Director: Brian Yuzna
Year: 1990
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Creature Feature; Horror/Comedy
Plot:
Now working for a local hospital, Herbert West and Dan continue their experiments on reanimating dead tissue to bring a patient back to life only to run into the same complications as before when the side effects appear causing more havoc than he initially expected.
Review:
This here was a rather impressive and enjoyable sequel that holds up quite well. Among the better parts of this is the film continuing on nicely from the original in regards to the utterly crazy atmosphere present along the way, which gets plenty of enjoyable elements from that. The main element of their serum again causes this one a lot of fun in the fact that there's no accounting for the fact that the side-effects here are completely overlooked that again provide this one with an array of intriguing creatures and deformities, from the nimble finger-constructed creature, the still-alive disembodied head, numerous reanimated bodies and the flying bat-winged head that appears in the finale which makes for such a great time within this.
They remain a heavy part of this up into the finale where it really lets them loose and gets a lot of enjoyable parts here, with the creatures taking on a rather enjoyable series of scenes up-front in selling the detectives' investigation into the two for what happened earlier while also making this one build the film up much as it did before with the crazy creatures getting out of hand and forcing him into a series of rather dubious mind-frames to keep it all under wraps as before while staying perfectly in-line with what becomes of the finale. This is where it really lets loose with the demented air of the Frankenstein-like quality of bringing the girlfriend back to life along with the frantic fight with the new girlfriend, a series of fine action set-pieces with the reanimated bodies coming back for revenge, and the utter fun of the destruction of the lab caused by the newly revived creatures brought along by the spilled serum that gives this a truly outstanding finale that captures the fun, humor and glee of the original.
This also extends to the graphic gore on display which doesn't throw it around as freely but certainly gets as creative with it as the original and along with the frequent nudity all give this a great mark against the few flaws. The main issue here is that the film just feels too much like a retread of the original with everybody continually trying to bring that back into focus instead of letting the new story breathe. This could've been a lot more fun had it dropped off a lot of the investigation angle covering this, itself the other big issue here since that seems to be its only purpose anyway other than throwing another body to mangle, and letting that time be designated with the two down in the basement getting the creation to work which furthers what the original did and this would've been an even greater one than relying on the past to sell itself. Still, this one is a great deal of fun overall.
Overview: ****/5
Enjoyable but not as demented as the first effort, there's a lot to this one that allows it to be a worthwhile follow-up if only a bit downgraded from the all-time classic of the original. Those who are intrigued by this one, enjoy this style of genre fare, or are fans of the creative crew will have a lot to like here while most others out there might want to stay with the original first before going with this one.
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