Beyond Re-Animator is more conceptually adventurous than Bride of Re-Animator was. Bruce Abbott’s Dan Cain has been written out and the only holdover (aside from Brian Yuzna) is the central character of Jeffrey Combs’s Herbert West. The film’s interesting twist is to place Herbert West in prison – Yuzna explains this as being because they had difficulty thinking how to expand the premise so the best solution was to lock West away from furthering his research. That said, the plot still cycles around the basics the original – West ruthlessly and amorally engaged in experiments to reanimate the dead; his naive assistant who becomes involved with a woman during the course of the show, before she is killed and reanimated; a cruel and self-serving authority figure who is inevitably turned into a zombie; a climax where everything runs out of control. Jeffrey Combs gives another of the cold, supercilious and emotionally detached performances that he perfected with this role.

Brian Yuzna starts in with an opening that gets the original’s sense of black humour down perfectly – with two boys sitting around a campfire retelling the basic story of Re-Animator, which we see has now passed onto become an urban legend, while a zombie with a waggling tongue instead of a lower jaw bursts into the house behind them and attacks their sister (Barbara Elorrietta), before being shot by police. Thereafter Beyond Re-Animator becomes surprisingly quieter – both in terms of the customary splatter effects and black humour that we expect of a Re-Animator film. It does however pick up for a memorably grotesque and funny extended climax during the last third. This lacks anything as outrageous as the cunnilingus scene with the severed head in Re-Animator, although Brian Yuzna does try hard with a couple of scenes – one where the religiously crazed zombie inmate (Nico Baixas) falls to the ground before the nurse (Raquel Gribler) and she grants him succour, before he tears her top open and then bites her breast off. The other being when the zombified Elsa Pataky is forced to give the sadistic warden (Simon Andreu) a blowjob but instead bites his dick off and throws it away to a rat, which promptly runs off with it. (If one keeps watching all the way through the credits, there is an animated vignette that plays throughout with the rat and reanimated penis fighting).

Where Beyond Re-Animator comes into its own is during the extended apocalyptic climax, which is filled with a variety of outrageous scenes:– a collection of bodies that have been injected with the serum by the warden and left hanging, twitching on the end of ropes while still alive; Jeffrey Combs reanimating the warden with rat neo-plasm with the warden then taking on increasingly rat-like features, finally being reduced to squatting with a set of giant elongated knees that stretch up above his ears; Jason Barry being attacked by the severed torso of Enrique Arce that agilely swings itself between the bars and along the roof; a junkie (Santiago Segura) repeatedly injecting himself with the reagent until his eyeballs pop out and his guts explode; the reanimated Elsa Pataky attacking Jason Barry and the final scene where Barry is left maddened, cradling her severed head.

Brian Yuzna has subsequently gone onto direct a number of other horror films:– Society (1989), Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: The Initiation (1990), Necronomicon (1993), Return of the Living Dead III (1993), The Dentist (1996), The Dentist 2 (1998), The Progeny (1999), Faust: Love of the Damned (2000), Rottweiler (2004), Beneath Still Waters (2005) and Amphibious 3-D (2010). Yuzna has also produced a number of genre films including various Stuart Gordon such as From Beyond (1986), Dolls (1987) and Dagon (2001), as well as Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989), Infested (1993), the manga adaptation Crying Freeman (1995), Arachnid (2001), Darkness (2002), Romasanta: The Werewolf Hunt (2004), The Nun (2005) ands Takut: The Faces of Fear (2008).