“Doctor Herbert West. I know all about you.”
Somehow, Dr. Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) managed to survive both zombie apocalypses and for the past 13 years has been in prison, having been responsible for a murder caused by one of his zombies. He has been clandestinely experimenting on rats. He manages to find a major factor that was missing from his re-animation process. An energy called “NPE” or Nano-Plasmic Energy. Extracting this from the brain of a living creature through an electrocution type process he can store it until needed. Then he takes the NPE along with the reagent and introduces it to the corpse. The NPE helps the reagent restore the dead person to a more normal state.
The new doctor for the prison is Dr. Howard Phillips (Jason Barry). Howard is well aware of Herbert’s abilities. His sister was the one killed by Herbert’s reanimated corpse. He has Herbert assigned to the hospital to assist him in normal hospital duties. However, they both begin secretly working on Herbert’s new process and creating more reanimation serum. When prisoner Moses (Nico Baixas) dies, they reanimate him. He is put into a cell. Laura Olney (Elsa Pataky) is a journalist doing a story on the prison. She meets Howard. They have sex and fall in love. Being a journalist she researches Herbert’s history. Warden Brando (Simon Andreu) has the hots for Laura. He tries to seduce her. She rejects him but still tries to manipulate him. The Warden kills her in a rage and blames Moses.
Herbert and Howard reanimate Laura. The Warden finds out. Herbert ends up killing him. He then uses the warden’s NPE on Laura. The affect is not quite what he expected. Moses escapes from his padded cell and ends up in the cell of a prisoner named Cabrera (Enrique Arce). Moses kills a guard and attacks Cabrera’s pet rat. Cabrera goes crazy and takes the keys from the dead guard and opens all the cells. A prison riot erupts. Things go downhill from there. “Beyond Re-Animator” was released in 2003 and was directed by Brian Yuzna. It was independently made Spanish/American film but distributed by the SYFY channel. It is also the third and final installment of the Re-Animator series.
This movie is the same re-animator, yet its not. You have Herbert West and the green glow-stick serum. You have the re-animated corpses and the blood, guts and gore. And you have the manic kill everything and re-animate it theme. But it’s more comedy than horror. Lots of jokes and puns. For some reason all the dead re-animated people think they have a more developed sense of humor. It wasn’t horrible by any means. I enjoyed watching it.
There was just something different about this one as compared to the first two movies. I’m not talking about Bruce Abbott either. One schlemiel is as good as another. It’s Combs who makes the movie anyway. It’s more of an atmosphere that’s different. In the first movie, especially, and somewhat in the second movie, there were these over the top OMG moments where I said out loud Oh My God. I didn’t do that in the third movie. Yes, there were over the top moments, like with the crawling penis. But that you saw coming, so to speak. When you compare that to the sexual assault with a head in the first movie, you might understand what I mean. I didn’t know the head scene was coming, but I knew the penis scene was, well before it happened. I think what I’m referring to is the shock value. With each subsequent movie there is just as much mayhem, but less shock value. Also Herbert didn’t seem quite as snarky as before. He may have mellowed in his old age.