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Director: Judith Priest
Writers: Benton Jennings and Judith Priest
Starring: Steve Westerheit, Connie Speer, Richard
Perrin
Synopsis: Divided
into two segments, Reanimator Academy begins with frat house member Edgar Allan
Lovecraft, a mad scientist out-of-place among the hard partying Delta Epsilon
Delta Fraternity, developing a reanimation serum and bringing the burnt severed
head of a comedian back to life. The second half, when this serum is wider
known, unfortunately leads a pair of gangsters to Lovecraft's doorstep,
demanding him to resurrect one of their prostitutes and moll Hot Lips.
[Spoilers Throughout]
Films are strange - especially
when you accept that, for every legitimate piece of art, they are a produce
that despite their expense are churned out like sausages and as a result, when
that process goes amiss, it shows in films that make little sense or end up as
peculiar viewing circumstances. Drop down into no-budget cinema, when you can
have access to straight-to-VHS era cinema let alone when DVD came to be, and
for those who try their hardest, and those who managed to succeed, there's
stuff like Reanimator Academy that
exists right at the bottom in the nebulous realm Bleeding Skull is usually an expert in rather than myself. I cannot
believe I've stepped on a sibling of Redneck
County Fever (1992), a "comedy" about Bill and Ted stoners
standing by buildings with a southern accent or two, but here it is. Produced
by David DeCoteau, if the credits are
right, shot on VHS, and with one of the leads of Redneck County Fever having a small cameo, a frat house member who
makes the ill-advised decision to drink the lead scientist's fish tank of
chemicals. I hope it's the same character, creating a small multiverse of
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Openly, shamelessly, taking its ideas from Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator (1985), this would be the extreme of After Last Season (2009) if not for the fact that film had sets with cardboard MDI machines and a sterile, vague acting style contributing to its own unique atmosphere. Reanimator Academy is even below that film in style, a home movie where people pretend to be Herbert West from Re-Animator and, bizarrely, two 1940s gangsters from a slapstick comedy. As with Redneck County Fever, the tone is a stilted one where people act in ordinary environments and outside locations on the street - this has a little bit more budget due to the bit of prosthetic effects involved, but those are minimal or visibly papier-mâché. It's not an insult from my part to point that out, or the mannequin heads used indiscriminately for the series of decapitation punches that take place later on in the film which I will explain later, rather describing to you that this is the equivalent to a home movie with genre tropes added to the visuals you yourself might make, but was released in commercial form so took that aesthetic there as well.
In this case, our Jeffrey Combs stand-in resurrects a bad
stand-up comedian - in this world Ed the head, as he dubs himself, is one of
the funniest of his kind but, whilst he's funny occasionally, the stand-up
routine definitely isn't. As the first half of the film is mostly about this
plot point, this character's the one I have to talk about the most. Ed the Head,
barring these scenes, is nonetheless the more animated, ironically in a cast of
amateurs, who try but were given very broad comedic moments and odd characters
to work with whilst the actor voicing the fake severed head gets the most from
his material. The two gangsters feel out of place out of them all, just from
their names from a Dick Tracy
pastiche, one a clown who is naive and dumb, the other shorter and vicious. They,
imitating gangster accents but very amateur in performance, emphasise the weird
juxtaposition of inert filmmaking with broad comedy. Occasionally they work but
only from charm of them being out of their depth, when the larger of the two
confuses slang for offing a person continually in one sequence, but mainly it's
with dead air as with a lot of the film's tone in general.
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Annoyingly a huge part of this comedy is sexism as well as, when the resurrection serum is used on women, such as the girlfriend of the lead Delta Epsilon Delta Fraternity member when she falls over on the street and dies instantly, it turns them into shrews. This emphasises this strange antiquated air to the material, a shrew an archetype of a nagging and snapping female character that is critical of everything the males in a story do, and has really died out in comedy over the decades for good reason. How this became the gag in this film is to debate, and I have to admit when it comes to Hot Lips as a resurrected zombie sex worker, the actress playing her takes the archetype and gladly chews the scenery in an entertaining way, but it does bring a nasty stain to the material. Its stranger as, due to the plot, the vicious shorter gangster ends up accidentally stabbed with the cure, a symbolically problematic idea of a feminising agent, which turns him into a weaker figure the moll can push around in her shrew state. It's weird itself, a problematic and curious aspect that in a film like this unfortunately stands out more as it's one of the only really big aspects to be able to talk about Reanimator Academy through in greater detail. If there's any semblance of entertainment, alongside the film in general, it's through Hot Lips and the plot point that, reanimated, she's angry and able to punch men's (fake) heads off with considerable ease; so many in fact that the men following her have to start collecting them in their car, an absurd progress the more it continues.
Most will find Reanimator Academy painful - even for
no budget film fans, who have tempered patience with movies like this accepting
their limitations, this does feel like an extreme too far in how little
actually takes place, the second preview to set up the second half (as if both
parts are two different exploitation films with Cookie Monster narration)
having to repeat scenes from the first, not helped by not a lot in the
slightest having actually taken place. If anything, Reanimator Academy is a reminder that, if you step outside the
template of Hollywood cinema, even the standard of what we presume of cinema,
filmmaking is an industry which has many individuals producing work within it
through various strands and communities, some of which varies in technical
quality to these extremes. It's a humbling experience...but when you suffer
through Ed the Head's stand-up, you also realise this film is better to think
of then actually experience.
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