Beyond Re-Animator

 Brian Yuzna doesn't make good movies, and is probably completely uninterested in making good movies. When given enough creative freedom, though, he makes things like Society, or the movie we're discussing now, which has a mid credits sequence where a rat fights a re-animated severed penis.
 That's right. Brian Yuzna doesn't make good movies - he makes awesome movies. At least when the stars are right.

 Beyond is the second sequel to Stuart Gordon's classic Re-Animator, set (and released) thirteen years after the previous movie. Dr. Herbert West, Re-animator (Jeffrey Combs), has spent the intervening time locked up in jail serving a sentence for one of his zombie's crimes.
 We are shown this crime, and it's a good one: the zombie in question spies a cute, scantily dressed woman drinking milk, then breaks into the house and kills her - and then lustily starts chugging from the milk carton. It's a great gag, but also an incredible image because the dude is missing the whole of his lower jaw:

Brian Yuzna and Screaming Mad George in the house, bee-yotches!

 The girl's murder is witnessed by her younger brother Howard Phillips (groan), who grows up to be Dr. Howard Phillips (Jason Barry). He's obsessed with West's work, and joins the infirmary at the jail he's imprisoned to get closer to him.

 Soon the two are working together and are running experiments again with the re-animation serum. There's a few complications this time around:
 a) A sexy journalist (Elsa Pataky), becomes romantically entangled with Dr. Phillips, and interested in Dr. West's work and history.
 b) Prison warden Brando (Simón Andreu), who plays the villain with scenery-chewing relish, hates Dr. West and is almost cartoonily infatuated with the journalist.
 c) West has run some experiments on a fellow inmate's pet rat, which did not go down well, and is getting death threats.

 West also has developed a new technology over the last thirteen years - a transference of electrical nano-wotsits from body to body, which in theory should stop the cadavers going completely psycho after reanimation by virtue of some extremely poorly written technobabble. I demand more scientific rigour out of my reanimation movies!
 As you might expect, the experiments don't turn out that well, and in the chaos that ensues the prisoners break out and cause a riot. The movie was fairly nuts before that, but the real madness starts after this point.

 This is a Yuzna movie, not to mention a Re-Animator sequel, so you should expect a lot of questionable content - sexual violence, boobs and dicks getting bitten off to comedy music, that sort of thing. The pacing is all over the place, and the tone... well, it's firmly a comedy, but way too over the top. Spanish comedy/horror legend Santiago Segura is unfortunately the worst offender in this respect, mugging at the camera with abandon while scarfing down drugs as if they were popcorn and other wackiness. But I can't let the script (by José Manuel Gómez and Miguel Tejada-Flores) off the hook - Warden Brando, for example, might be having a little too much fun squeaking like a rat, but he's playing his role as written.

 This is an English-language Spanish production* which got distributed by the sci-fi channel (and released as a PG cut! Wonder how long that is). The upshot is that most of the actors are Spanish, which lends the movie an even lower-rent quality as they are dubbed or unsuccessfully try to pass for native speakers. The acting is almost uniformly terrible - even Jason Barry, who's Irish - but honestly I think that's down to the material and directorial decisions. Everyone is pitching to the rafters.
 With Combs an a honorable exception, of course: he plays West as he ever has, all acerbic wit and medical detachment. The guy can elevate anything.

 Being a B-movie all the way down to its ugly, deformed soul, the production values are actually all right; The crew had access to a whole jail, which looks suitably imposing, and a ton of extras. The effects are also top notch, with the legendary Screaming Mad George delivering some pretty nuts gore effects which deserve to be put up there with the best this series has to offer.

 It's nowhere near as good as the first movie, but no one expected anything else out of a second sequel. Also- I like Yuzna but he's definitely no Gordon.
 I should re-visit Bride, which I didn't think much of at the time, to see how it's aged. But this, this was a very pleasant surprise - I somehow missed it completely when it came out, and found it to be a blast. A minor Christmas miracle.

*:Just like the excellent Dagon, which was released two years before this one, but by different production companies. I wonder if Gordon was involved in getting his partner in crime this gig.