Herbert West is at it again in BRIDE OF RE-ANIMATOR, producer Brian Yuzna's sequel to Stuart Gordon's quirky 1980s gorefest, on limited edition Blu-ray/DVD combo from Arrow Video USA.

After the "Miskatonic Massacre" at the conclusion of RE-ANIMATOR, Dr. Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs, CASTLE FREAK) and colleague Dr. Daniel Cain (Bruce Abbott, BAD DREAMS) went down to Peru as volunteer medics in the country's brutal civil war. While Cain may have done it as sort of penance, West chose the job to provide him with plenty of raw material on which to refine his reagent. During their time down there, West has discovered a stabilizing agent in the amniotic fluid of the Cuzco Iguana that has not significantly evolved in one hundred million years. Upon their return to Miskatonic University hospital, Cain makes his rounds and connects with pretty cancer patient Gloria (Kathleen Kinmont, HALLOWEEN 4: THE RETURN OF MICHAEL MYERS) who reminds him of his lost love Meg (FROM BEYOND's Barbara Crampton in the first film and FINDING NORTH's Mary Sheldon in a prologue excised from this film) while West decides it is time to move from reanimating the dead to creating life. West keeps his hold on Cain with his plans to use bring Meg's heart – which has shown no signs of tissue or cellular deterioration like the other body parts from the massacre – back to life within a new body assembled from desirable parts he has been pilfering from the pathology lab of Dr. Graves (Mel Stewart, DEAD HEAT). Cain helps West assemble a body in their former mortuary abode neighboring the graveyard from the feet of a ballet dancer, the legs of a streetwalker, a virgin's womb, the arms of a lawyer and a murderess (hmm…), and West has a pretty good idea where to get the head. Complicating the pair's attempt at nonsexual (but tacitly sexualized) procreation are the reappearance of plucky freedom fighter Francesca (Fabiana Udenio, AUSTIN POWERS' "Alotta Fagina") from their Argentinean venture to romance Cain, and the snooping of police lieutenant Chapman (Claude Earl Jones, EVILSPEAK) whose late wife (Marge Turner) was discovered among the living corpses confined to the hospital's psych ward while doctors try to explain their apparent reanimation. Dr. Graves has also been experimenting with a sample of West's reagent and makes the mistake of injecting some of it into the brain of the severed head of Dr. Hill (David Gale, SYNGENOR) recently recovered from a carnival sideshow showing no signs of tissue decay and still bearing a grudge against West.

After RE-ANIMATOR, director Stuart Gordon (PIT AND THE PENDULUM) and producer Brian Yuzna (SOCIETY) had planned to adapt H.P. Lovecraft's "The Shadow Over Innsmoth" as DAGON for Empire Pictures, but the project was shelved (and not picked up again until 2001 during Yuzna's association with Spanish production company Filmax) in favor of FROM BEYOND and DOLLS. A proposed sequel to RE-ANIMATOR underwent many different ambitious conceptual incarnations, but it was not until Brian Yuzna was working on SOCIETY for Keith Walley (NIGHTWISH) and Paul White's (THE UNNAMABLE) that Yuzna decided to undertake a sequel. Working on a short pre-production schedule with the threat of funding falling through, but without any requirements from the producers, Yunza and screenwriters Rick Fry (DEMENTIA) and Woody Keith (INITIATION: SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT 4) sort of threw everything at the wall and kept what stuck. The end result is really less Lovecraft (apart from a thruway line about "rats in the walls") than BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (the neighboring graveyard is even called the Deodati Cemetery) with the bride so cruelly rejected. The many effects contributions of the newly formed K.N.B. Efx Group (IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS), John Carl Buechler's Magical Media Industries (CELLAR DWELLER), Screaming Mad George (POLTERGEIST II), Anthony Doublin (CARNOSAUR), and stop-motion wiz David Allen (SUBSPECIES) goose the padded middle section of the film until we get to the third act mostly set in West's and Cain's basement lab in which the set dressings, color gelled but expressionistic lighting, costumes, and camera angles pay an effective homage to James Whale's film without seeming like an attempt to copy the look or tone.

Combs is amusingly manic as usual – particularly when "doodling" with body parts he reanimates in various grotesque concatenations (including a "spider" made up of severed fingers and an eye or a joined together foot and hand which tries to kick and then strangle him) – while Abbott balances the dramatics with increasingly deadpan reactions to being sprayed in the face with blood until the climactic (if role-reversal. Udenio is eye candy with a side of hysterics while Kinmont manages to wring sympathy from her pained performance as the creature (more so than as the dying cancer patient). Gale's Hill is sidelined for too long (Hill's own adversarial relationship with Graves might have spawned a film itself but the highlight is pretty much a variation on the Looney Tunes singing frog gag) only to turn up flying around on bat wings at the last moment to little effect. The cinematography of effects cameraman Rick Fichter (DRAGONSLAYER) is workmanlike in exteriors and the hospital settings but becomes more dynamic during the sequences set in the scientists' house and lab (the latter designed by PHANTASM II's Philip Duffin), but the score of composer Richard Band (HOUSE ON SORORITY ROW) is undistinguished apart from his reprise of the first film's PSYCHO-influenced (or –indebted) main theme.

Disc two of the set features the high-definition debut of Yuzna's BEYOND RE-ANIMATOR, one of a handful of Fantastic Factory productions mounted in collaboration with Spain's Filmax. Thirteen years after he witnessed his sister Emily (Bárbara Elorrieta, granddaughter of FEAST OF SATAN director José María Elorrieta) murdered by a man with no jaw, young Dr. Howard Phillips (Jason Barry, TITANIC) takes a position as doctor at a maximum security prison as the facility's doctor. Although ostensibly interested in reform, Howard actually wants to work with imprisoned Dr. Herbert West (Combs) and has requested him to assist in the medical ward. In the last decade, however, West has moved beyond reanimation to Nano-Plasmic Energy, allowing him to extract the life force of a living being in order to give a more lifelike existence to those brought back to life by his reagent. Howard and West save the life of a prisoner (Nico Baixas, BENEATH STILL WATERS) who dies of a heart attack with the reagent with the intention of using him as a recipient Nano-Plasmic Energy, but his attack on the guards lands him in solitary. Reporter Laura (Elsa Pataky, GIALLO) is doing a story on prison reform, and is being humored by punishment-minded warden Brando (Simón Andreu, THE BLOOD-SPATTERED BRIDE); however, she takes both a romantic interest in Howard and starts looking into West's past. Laura's snooping and Brando's cruelty set the stage for a prison riot with West, Howard, and the guards battling prisoners alive and otherwise thanks to re-animated Brando and Speedball (Santiago Segura, KILLER BARBYS), an inmate who becomes addicted to the reagent.

Brian Yuzna's long-in-development second sequel to Stuart Gordon's RE-ANIMATOR tries to distinguish itself from the first to films with the new angle and setting; however, the script by Miguel Tejada-Flores – whose career ranged from FRIGHT NIGHT 2 and SCREAMERS to the REVENGE OF THE NERDS series – is ultimately a retread of the structure of the first film (as was the second film). Rather than his supposed obsession with bringing his sister back to life making him even more obsessive than West, Howard pretty much takes Dan Cain's place (so much so that West warns him off the bat that love interest Laura is trouble), with the end finding West somewhat avenging himself on Cain by proxy through Howard who proves to be even weaker and overall less interesting than Cain while Pataky joins the ranks of the series' other thankless love interests (alive and/or re-animated). The backstory also seems inconsistent, with Howard telling Laura that his sister was killed by one of the re-animated bodies that escaped from the hospital, suggesting a follow-up to RE-ANIMATOR while the prologue shows that his family home neighbored the cemetery, suggesting that the corpse escaped from West's cemetery adjacent basement lab in BRIDE. Combs gets by on his usual quirky charisma while Irish actor Barry is saddled with an American accent. Andreu gives a more lively performance – although it appears as if he redubbed a couple lines in ADR himself – but the rest of the supporting cast is rather bland (also Spanish actors acting in English). The gore is more technically proficient but less outrageous than the earlier films, even in its unrated version (the US R-rated version lost only eight seconds of footage). The Spanish production backing and location filming allows for more production value than the Yuzna would have managed stateside (apart from Canada, perhaps), and it is an overall slicker looking production than BRIDE. The scoring of Xavier Capellas is rather subdued, although the title music is a cover of Richard Band's PSYCHO-derived theme by Reyn Ouwehand.

BRIDE OF RE-ANIMATOR was purchased by Live Home Video but released theatrically through Troma's 50th Street Films. Live released it on tape in R-rated and unrated versions (the timings were similar because the R-rated version used alternate shots and cutaways rather than just snipping gore), along with a laserdisc from Image Entertainment of the latter, and Pioneer Entertainment – who would release a handful of Vestron/Live titles to DVD before it became Artisan Entertainment – would release the film on DVD in 1999. The Pioneer DVD was a double-sided affair that featured both R-rated and unrated cuts in 4:3 transfers with a non-anamorphic widescreen option utilizing the subtitle function as a matte over the top and bottom of the picture (the matte would disappear during fast-forwarding or chaptering skipping and then reappear). The R-rated version was brighter, sharper, and more colorful, presumably a more recent transfer while the unrated version was darker, softer, and probably derived from the 1" tape/laser master. The R-rated version was accompanied by two commentary tracks. The R-rated side also included behind the scenes and workprint footage of the deleted opening in which Dan tries to reanimate Meg as well as commentary over stills of the excised sequence in which Chapman discovers Hill's head at the carnival, the theatrical trailer, and an extensive stills gallery. The unrated side was accompanied solely by the behind the scenes featurette "Getting Ahead in Horror." Like most of the Pioneer discs, BRIDE OF RE-ANIMATOR because an expensive item when it went out-of-print, and Artisan disappointed fans when they reissued the film as a single-sided disc of the unrated version in the same fullscreen transfer and no extras.

Various DVD editions appeared overseas but none of them matched the Pioneer in terms of extras, and it was not until 2014 that German company Capelight released a Blu-ray/DVD combo from a new 2K restoration of both cuts (the R-rated version from the original interpositive, the unrated version from DeLuxe's composite master positive, and the stereo audio from Digital Betacam). Arrow Video's UK and US limited edition three-disc set utilized the same masters, as does Umbrella's all-region second volume of their Beyond Genres line which includes both unrated (96:21) and R-rated (96:22) – the slight difference in running time due to substitutions rather than cutting – editions on the same BD50 platter. The older DVD masters were darkish and over-sharpened (yet still soft). The brighter and boldly colored transfer reveals newfound detail in the dingy production design, spurting blood, and the sometimes rubbery but still stomach-turning prosthetics. The "Bride of Frankenstein" scenes during the climax now look quite stylized without the video haze and distortion of the gel lighting in the earlier master, looking as much color expressionism as comic book. The DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 stereo soundtrack has its share of squishy sound effects and piercing screams, but Band's score makes less of an impression due to the lesser fidelity of the track which had to be sourced from the Digital Betacam master of the DVD releases (Arrow utilized the same source but it was inexplicably rendered as mono after their cleanup job). Optional English SDH subtitles are included.

Like Capelight and Arrow, Umbrella carries over most of the extras from the Pioneer release, starting with the two commentaries now synchronized to the unrated version along with a new commentary by Yuzna (moderated by Severin's David Gregory) once exclusive to the Arrow. Yuzna admits the debt to FRANKENSTEIN but also reveals that he tried to incorporate material from Lovecraft's source story that they did not use in the adaptation of the first film including the war opening, the iguana, and the scientists' mortuary abode abutting the cemetery. He also discusses the film's original four prologues: Dan trying to reanimate Meg, Hill's "talking head" (a William Castle homage), the war, and the discovery of Hill's head at the carnival. Gregory does ask about the indebtedness of Band's theme to PSYCHO and Yuzna reveals that he was not aware of it during the first film but figures that it was different enough that no one brought suit. The second commentary by Yuzna, Combs, special effects coordinator Thomas Rainone (LORD OF ILLUSIONS) and the effects team including John Buechler, Mike Deak (SUBSPECIES 2), Robert Kurtzman (WISHMASTER), Howard Berger (PHANTASM II), and Screaming Mad George is a lively affair with much overlapping of voices as the group recalls the twenty-four hour shifts (in the workshop during the first unit shooting and then on the set with the second unit after the cast and primary crew left). Yuzna also mentions at the cutting of the negative for the R-rated version and the known existence (in 1999) of only two prints of the unrated version. They also speak highly of David Allen who was still alive and working with them on another production at the time but who would die later that year. The commentary with Combs and Abbott is a punchy, amusing one in which the actors muse on their characters' bickering dynamic, acting with rubber (or latex), and their characters' very different outlooks on sex. Abbott comments on his character's tendency to get distracted by women (cute dogs too) while Combs reveals that the reagent was Luminal and that his chemist father-in-law created the test tube rig for mixing the components.

Also carried over "Getting Ahead in Horror" (23:50), an archival featurette that visits the effects workshops and setups of scenes on location and set for visual and make-up effects. We see Doublin working on his finger creature, Gale undergoing extensive make-up (even playing poker with the crew), and Kinmont being made up in her bride body suit (which the effects commentary reveals was cast from her body and built around a "Visible Woman" anatomy kit). The deleted scenes (10:01) consist of workprint and behind the scenes video for the sequence in which Dan tries to reanimate Meg with Screaming Mad George's distorted head effect looking less effective than his SOCIETY creations, as well as the behind the scenes stills from the aborted carnival sequence with commentary. Ported over from the Arrow release is the featurette "Brian Yuzna Remembers Bride of Re-Animator" (9:37) in which he rehashes the origins of the project following so quickly after SOCIETY, throwing together the script so quickly, and Gale calling him up enthusiastic to be part of the project before he realized that he would have no wardrobe and spend the film as a severed head. Also ported over is "Splatter Masters: The Special Effects Artists of Bride of Re-Animator" (14:39), a set of interviews with effects artists Kurtzman, Screaming Mad George, Tony Doublin, and John Buechler that is perhaps more focused than the commentary track but spends much of its time delineating the responsibilities (which we know of already from the end credits and the effects commentary). Screaming Mad George does recall with some disappointment that his surreal sequence was meant to be shot last and that the production going behind schedule meant there was less time to actually shoot it. While Arrow's limited bonus of the original RE-ANIMATOR featured a reading of the Lovecraft source story by Combs, Umbrella features the "Dark Adventure Radio Presents" (71:36) retro dramatization. The "Behind the Scenes: Special Effects Artists" (14:27) featurette is the same behind the scenes reel featured on Arrow's limited edition third disc with the R-rated version. The film's theatrical trailer (1:53) is a longer version than the one from the Pioneer DVD which ran just under a minute and may have been a TV spot.

Released stateside by LionsGate on DVD in its R-rated version only while other territories got the unrated cut, BEYOND RE-ANIMATOR does not look as impressive as the older film in its 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.78:1 widescreen master. It may indeed be an older HD master prepared in Spain – the titles before the pre-credits sequence are in Spanish while the rest of the opening credits and end credits are in English – around roughly 2010 when the Fantastic Factory/Filmax production DARKNESS was released on Blu-ray as part of a Jaume Balagueró boxed set and the Yuzna productions THE NUN and BENEATH STILL WATERS popped up on German Blu-ray. We have not yet seen LionsGate's Vestron Blu-ray to compare their master. The DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track makes use of the surrounds for the score and the prison atmosphere, and it is occasionally adventurous in terms of sound effects but not comparable to a major studio film's mix. Optional English subtitles are included, and a slight lag with one or two lines makes one wonder if it was a transcription of the original English audio meant to be synchronized to the Spanish track.