We learn that March's curmudgeonly old neighbor (not to be confused with the curmudgeonly old gas station attendent) has been killed, "seemingly by wild animals" and soon after so has another neighbor of the old Curwen/Ward place, this time a drunk old woman who claimed that "they" were digging tunnels under her yard. I got the impression she didn't have a persecution complex involving Con-Ed. Swarthy Thug has been found dead as well, identified as a "local drug dealer".
March and Clare return to the Curwen farm yet again, and I wonder at March's mileage expenses. This time they've brought police with them, and paramedics. Ward slashes open March's hand with a scalpel, and tries to cut up Clare, but gets slapped in a straight jacket.
This would be a good place to end the movie, but believe it or not, we still have almost forty minutes to go.
Well, O'Bannon knows his horror staples, so suddenly we have the "Fearless Heroes" assemble. March, Clare, suddenly-quit chain-smoking associate (Lonnie!), a .357 revolver, a 12-gauge shotgun, and a really red backpack filled with plastic-explosives, which they (almost) manage to posess without losing credibility.
Down into the catacombs beneath the Curwen farmhouse, go our intrepid heroes. And suddenly the movie drags to a stop. It takes them a seeming age to wander about, with one flashlight and a kerosene lamp, before anything happens. Sure for a while I was expecting something to leap out of the shadows while going "BleArgH! i sMell HAM!!!" but nothing does, until March has discovered the icky secrets (essential salts! Just like in the book!) and become a believer. He also discovers that if you raise someone and stand too close, you both disintigrate. Or something. And, just to keep our "wow, now that's luck!" meter high, he finds Ward's bag, which he grabs. Now it's time for the "improperly raised" dead to rear their mishapen, stop-action animated heads. Some under-charged blanks that miss (the shotgun misses? No budget for squibs, I guess), and recently-re-started-chain-smoking associate is pulled into a pit by a beastie. Lonnie! Noooo! Not Lonnie!
Oh well, there goes my favorite character. After a really ineffective chase scene (the matches keep going out, so that we don't have to see how shoddy the monsters are) Clare and March escape, and the Curwen house goes BOOM! in a pretty satisfying explosion... except.. if March planted all the plastic explosives in the catacomb, how come we have billowing explosions ripping apart the second floor of the farmhouse? Ah, never mind.
Clare ends up in the hospital, unconcious. The grim doctor informs March that she "probably won't remember much" and she's pregnant to boot. Dum-dum-duuummmmm!
March opens up the bag (Ward's, remember Ward?) and finds a bunch of bones. He goes to visit Ward in the booby-hatch, and here we see why Chris Sarandon signed on to do the flick. March explains that he knows that Ward isn't Ward, he's Curwen. Ward raised Curwen, who pretended to be Dr. Ashe (remember Dr. Ashe? Ashe! Essential salts! How droll!) and Curwen offed Ward after he grew spine and some qualms about what they were doing.
Now Sarandon gets to shine, in a truly sinister and creepy monlogue. And yes, some Elder Gods are hinted at, and Sarandon is effectively eerie, and my hackles were back at attention (and Bettie was asleep on the couch, therefore useless as a fright-chaser), and then the orderly get's decapitated (remember the orderly?) and March gets tossed about like a second-rate Bruce Cambell in search of a bookshelf (or a third rate Tony Head in search of a bookshelf). Finally, March sprinkles some essential salts on Ward's remains, and Chris Sarandon more or less turns into a big flaming pile of goo. Remember the really vague part about how "if you raise someone and stand to close, you both disintigrate. Or something."? Go up two and a half-paragraphs, we can wait. Done? Back up to speed? Yes. It is weak. But in a late-80s, early 90s kinda way, it works. March trudges off to fill his report, and because of his quick thinking, Clare (and the rest of the world) will never know what took place, but merely believe that Charles Dexter Ward was a raving loonie who killed a bunch of people and is still at large... wait a minute... oh, thanks March. You won't be tucking me in anytime soon. Sheesh.
As cheesy as it is, The Resurrected is pretty mindlessly fun cheese, kinda like a cheap cheddar. Actually, this movie is not unlike the red sauce Bettie made for our pasta. It has good ingredients in a new-take on a traditional recipe, but afterwards I had a little heartburn.
Fun Facts! My favorite character, the chain-smoking associate (Lonnie!) hasn't done much before or since. Lonnie, I'll miss you most of all. Composer Richard Band composed the music for Stuart Gordon's Lovecraft-fest The Re-Animator and is the brother of Charles Band, they share Albert Band as father. Albert wrote and directed I Bury The Living, about which Steven King once wrote: "Once upon a time there was a cemetary care-taker who discovered that if he put black pins into the vacant plots on his cemetary map, the people who owned those plots would die. But when he took out the black pins and put in white pins, do you know what happened? The movie turned into a big pile of shit! Wasn't that funny?" And it was. Charles Band is responsible, as producer, for a good many of the B-horror franchises that I grew up adoring. Ghoulies, Trancers, Subspecies, Puppet Master, and Dollman, and the not-yet franchised-but-should-be The Dead Hate The Living. So O'Bannon picked his composer well.
Methinks I will have to touch on Brother Charles' movies in the future, as well as those of brother-in-spirit Stuart Gordon. But hopefully, Bettie and I will enjoy a few movies that don't give me heartburn before then.