The Immortalizer

My review was written in August 1990 after watching the movie on RCA/Columbia video cassette.

Gore is the goal of this 1988 sci-fi/horror production bowing domestically in video stores.

Success of Stuart Gordon's "Re-Animator" was bound to inspire imitations, of which "The Immortalizer" is an idiotic example. Ron Ray is a mad doctor running a clinic where people routinely trade in their bodies for beautiful, young ones -latter obtained in the usual Burke and Hare fashion.

Four teens are doped and shanghaied in an alley by two monsters sporting poor makeup effects (courtesy of John Naulin) and taken to the clinic. One of them escapes, leaving Bekki Armstrong conscious (but pretending to be doped) to suffer innumerable indignities not uncommon to starlets appearing in exploitation films.

Although director Joel Bender gets some overacting here, nothing reaches the campy, enjoyable levels of "Re-Animator". Experimental failures are kept locked up as cannibalistic geeks, a poor taste subplot which wastes (beneath monster makeup) Raye Hollitt, the bodybuilder who had a memorable tryst with John Ritter in Blake Edwards' "Skin Deep".

Armstrong is an alluring heroine who deserves better assignments, but the rest of the cast is unimpressive. Script overworks its "boy who cried wolf" premise, as no matter what happens the sheriff (Bo Byers) doesn't believe it and refuses to intercede. Yucky gore during the brain transplant operations is a turnoff.

THE IMMORTALIZER was, uh, interesting. It certainly didn't kill me during its hour and a half duration, but it didn't impress me much either. A group of kids are abducted in an alley by musclehead mutants (in a scene featuring cinema's least convincing head crushing sound effect) and taken to a fancy house in the suburbs. Here Dr. Divine and his team are performing brain transplants for his rich old patients so they can have young bodies again. Hey, this was quietly remade with a big budget a few years later as FREEJACK! Who knew that when you transplant an old person's brain into a different body that their new voice will sound exactly like their old voice? With all this talk of pineal glands and the use of a glowing green serum, you can almost see visions of FROM BEYOND and RE-ANIMATOR dancing in the producers' heads. But the production literally doesn't have the guts to pull it off. I've never understood why, when someone is making a low budget horror film, that they don't pack it to the edge of the frame with gore. The acting is uniformly terrible, with the only good performance coming from Clarke Lindsley as the assistant Dr. Price. He has a nice evil laugh. The only other thing of note about THE IMMORTALIZER is that it features lots of old people doing their own stunts. Seriously, most of the cast takes some serious bumps for old folks.

The Immortalizer (1989) is a movie I recently watched on Tubi and tells the tale of some scientists who have created a machine that helps keep you young forever. However, everything has its catches and this machine is no different. The scientist needs to kidnap the people whose bodies his older clients want, he then transfers the old people into the young bodies and vice versa. Can the latest victims find a way to escape and expose scientist?

This movie is directed by Joel Bender (Gas Pump Girls) and stars Melody Patterson (Blood and Lace), Raye Hollitt (Skin Deep), Elmarie Wendel (Lorax) and Karen Moore (Quantum Leap).

The big guys makeup in this was just okay but they were fun characters. The monster fights were entertaining, especially the female fighter, and was probably the best part of the film. The dialogue in this was awkward and painful at times. The acting was also just okay and fairly clumsy. Unfortunately the attack and kill scenes were nothing special.

Overall this is a below average addition to the horror genre. There were some elements that had potential but the film unfortunately doesn't hit the mark. I would score this film a 4/10 and only recommend it if nothing else is on.

I went into this movie thinking it was a Charles Band Full Moon Production, but I was surprised when I didn't see his name in the credits. I remember the VHS cover art looking exactly like the memorable Full Moon boxes during their Paramount distribution deal heyday, with vibrant colors and depicting something either violent or titillating on the cover. THE IMMORTALIZER wants to be a RE-ANIMATOR knockoff based on the box, following the story of a mad scientist who kidnaps beautiful young folks off the street (using his zombie musclemen, of course) so he can sell eternal youth to old folks who want their minds transfer these young nubile bodies. It's not a bad setup for a cheesy direct-to-video horror movie, but this one is total amateur hour. Most of the film is one of the young people running around, hiding, and trying to escape the evil scientist's house/clinic. Boring, not funny, not scary, and not even all that gory. There wasn't even any nudity, which is a shock given that one of the cast members was a Playboy Playmate. Stick with Charles Band cheapie horror flicks like SORORITY BABES IN THE SLIMEBALL BOWL-O-RAMA or ASSAULT OF THE KILLER BIMBOS, and don't bother with this one.

This was a thriller with a lot of action. Pretty good for a B - movie.