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From the depths of shot-on-video obscurity surfaces REANIMATOR ACADEMY, a 1992 feature from the late, unlamented Cinema Home Video, who spawned oodles of crappy horror tapes in the early nineties, each with the shelf life of a Hostess Pudding Pie. This one, directed by Judith Priest (in all likelihood a pseudonym for executive producer David DeCoteau), attempts to recreate Stuart Gordon's classic on a hundred-dollar budget, filtering it through a sub-PORKY's college/party flick sensibility. The resulting film, unsurprisingly, is a certified disaster.

Jeffrey Combs-lookalike Edgar Allan Lovecraft (puh-leeze!) is a member of the Delta Epsilon Delta frat house (that's DED, by the way, as in Ded Heads, the nickname for all the frat brothers). Instead of explaining how a labcoat-wearing nerd got into the party-heartiest frat on campus--an initiation that had to've made collegiate history, no doubt--Edgar develops a reanimation serum that he uses on the decapitated head of a car accident victim, transforming it into a barely-articulate dummy named Fred the Head. A stand-up comedian before he died--get it? A stand-up comic who can't stand up! Ha!--Fred's a huge hit at the frat parties, knockin' 'em dead with his barrage of sub-vaudevillian one-liners. (Now, fraternities are not especially well known for their refined senses of humor, but I doubt even they would enjoy Fred's cornball jokes.) But the fun comes to an abrupt halt when a pair of cartoonish gangsters recruit Edgar against his will to revive the corpse of their favorite working girl, Hot Lips.