Once in a blue moon a horror sequel lives up to the original movie. That goes for any sequel for that matter. Bride of Re-Animator lives up to the original and nearly surpasses it.
Nearly. A slightly better budget in this flick allowed for some amazing special FX which were carried out by five different teams of wizards, including the KNB Effects Group, who later went on to do FX for such movies as Army of Darkness, Bubba Ho-tep, and Kill Bill (and the upcoming Romero zombie-fest Diary of the Dead). There were a couple problems I had with this sequel, but all-in-all it was extremely satisfying.In a brilliant bit of story-telling, this movie follows the same two characters as the first one, including Herbert West, uses the same actors, the same setting, the same villain, but is not the same story at all. The former med students from the first flick are now official doctors and have been getting their hands dirty experimenting on the dead. This time around they’ve made a shocking discovery: the re-agent used for bringing the dead back doesn’t just work on whole bodies. It works on parts as well. So they follow their findings to their natural conclusion. They harvest body parts of women, string them together, and animate their own cobbled together zombie bitch. Awesome.
There’s only one aspect of the quality of this movie I can harp on. The acting in many instances is atrocious. Herbert West once again steals the show, played by Jeffrey Combs (also featured in Frighteners as the psychotic FBI agent). Besides him, and the decapitated doctor also from the first flick, there isn’t a single talent among the cast. At first I thought the poor performances were due to poor casting, but I’ve to realize since then that it was the result of poor direction. Brian Yuzna, who produced the first film, took over as director on this one. He has a flare for choreographing special FX shots, but he should not be allowed to talk to actors. If it wasn’t for that issue, I might have said this was the first sequel to out do its predecessor.
