Year released: 1990
THE CHARGE: Impersonating Re-Animator with a budget that screams Re-Possessed.
THE EVIDENCE: By 1990, the horror genre was on life support. We had eight Friday the 13th and five Nightmare on Elm Street films to that point, with both series demonstrating serious declines in quality. Sequelitis was in full force, and for every decent one released (like Exorcist III) we were treated to a slew of stinkers (Prom Night III, Psycho IV, Troll 2). And on the rare occasions that original horror films like The Immortalizer were released, they were typically as unoriginal as you could get.
Four city teens are abducted by a couple of bodybuilders in monster make-up and taken to a nondescript clinic in the suburbs. The clinic is run by Dr. Devine, who has developed a special technique for making old people look young again: he simply removes their brains and puts them in younger bodies. It seems the four new arrivals are meant to be involuntary body donors, but one of them escapes and contacts the police who, naturally, don’t believe his story. Now he has to find a way to save his friends and the only help he has is from a nosy elderly neighbor across the street.
"She's the right size, but does she come in a different color?"
The Immortalizer should be preserved forever as a prime example of why the horror genre practically died out in the late 80s/early 90s. The formula for cheap genre flicks was etched in stone at that point: show a pair of boobs and a couple of halfway original kills and voila, you’ve got a movie. Plotlines and character development were completely optional and usually ignored because it would require hiring a screenwriter smart enough to demand a decent paycheck.
The formula is slavishly adhered to by The Immortalizer, which offers a couple of instances of gratuitous nudity (female, of course) and a few kills that are certainly original even if they don’t make a lick of sense. One features a guy who’s stabbed in the back with a gun - yes, stabbed - which then fires through his chest. It scores points for originality, but gets a low score from the Russian judge for execution. It’s OK, we still hated the Russians back then.
The "Homeless Back-Alley Hulk" spin-off never really found its audience.
But don’t try making any sense out of the shenanigans. If you do, you’ll just end up hurting yourself. For instance, the clinic is located in a two-story suburban home that’s large enough to hold a couple of operating rooms, several recovery rooms, an elevator, a dungeon, more rooms hidden behind fake sliding walls, and a control center with a bank of monitors. The architect must have been inspired by the flying car that unfolds from George Jetson’s briefcase. It’s the only rational explanation I can conjure up for this apparent manipulation of matter and space, and I think I popped a blood vessel coming up with it. See what I said about hurting yourself?
Now, I’m not a complex man, as my wife can attest to. I can forgive bad acting, cheap sets and complete lack of logic in a horror film if I can at least have something interesting to look at. Sadly, director Joel Bender went out of his way to make everything look as bland as possible. The entire film, aside from the surprisingly gory brain operations, is shot like a cheap TV soap opera. Bender would later go on to use his banal style to full effect editing several episodes of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers. ‘Nuff said.
All in all, The Immortalizer is as generic as they come, like a horror story written entirely with Mad Libs: The (adjective) scientist (verb ending in ‘s’) some teenagers by (verb ending in ‘-ing’) their (body parts).
As far as I'm concerned, The Immortalizer can go (expletive) itself.
THE VERDICT: The Immortalizer is GUILTY of conspiring to kill the horror genre with a lethal mix of banality, apathy and general incompetence, and should be immortalized only as an example of how NOT to make a horror film.
