Dr. Immortalizer

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.

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.

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.

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.