Dr. Strain the Body Snatcher (1991)

 

Director: Michael Cornejo and LaMonte Fritts

Screenplay: Michael Cornejo and LaMonte Fritts

Cast: David Winkler as Doctor Strain; Carmine Puccio as Jesse Strain; Kenneth Knaff as Dr. Moore; Gabriel Trupin as Creature 2

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #263

 

Well my sceptical friend, prepare yourself for God science!

Low budget Re-Animator copies, based on the 1985 film, surprisingly exist in a little handful. Reanimator Academy (1992) was a strange comedy take with the burnt talking head of a comedian and slapstick gangsters. The Soultangler (1987), which Dr. Strain eventually copies its premise from, was Long Island's no-budget cousin of Re-Animator. Dr. Strain itself, beginning with split screen of a man working a lab set to synth/electronic drum beat percussion, fully informs you of the period this was made in with this opening. It shows nothing, but still says of how idiosyncratic the moods of such films from this context are, even if they are not everyone's bread and butter.

This initially feels like it has lifted from the premise of From Beyond (1986) too even if proven not the case, another Stuart Gordon film made after he helmed Re-Animator, as a police psychologist interviews the assistant of a doctor who has vanished. Said assistant is the nephew of Dr. Strain (David Winkler), a biochemist who asks for his assistance. Unfortunately whilst learning to reanimate brain cells and other material, Strain himself looks more than pallid and is slowly decaying as, testing it on himself, his chemicals for the reanimation formula works the opposite way on living tissue.

The result is a curious homemade work. At this point, viewing as many as I have, there is a divide between a viewer like myself, who can watch a no-budget film like this, to those who never heard of such films, and to those who cannot, dank VHS rip or otherwise. This is a slow film, one that is entirely dependent on your tolerance on meandering micro-budget riffs on genre cinema, scored to the same repetitious stabbing sound with synthesizer moaning in the soundtrack, sounding like a track stuck in a loop. This film floats between ideas, such as unexpected name checking alchemy, only to disappoint by pretending to without any real knowledge of what it actually is, and not actually tackling them regardless of budget. At least made in 1989, as the end credits suggests, this also as mention mimics The Soultangler in premise, as like that film this gets into the transfer of souls from one body to another, all through a lot of dialogue which makes up most of the film, and is the thing you have to get over to try to watch the film.

It never gets anywhere, even if it sets up the premise that transferring souls from "the Field of the Damned", a place where black sheep of families or siblings who become killers were buried, is an inherently dumb idea especially for a scientist dabbling in forbidden arts to have thought was sound. But I found this entertaining. Dr. Strain, his actor with his face covered in white and a booming theatrical voice, becomes a more evil figure, with the advantage of having a nephew who has a fresher, younger body to steal, whilst their initial plans do no succeed well as the dead are not as cooperative as you presume. It is a film which, even under an hour, feels inadequate in what it wants to achieve, my appreciation for these no-budget films now admitting when they fail but admiring their attempt. This is a film you can have a legitimately memorable moment, when a zombie does escape but goes back to its grave, trying to rebury itself, but is lost in a film which has a lot of dialogue, too much, to succeed as a film. Where the fun is to be found more in its kitsch moments as much as when it succeeds, such as a prop skeleton levitating upwards from its grave with a candle between its teeth, thus also showing this film has to be appreciated as a silly regional production.

Only over an hour, it cannot hurt one a great deal, baring the fact it is of its era in aesthetics which can be an acquired taste, a rat rail on someone's head and all. Ending in a prolonged on foot chase, with echoed footsteps, within a real city and its back streets with Invisible Man cosplay, Dr. Strain still has the haze of a dream. This is the best aspect of this type of cinema, no-budget filmmaking, even if this is not the best.