on-videotape titles on Blu-ray disc, and
with their latest offering Reanimator Academy they’ve served up another
solid disc run of one of McCormick’s more rare iterations.
Delta Epsilon Delta is your typical National Lampoon’s
Animal House fraternity of college kids boozing up and partying, save for
Edgar Allen Lovecraft who looks a bit older than Jeffrey Combs but maintains
the same nutty doctor’s outfit and thick rimmed glasses as the Stuart Gordon
film. Intent on finding a cure for
death, his studies cultivate a serum that can reanimate dead body parts and the
first thing he tries it out on is the severed badly burned head of a local comedian. Contrary to expectations, the fraternity out
of the gate loves the severed head and regard it as another frat brother to
drink beer with. Soon however a local
mobster apprehends the serum to revive his dead girlfriend. To make matters worse, a side effect causes
the reanimated woman to turn homicidal, ripping off the heads with one-punch
uppercuts murdering men right and left.
From producer David DeCoteau of Sorority Babes in the
Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama, running a mere hour in length on grimy faded and
often colorless video transferred from existing standard definition elements, Reanimator
Academy despite the pedigree of McCormick and the lo-fi charms of the
premise and punched off heads never quite achieves the transgressive outlandish
hilarity of the 1985 Stuart Gordon film.
More of a supplemental attachment or tagalong to your favorite horror
movie, some of the film’s humor stem from the eccentric over the top
performances, the corny hand puppet severed head monster and a measure of
familiarity with the Gordon film. As such
it is a weaker film than The Abomination by many long miles but in
McCormick’s canon it’ll give you a grimy VHS time with H.P. Lovecraft.
Included in the Visual Vengeance set alongside an audio
commentary and interview with Bret McCormick as well as interviews with the
cast and crew is another entire short film: a vampire mockmentary entitled Children
of Dracula from 1994 also shot on videotape and running roughly the same
amount of time as Reanimator Academy.
The case itself comes with the time-honored multiple stickers, slipcover
and reversible sleeve art. Though here,
the boutique label went an extra mile with the inclusion of a fake videostore
card for Movie Galaxy as well as a mini poster.
While I myself was a tad disappointed in this
Bret McCormick entry, I’m glad Visual Vengeance continues to preserve his work
in high definition Blu-ray and soon his whole filmography will be on their
label at this rate. Fans of Visual
Vengeance will surely have a good time while Re-Animator fans may or may
not write it off as an unofficial entry.
While nowhere near as strong as the film which put McCormick on the map,
Reanimator Academy is a silly and tongue-in-cheek springboarding off of
the lore established by the Gordon/Yuzna films and SOV fans will want to eat
this up immediately.
--Andrew Kotwicki
