Released: September 1992
Directors: Albert and Charles Band
Rated R
Run Time: 74 Minutes
Distributor: Full Moon Entertainment
Cast:
Jeffrey Combs: Dr. Anton Mordrid
Yvette Nipar: Samantha Hunt
Brian Thompson: Kabal
Jay Acovone: Tony Gaudio
Keith Coulouris: Adrian
There was a time during the 80s and 90s that a ton of sci-fi movies and horror movies were made. Most of them were not particularly mainstream. Yeah, we had the likes of Nightmare on Elm Street, The Thing, and Friday The 13th. But what about the films that went under the radar? What about the ones that most people never knew existed? A good chunk of these films were produced and distributed by fairly independent film-makers. Full Moon Entertainment was one of the companies that gave us the likes of the Puppet Master films, Trancers, Subspecies. Now, a sizable amount of these movies were produced and directed by a man named Charles Band. He actually formed the Full Moon company, so he’s had his hands in most of every movie put out by that company. Were any of these movies any good? Not really, but they had their own kind of cheesy charm about them. One thing to consider when watching a Full Moon production, is that you have to consider that these movies are very low-budget. Some of them may have gotten a theatrical release, they actually find life on home video as cult classics. These films are targeted towards a particular……brand of audience. A lot of these movies I grew up on as a kid, but haven’t really found them for years afterwards. It wasn’t until a few years back that these movies have started reappearing on DVD. One of the films that remember most fondly was Doctor Mordrid: Master of the Unknown.
The film opens as we see a man clad in what appears to be blue pajamas, Mordrid talking to a giant pair of eyeballs known as “The Monitor.” Mordrid is a sorcerer from another dimension who has been stationed on Earth to await the arrival of something called the Death’s Head. We then cut to a road somewhere in Brazil where a security guard driving a truck has been killed by his partner who then puts the contents of the truck on the ground. A whole truck for three boxes. There must be something valuable, because there is a person driving up behind them with a suitcase full of bottles filled with unknown substances. After pouring out the contents of one of his bottles, the three boxes suddenly vanish. Turns out the guy with the mysterious briefcase is Kabal, aka The Death’s Head that Mordrid has been waiting for. Kabal is attempting to free his fellow demons from their prison in the Fourth Dimension to unleash Hell on Earth. Really? Why is it that these villains always think it’s a great idea to unleash the forces of Hell on to our world. How many different ways can you do it?! Apparently, the right chemical mixture with The Philosopher’s Stone will do just that. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m being a little silly describing the story. The story is absolutely silly. This is early 90s B-movie-fare, plain-and-simple, so the cheese-factor is right through the roof. You have to go into a movie like this expecting it to be cheesy.
Let’s start with the silly factor, which is actually, the whole damn movie. But, let’s get more specific. The mysterious Monitor that contacts Mordrid is nothing more than a giant pair of floating eyeballs. Doesn’t that just strike you as a little creepy. Especially since they stay in the same expression throughout the movie. Don’t get me started on that monotone voice. That outfit that Mordrid is wearing is unbelievably ridiculous. As I said above, it appears the character is wearing blue pajamas with a blanket for a cape. It certainly doesn’t help that Jeffrey Combs is playing the character straight, which is an interesting choice, considering the ludicrousness of the character. You would think that a being from another dimension would have a little bit more personality. The other inter-dimensional being, Kabal, definitely has more personality, but he wants to murder the human race. A dead-pan super-magician and a psychotic alchemist: We can’t win. You wanna see something funny? The introduction of Kabal, reminds me of the pirate captain from Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Cyborg. Don’t believe me? Take a look:
Apparently, villains really like dark sunglasses.
Now, if Jeffrey Combs is playing Mordrid a little too seriously, Brian Thompson goes the other direction. Thompson is appropriately over-the-top and is clearly having a great time. Brian Thompson is just a fun actor to watch. He’s great at playing villains. Yvette Nipar plays the plucky, yet intelligent love interest of Mordrid. The character knows her stuff and yet is laughed at by her colleagues at the local police station. The acting is very appropriate for a movie of this sort. Now let’s discuss the visual effects. This is clearly a low-budget film, even during the early 90s. Visual effects had reached a new level when Terminator 2 was released the previous year, and Jurassic Park would revolutionize them again in 1993. So, where does that put Doctor Mordrid? WAY low on the totem pole. The visual effects were clearly dated already when the film was released, and yet they were strangely charming. Obvious magic effects are obvious and all that, but some of the stop-motion animation was pretty interesting. Some of the creature and set designs were pretty unique. The demons that you get to see towards the end of the movie look like animated trolls, but the real star of the show was the animated skeletal dinosaurs during the film’s climactic scene. The visual effects were done by David Allen. While most of the movies that he worked on were of the low-budget variety, he did have a hand in movies like Willow, Young Sherlock Holmes, Ghostbusters II, and Honey, I Shrunk The Kids. The man is clearly talented, considering he cut his teeth on The Gumby Show during the 60s. Fantastic stuff. The whole floating castle/prison in the Fourth Dimension was pretty interesting to look at. It has a very medieval look to it and yet it is guarded by a man with a laser-gun. Here’s the castle I’m talking about:
Now, you can’t have a cheesy movie without cheesy music. The film’s score by Richard Band strikes me as a bit of a rip-off of Danny Elfman’s theme for Batman. It’s epic and yet it’s something you can’t take seriously. At 74 minutes long, Doctor Mordrid moves at a pretty brisk pace. I grew up watching this movie, so finally finding it on DVD was a relief. Does it hold up after 20 years? Not particularly, but then again it didn’t really hold up that well to begin with. So, it’s not really as awesome as I remember it being, but it still has it’s bizarre charms that keep me hooked on it. Here’s an interesting tidbit, Doctor Mordrid initially started out as a project to turn Marvel’s Dr. Strange comic into a live-action feature, but somewhere along the way, Charles Band lost the rights to that character, but he didn’t scrap the entire project. Instead, he re-wrote and re-tooled the whole thing into what would eventually become Doctor Mordrid. In the end, I’m actually grateful that he didn’t scrap it, because it is a visually interesting film, if not very good. Seeing Jeffrey Combs playing a more sedate and level-headed character is surprising, given his filmography. So, yeah, it is a very silly movie. But the same could be said for almost every movie put out by Charles Band and Full Moon Productions. Like I said before, you have to go into a movie like this expecting a lot of cheese, and I think you’ll be very surprised at how entertaining it really is. All the stuff that I talked about earlier can be taken as a negative or a positive, but I really enjoyed the hell out of this one. Personally, I recommend it. 9/10.