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.

Batman: The Doom that Came to Gotham

 In case you're not aware, there's an imprint of DC that lets them put out non-canon, what-if stories with established characters: It's called elseworlds, and the formula is to grab a superhero and change something about them, or to place them in a strange setting for an alternate take. So you get... I dunno, what if Batman were a vampire? Or if Superman had landed in Russia, and had become a communist superhero?

 They're usually short, contained stories. Because the setting or the circumstances are changed pretty heavily, there's a nerdy appeal to them in seeing what they did not just with the superhero, but with their supporting cast: If Bruce Wayne is a Viking, what will they do with Selina Kyle or the Condiment Man?

 The Doom that Came to Gotham is the animated adaptation of an Elseworld title published more than twenty years ago, written by Mike Mignola (the creator of Hellboy) along with Richard Pace and illustrated by Troy Nixey and Dennis Janke. As you might expect from the title, the question it asks is: What if Batman, but Lovecraft?

 Or, like most pop-culture takes on Lovecraft, a light, much pulpier version of his signature cosmic horror. You've got to leave some room to fit in all the punch-outs and chases, after all.

 And in this case, I am very happy to report that these action scenes include a fistfight with Mountains of Madness-style mutant penguins. Faithful yet ridiculous, making the tone of the thing crystal clear.

Chillin'

 Bruce Wayne is heading an expedition to the artic to find a previous expedition led by one Oswald Cobblepot; he finds their boat abandoned, Cobblepot gone feral (the sight of him wandering  the artic wastes butt-naked is a wonderfully grotesque image), and a half-frozen man in an eldritch, cyclopean cave, whom he rescues. But not before the stranger frees That Which Should Not Be and is infected with some sort of parasite.

 The expedition returns to Gotham, where it quickly becomes clear that all this artic weirdness was just a prelude to something bigger. There's a cult trying to summon an elder god or two, an ancient conspiracy that may lead to the end of the world. As Batman investigates, he realizes science and rationalism may not be enough to see things through.

 The story's a decent, very comic-book yarn where half the fun is seeing who pops up next, and in what guise. This gets in the way of the narrative, but I guess that's the nature of the beast.
 As silly as it gets, the plot is a fun, pulpy trawl though Lovecraft-flavored nonsense; And it does have some pretty good horror imagery every now and then. Poor Mr. Dent.

 Dialog-wise there's a lot of appropriately purple prose and some great lines. My favorite comes after Jim Gordon accuses Green Arrow of helping contraband bootleg moonshine. Green Arrow's response: "Tell you what, though. If I do happen upon a case, I'll let you watch me polish it off. At least then you and your boys can see what getting to the bottom of a case actually looks like."

 Nothing else in the script comes close to that level of repartee, but that alone makes it above average.

 Delivery varies wildly: I liked what David Giuntoli did with Batman, and Jeffrey Coombs pops up to deliver an unhinged voice performance. Didn't really find anyone else memorable, for good or ill.

 The art style tries to ape what I imagine is the style of the comic (which I haven't read), and looks like a cross between the old Bruce Timm Batman cartoons and lesser Mignola. DC are putting out a lot of these animated films, but I haven't seen any of them so I can't really compare - the style looks a little cheap to me, a bit flat. But there's a lot of variety in the action and the backgrounds, it never feels half-assed.

 It's...  ok. Horror for kids, well-made enough to be perfectly watchable but not really worth seeking out unless you really like this sort of thing. Or if you want to see Batman deliver a beatdown on mutant (non-albino) penguins, which I admit is a strong selling point.

 Having fun with Lovecraft rather than actually engaging with his ideas properly, and that's fine, I 'd never expect this genre, of all things, to ever do that, to pit superheroes against something so powerful and alien it wouldn't even recognize them as a threat, let alone be defeated in any meaningful way. Wouldn't that be something, though?

Motivational Growth

  Ian (Adrian DiGiovanni) hasn't left his apartment in over a year. A little agoraphobia, a lot depression. We know this because he's in the habit of speaking straight to the camera and expounding on his habits and philosophy at the drop of a hat, in slightly overwritten monologues that are articulate but maybe a little too glib, trying too hard to be clever. A very indie movie style of dialog. In any case, he's not too big on introspection or self-analysis. He's likeable enough, though.

 Unsurprisingly, his place is a sty. Ian himself is a mess of sores and unkempt hair in a dirty wifebeater-underwear combo. The guy's routine consists of a haze of watching TV, with his daily trek to the bathroom to take a dump the sole highlight. It's in one of these pilgrimages that, after his TV implodes, he decides that he's had enough and attempts to kill himself by making a cocktail of bleach and sulphuric acid, trying to gas himself with chlorine.

 He is not successful*; When he wakes up, it's to the dulcet tones of The Mold (Jeffrey Combs!), a sentient pile of mold that talks about itself in the third person and kind of sounds like a deranged beatnik.
 After getting over Ian's initial disbelief, The Mold (never just Mold) browbeats him into getting his shit together, cleaning up his act, and fixing up his department. He also gets him to drill holes all over, which will factor later into the... well, let's be generous and call it a plot.

 What we have here is a sort of surrealist chamber piece -or, to be precise, a two-chamber piece- that's mostly driven by Ian talking with The Mold, and Ian talking with us, the audience. Other characters intrude every now and then, all of them a bag of quirks, most important among them Leah (Danielle Doetsch): the girl next door and love interest whose immediate attraction for Ian, obstinate self-insertion into his life and relentless acceptance is... well, very quirky-indie-movie and kind of a bum note. Without going into spoilers it does kind of fit into the narrative by the end, but still.

 As a whole the film is kind of comedic, but without a whole lot of jokes, and it's definitely going for weird for weirdness's sake. It works, mostly. I was expecting the different characters to be symbolic, or at least to have a function, but if they do, I didn't catch them. They seem to be there just to provide incident and pass the time. Their dialog is, again, a little hit-and-miss, and so is their acting, but nothing too dire. I liked the TV repairman's monologue (Robert Kramer, I think?) , and there's a pretty funny rant about breaking a chimp's arm.

 Jeffrey Combs stands apart - he clearly had a blast voicing The Mold, and the script brings its A-game to all of his lines. The puppet they used for it is also extremely expressive; It's effortlessly funny and inscrutable and menacing in turns... Definitely the best character in the movie, which is as it should be.

 Writer-director-editor Don Thacker's done a lot of videogame shorts (including a few widely liked ones for Devolver Digital), so I guess it shouldn't be surprising that the whole soundtrack is composed of chiptunes, or that there are animated scenes done in the style of an old videogame. This seems odd, since Ian at no point even expresses any interest in gaming.
 There really is no discernible reason for that stylistic choice, but hey, it adds variety to the proceeds and it looks good, which is kind of a guiding principle here. There are aso some cool camera moves, especially at the beginning. It gets a bit flatter later but by then there's enough going on to keep things moving apace.

 The film ultimately attempts to be some sort of mindfuck, but honestly I felt there's too little substance here for it to stick... even now that world events have lent it more resonance than when it was originally made back in the year of our lord 2012. It's entertaining, though, agreeably loopy, and well worth it just for Comb's performance alone.

*SPOILERS: Or... is he? Dun dun DUNNNNNN