Review: The Immortalizer (1989)
Directed by: Joel Bender
Starring: Ron Ray, Chris Crone, Clarke Lindsley
Written by: Mark M. Nelson
Music by: Barry Fasman, Dana Walden
Country: United States
Available on: Blu-ray (Vinegar Syndrome)
IMDb
The Immortalizer, sort of a hybrid Re-Animator (1985) ripoff and Z-grade prototype for Get Out (2017), is one of those flicks that’s in one eyeball and right out the other for me, which makes it very difficult to write about. It’s about a surgeon who, with the help of some drug-addicted winos and some buff zombie-like heavies, abducts young hotties so that rich, elderly clients can pay mega-cash to have their brains transferred into these sexy bods.
Any time something like this drops from Vinegar Syndrome, I expect a satisfying balance of weird, trashy, and interesting, and sadly The Immortalizer stumbles in every lane it tries to occupy. It’s trying for some goofy humor, but nothing’s really funny. It slicks the floors with a little blood, but never gets gruesome. There are breasts, but it’s more of a tease. Mostly, this flick is about one of the abductees escaping from this sinister clinic and then getting captured again and then sneaking out again and then getting caught again and so forth until it finally ends. Along its circuitous way, there’s the rare bit of amusement, like people being impaled by a shock stick or a cop getting squished by a slow-moving van. But the driving force here is its relatively cool location, which the filmmakers definitely secured and decided to use the shit out of it before they got kicked out. You’ll see the same rooms, halls, trap-doors, and bunkers over and over again until they feel as familiar to you as your childhood home, if your childhood home had trap-doors that opened to dungeons with chained-up zombie hunks.
Unfortunately for us, director Joel Bender and writer Mark M. Nelson can’t find enough ways to keep the place interesting. As I watched the third or fourth sequence of our hero Gregg wandering the halls of Dr. Divine’s transplant mansion after eluding custody, it started to feel like the filmmakers finished a first cut, realized it was only 50 minutes long, then went back adding more and more improvised (i.e., not planned in any sense) content to the middle until they passed their precious 90-minute goal.
But it’s not all tedium. None of the actors are bad, actually, and Ron Ray is having a good time as the mad surgeon. The special effects are fine. The music is fine. All the ingredients are here for something tasty, but they just weren’t baked long enough or baked too long or whatever cooking analogy speaks to you. But The Immortalizer is definitely one of Vinegar Syndrome’s least entertaining horror releases, that’s neither shameless enough of a knock-off, nor exploitative enough to be audacious, nor badly made enough to be laughed at, nor well made enough to be lauded. Plenty of people have opined that the only bad movie is a boring movie — an opinion I can get behind — and The Immortalizer is perilously close to dull.
Overall rating: 3.5 out of 10
