Docteur Immortalizer

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.

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

In my opinion, great B movie from 80's! Very good idea of movie.

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.

Once again a devious, dastardly doctor is up to no good: the nefarious Dr. Divine (Ron Ray) runs a clinic with the equally slimy Dr. Price (Clarke Lindsley) and their devoted nurse (Melody Patterson of 'F Troop' and "Blood & Lace"). Their mission is to transplant the brains of elderly & wealthy clients into much younger, healthier bodies in order to prolong their lives. But they make a mistake with the latest batch of youngsters whom they abduct: Gregg (Chris Crone) manages to escape, but is determined to save his friends as well. Naturally, the jerk Sheriff (Bo Byers) is no help at all, but Gregg gets some assistance from a snooping neighbor (Elmarie Wendel, 'Third Rock from the Sun').

Entertaining gore effects, as well as a subplot involving unsuccessful donor bodies, makes this a reasonably engaging direct-to-video B flick. This viewer was overall fairly satisfied, and would chalk this one up as "good" dumb fun, even if he was often questioning character decisions. The characters, by and large, are all pretty standard, and the script may be not so hot, but director Joel Bender ("Gas Pump Girls", "Rich Girl") still delivers a consistently amusing, trashy horror flick, complete with nudity and a pretty typical ending. The performances are actually a bit better than one might think, with Crone making for a decent-enough hero and Lindsley seeming to enjoy himself as the not particularly loyal Price. Viewers will also recognize American Gladiator Raye Hollitt ("Skin Deep") as one of those "creatures" whom our villains keep locked up in the basement. Bob Verne and Terry Miller are good for some chuckles as two brain-dead henchmen. And Ray is fun to watch as the pompous chief antagonist.

"The Immortalizer" is no unsung B movie gem, but if you're anything like this viewer, you may have a fairly good time with it as well.

Six out of 10.