A teenager creates a machine to raise the dead for a science experiment. Things go terribly wrong....A teenager creates a machine to raise the dead for a science experiment. Things go terribly wrong....A teenager creates a machine to raise the dead for a science experiment. Things go terribly wrong....
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- TriviaFilmed in Grand Junction, Colorado
- GoofsIn the first scene, the "dead body" moves his head after falling off of the embalming table.
- ConnectionsReferenced in WildCat (2007)
Featured review
Mindless but in its way sort of catchy.
Bush, the English band, not the Presidents, had a song out in '94 called Machinehead. The opening verses consist of the word yeah and breath repeated ad nauseam. Pretty mindless but in its way sort of catchy. The same could be said about the movie Machine Head.
OK it's not Re-animator nor is it Frankenstein, any version, but it is part of that tradition. Oh, and it's funny, not Mel Brookes' Young Frankenstein funny but sort of groan and smile funny. The fact that it is supposed to be funny is a bonus.
Of course, it does raise the great question of the 21st Century, is Frankenstein's monster, and his kin, a zombie, or something else? Doctorate stuff this.
Max Kelp, played with gusto by Josh Walitt, is a high school student who reanimates a corpse with a lawn mower motor as part of a high school science project. He is desperate to win a cash prize. In his way, he is just desperate. This is Walitt's one stab at a Zombie movie; it seems it his one stab at anything!
The macabre tenor of the movie is established at the outset. Kelp's father Herman, played by Jeff Stroud, is an undertaker and Kelp helps out in the mortuary. I suspect that these scenes are also meant to establish the project as a comedy but in reality, it just involves a lot of shouting. Shouting is something of a reoccurring feature of the film.
Many in the cast are on average a decade too old for the high school students they are playing. Even so, or perhaps because of this, the cast, overall own their parts and deliver adequate performances.
Again, the film has the look of being filmed on a mobile phone but director and writer, Michael Patrick-Leonard Murphy, does go to the trouble of establishing and constructing shots as opposed to filming whatever happens to be occurring in front of the lens and hoping for the best.
The special effects aren't special, but they are probably better than the budget might suggest. Oh, and there is surprisingly little gore given genre.
There is the usual unrequited love involving a way too old Sondraya Rowe as Sally Kates (way too old for a high school student), the monster running amok, police involvement and so on that one has come to expect. Rich Cowden throws his all into the monster, Machine Head.
Look, it's OK. Think a good quality high school production of Little Shop of Horrors. It's about that standard.
OK it's not Re-animator nor is it Frankenstein, any version, but it is part of that tradition. Oh, and it's funny, not Mel Brookes' Young Frankenstein funny but sort of groan and smile funny. The fact that it is supposed to be funny is a bonus.
Of course, it does raise the great question of the 21st Century, is Frankenstein's monster, and his kin, a zombie, or something else? Doctorate stuff this.
Max Kelp, played with gusto by Josh Walitt, is a high school student who reanimates a corpse with a lawn mower motor as part of a high school science project. He is desperate to win a cash prize. In his way, he is just desperate. This is Walitt's one stab at a Zombie movie; it seems it his one stab at anything!
The macabre tenor of the movie is established at the outset. Kelp's father Herman, played by Jeff Stroud, is an undertaker and Kelp helps out in the mortuary. I suspect that these scenes are also meant to establish the project as a comedy but in reality, it just involves a lot of shouting. Shouting is something of a reoccurring feature of the film.
Many in the cast are on average a decade too old for the high school students they are playing. Even so, or perhaps because of this, the cast, overall own their parts and deliver adequate performances.
Again, the film has the look of being filmed on a mobile phone but director and writer, Michael Patrick-Leonard Murphy, does go to the trouble of establishing and constructing shots as opposed to filming whatever happens to be occurring in front of the lens and hoping for the best.
The special effects aren't special, but they are probably better than the budget might suggest. Oh, and there is surprisingly little gore given genre.
There is the usual unrequited love involving a way too old Sondraya Rowe as Sally Kates (way too old for a high school student), the monster running amok, police involvement and so on that one has come to expect. Rich Cowden throws his all into the monster, Machine Head.
Look, it's OK. Think a good quality high school production of Little Shop of Horrors. It's about that standard.
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- ansell-72879
- Jun 27, 2021
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- Runtime1 hour 19 minutes
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