Despite its low budget construction, the Super 8 mad scientist tale reaches moments of genuine inspiration far beyond its means
Lamonte Fritts’ and Michael Cornejo’s Doctor Strain the Body Snatcher (19911) is one of countless examples of regional horror cinema that has been granted a new life in the decades since its first appearance. Benefitting from some surprising production gloss and impressive location work, this Los-Angeles-lensed obscurity has had impressive staying power beyond its initial limited VHS release from Nina Films. All extant copies of the film online are most certainly sourced from one of those original VHS tapes, suggesting an archival function to its spread, despite its later appearance on a Frolic Pictures DVD set. Information on the film is hard to come by, restricted to a brief mention in Slaughterhouse magazine (who are also thanked in the credits) and ads for Super 8 Sound from the early 1990s. These are the tantalizing scraps of information that guide interest toward so many video era mysteries, and a closer look at Doctor Strain itself proves illuminating if no more informative.
Recent college grad Jesse (Carmine Puccio) is interviewed by a police psychologist from his prison cell, and he begins fessing up when his interrogator agrees to talk as if he’s a man of the cloth. Despite his slacking through undergrad, things once looked promising when his biochemist uncle, Dr. Strain (David Winkler), asked him to join in his research. Upon arriving at Strain’s mansion, Jesse learns that the doctor is decomposing, a side effect of his research into cellular rejuvenation on brain and body tissue. It turns out this process has a reverse effect on living tissue, so Strain’s focus has shifted to soul transference to get out of his rotting body. Strain acquires corpses from a nearby cemetery for criminals so he can experiment on lifeless forms without remorse. When he finally manages to extract one corpse’s soul, he sets his sights on Jesse and his healthy body. Strain ends up in the wrong body during the rejuvenation process, allowing Jesse to escape as the doctor fights with one of his reanimated subjects. After another scene with the police shrink, we get a long daylight chase scene, with Strain now made up like the Invisible Man. The movie simply ends when Jesse knocks Strain down and runs off. The last shot features Strain stabbing a light pole in frustration and stumbling away in Jesse’s direction.
Cornejo’s and Fritts’ sole outing is a film completely earnest in its sincerity no matter how flawed it may be. It entirely lacks the self-aware humor or gross-out pandering of other underground titles from the cluttered video scene of the early 1990s. The filmmakers want everything to be taken as it is, providing simple entertainment with modest means and little else, which is why they succeed more often than not. It bears all the hallmarks of so-called inept filmmaking: Jesse always calls his uncle “doctor,” and we later learn he was only roommates with Jesse’s father at one point. Transitions between scenes are spotlight filters and square overlays that are never consistent, and split-screens are illogically employed while Fritts’ theme music plays. The audio is harsh, and music often drowns out dialogue. At several points you can hear someone shouting off-camera at the end of a take and even during scenes in progress. And yet none of these things matter because so much seems to fall into place. Even the tranquil pacing of the brief runtime somehow suits its high-ambition, low-stakes approach to filmmaking.
The grainy Super 8 image displays a careful amount of craft, and everything is well-lit with expressive colors. Beyond this, the mise-en-scène is particularly considered. The laboratory set is especially impressive in its cluttered attention to detail, just as the stark potter’s field of makeshift crosses as grave markers signals a knowing efficiency of design. Of particular note is Strain’s elaborate Victorian mansion: the dimensions of its interiors cast looming shadows and reveal a layered depth of field in the film’s longer shot compositions. This construction shows the synergistic relationship between camera and setting, details all too often overlooked in the creation of regional genre cinema. This all points to the fact that Cornejo’s and Fritts’ film is in a different mold than many no-account regional curiosities, existing instead with aspirations of actual cinematic prowess. In this manner, it recalls Tony Elwood’s Killer (1989) and John Sjogren’s Disturbing the Peace (1988) — like-minded Super 8 works that harness their format to prove the skills of their creators and crew rather than adding a bit of polish to chase video sales.
Only in the underlit basement scenes, the sole light source provided by a handheld lantern, do the film’s low budget origins impact its visual content. Yet even here, Cornejo and Fritts employ an effective, green-tinted light for impact, just as the candle-lit laboratory scenes provide atmospheric touches despite their general illegibility. These economical innovations come to a head with the first soul extraction. Strain works in a candlelit chamber, alone with a corpse, and bathed in the unnaturally warm and flickering light. Elsewhere, the visual stylings are a bit more limited. The repeated spotlight inserts and overlaid graphics during the film’s montages feel hopelessly dated today, but also indicate the careful craft and presentation put into post-production. For every shaky performance decision captured onscreen, there’s a sense of the directors resisting the one-take amateurism that defined the obscure video market of the time. Instead, the filmmakers and their collaborators occasionally come off as consummate professionals hindered only by budget and shaky performances.
Winkler speaks throughout with a slight lisp and delivers his dialogue with little evident conviction. At one point he noticeably stumbles over a line. In effect, these are the exact sort of acinematic touches that reveal the true potential and pleasures of this mode of filmmaking. Alternatively, Winkler’s monotone delivery actually suits Strain’s more rambling philosophical digressions as he manages to sound a convincing authority on his esoteric research. However, when the film does achieve its intended aesthetic goals, it can be surprisingly effective. The best example is Jesse’s encounter with a reanimated corpse as Strain performs his first successful soul extraction. The entire house is heavily shadowed, cast in ominous and oppressive blue lighting, and the dissolving creature’s face emerging from the darkness is one of the film’s more jarring effects shots. Despite this moment of genuinely effective staging, the following scene revealing Jesse on the operating table points to pages of the script either left undeveloped or unable to be filmed, something that recurs with the rushed and perplexing conclusion. What fascinates most about Doctor Strain more than 30 years after its release is the tightrope balance between genuine inspiration and clumsy execution. Reading between the lines, it’s a perfect example of the difficulties and limitations of low budget filmmaking. Seeing these details emerge inadvertently onscreen can be as revealing and inspiring as the logical lapses in the works of Jess Turner.
The film’s narrative inspirations are obvious as it imitates elements of both Frankenstein and Re-Animator, right down to the green serum Strain employs in his research (which is often rendered a muddy or dull brown due to the Super 8 image). However, the dialogue on the nature of the soul and the obligation of science proves far less shaky than the film’s pedigree would have you believe. Further fleshing out the supernatural elements of the story are bizarre deviations where Strain visits the cemetery and recites what seem to be voodoo rituals, as well as his insistence on the role of “God Science” in his research. Strain’s mission to transfer his soul by researching the process on corpses reveals a desperation as he degenerates, and the disregard for the dead criminals does offer an interesting insight into the moral toll of these horrors. Even if they aren’t given space to be fully developed, these point to richer thematic depths behind the film’s inspiration that further work to distinguish it from its influences and countless forgotten contemporaries.
A look at the credits suggests this was a family production, with Gamaliel Fritts listed as assistant director and a total credited cast of nine (with one repeat in that number). Lamonte Fritts also provided the score, and produced, and wrote alongside Cornejo. I don’t have any additional information on Cornejo, but there are traces of Fritts’ involvement in certain corners of the Los Angeles underground horror scene of the mid-1990s. Admittedly, the little I do know about Fritts is a result of his relationship with actor Christopher Michael, who produced four Super 8 features of his own in the 1990s. The credits for Michael’s films often included some sort of shout out to Fritts, and VHS copies of Doctor Strain make several appearances, notably being rented by the titular character in Michael’s 1996 masterpiece, Limp Fangs: The Adventures of Count Malt Liquela. Fritts also deserves mention as one of an exceedingly few number of African American directors working in the underground horror field at the dawn of the 1990s — his company is essentially limited to acquaintance Michael, Chester N. Turner, Jess Turner, and James Adam Tucker (like Michael, a recognizable face due to his numerous acting appearances in mainstream productions).
At a trim 53 minutes of actual film, we aren’t given enough time with the characters to ever empathize with Strain throughout his journey, nor even with Jesse, our ostensible protagonist. The film proceeds in a straight line, only occasionally cutting away to Jesse’s interrogation in his cell, offering no subplots and hardly any additional characters. Jesse often remarks on the isolation of Strain’s mansion and laboratory, and the film itself seems to revel in that anti-social element. It largely plays as a two man show that sporadically features reanimated corpses. In fact, the only true exterior setting beyond the graveyard is an abandoned street at the conclusion that further removes the film from any recognizable social experience.
In many ways, the film’s mere competence and brevity could work against it. The underground video market was filled with titles that just fit the bare minimum of effort and technical know-how and left little impression; however, beyond its incredible box art, Doctor Strain the Body Snatcher has stuck around, its rarity only partly accountable for this fact. There are occasional lapses into the ridiculous, but no matter how shaky things get with the filmmakers’ technique, there’s nothing outright bad about the film as it stands. For some, that could read like the definition of mediocrity, but there’s a beating heart to the film that imbues it with a genuine personality that merits investigation.
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- Its credits and copyright reveal a 1989 production date. ↩︎
