As you also know, H.P. Lovecraft hasn’t had a great deal of luck being translated to film unless the names Combs and Gordon are involved. And by “hasn’t had a great deal of luck”, I mean most of the movies claiming to be based on his works cause internal hemorrhaging and are only slightly preferable to shooting oneself in the face point-blank with a nail gun.

With that in mind, what would you get if you took Lenny and George from “Of Mice and Men”, blended them with a pair of Loony Toons-style gangsters, teamed them up with a wisecracking disembodied head in a casserole dish and a guy who looks nothing like Jeffrey Combs, and had them tracking down a re-animated hooker with superhuman strength who looks Mae from Microwave Massacre was run over by a dump truck full of Branson, Missouri? You’d have what is, so far as I know, the world’s only feature-length Re-Animator fan film, Reanimator Academy. And no, I’m not counting the porno Re-Penetrator because it’s a porno and that’s just what they do.

Wait, what the fuck was I just talking about? I shit you not, I was writing something here when I blanked out and when I came back to myself I was looking at LOLDogs. www.ihasahotdog.com. Seriously. I know, I know, but it’s cute as all hell.

Mugsy and Bruno are a couple of small-time (so small-time in fact, that they appear to operate out of Mugsy’s grandma’s living room) thugs who pimp exactly one hooker and, judging from appearances, have no other illicit business concerns or even legitimate jobs. When Mugsy kills Hot Lips in a fit of anger, he becomes understandably concerned that his only source of income is now bleeding out on grandma’s plastic-coated sofa.

How fortunate for them that across town at the Delta Epsilon Delta fraternity, Edgar Allen Lovecraft (presumably cast when the filmmakers said, “Hey, which one of us looks least unlike Jeffrey Combs when we stick huge glasses on him?”) has just perfected his “re-animator serum” and brought the head of a car wreck victim back to life in his dorm room. A head belonging to a stand-up comic named Fred. After introducing Fred (a fellow “DED Head” member of the Missouri branch of the fraternity) to his frat brothers and making the joke-spewing head a social success despite being hideously burned, only having one eye, and being a talking severed head in a pan (he and Jan should hook up…), the party winds down and his roommate’s girlfriend falls down on the sidewalk and dies. Not sure if she was supposed to have dropped from alcohol poisoning, or if she tripped and fell, or what. Kinda vague, kinda poorly conceived, kinda don’t care.

Edgar brings her back to life, but with the unfortunate side-effect that when you re-animate a woman, instead of a wisecracking party animal, she becomes an insufferable shrew. Quickly developing an “anti-shrew serum”, Edgar saves the day and makes headlines.

At this point the movie serializes itself by advertising the exciting conclusion in a sequel, and then immediately delivering that sequel. I was actually worried for a minute there that I was going to have to waste some effort tracking this thing down before I realized the runtime was only half elapsed. Given the resources and motivation of most people who make movies with a camcorder (look up Not the Mafia on IMDB to see what I mean, I’ll wait…it’s not there, you say? And that, Constant Reader, is the point), the sequel would probably have fallen victim to lapsing attention spans and distractions such as Hot Pockets had they actually tried to franchise the thing.

Mugsy sees in Edgar’s re-animator serum as a solution to his problem, and arrives at House DED with Hot Lips’s corpse, forcing Edgar to revive her. Unfortunately, having been dead and frozen for at least several days has advanced the onset of shrew syndrome to the point where she goes on a super-powered rampage punching the heads off random people on the street (apparently there was also some inspiration drawn from Frank Hennenlotter) until Edgar, Mugsy, and Bruno can track her back to Mugsy’s (grandma’s?) place, where…they completely fail to sedate her and she makes Mugsy her bitch! Edgar is made head of the University’s biology department (which for some reason does not include upgrading him from living in the DED frat house), and Bruno goes along to be his driver, which he doesn’t need as he apparently still lives on campus. Fred the Head goes on to a successful stand-up (or should that be propped-in-a-pan-up?) career, and yet another promised sequel that, thank Cthulhu, never happened.

I realize this sounds like a sure-fire recipe for an industrial-strength shit sandwich, but remember what I said about corny humor? This thing doesn’t take itself seriously for one second of the runtime. Doing so would seem like a no-brainer, but the amount of people who make these shitty little home movies and think they’re Peter fucking Jackson making Lord of the Rings is staggering. In the end, the reason this is watchable is because that spirit of fun the makers clearly had filming this thing is there in every frame. There are no pretensions of upping the ante and topping Gordon’s Re-Animator, there is no attempt to provoke fear or tension in the audience. What you see is totally designed for cheap chuckles, and they abound. I have to admit, I even thought the original music over the credits was kinda cool.

Admittedly, the movie never lives up to the promise of its title, which implied to my overactive imagination that we would be seeing a school where Herbert West was teaching whole classes of young mad scientists to bring hideous abominations before the eyes of God to gibbering, unnatural life. Presumably they couldn’t afford the effects and extensive cast necessary to bring such an epic vision to life. Which leaves the option open for me…you heard it here first, folks. If I see such a movie come to life out there, your lawyer better be fucking Robocop, because I’m coming after you. My idea, bitches. MINE!

Okay, I have a much higher tolerance for this type of thing than most people, but if you don’t at least get a little chortle out of a guy dressed like Herbert West riding around on the hood of a car being driven by a cartoon gangster, picking up the heads of victims of a super-powered zombie hooker with a garbage sticker like those things you see prisoners using on the side of the highway, then I don’t know what you think you’re doing here, but you ain’t cut out for it, bub.

Not the Mafia Rating:

A joyous aura of goofiness surrounds this humble little flick and kinda makes you wish you had been there.