It would be uncharitable to name names, but unlike some of his competitors in the field of low budget cinema, Charles Band, maestro of Full Moon Films, has always understood that delivering actual entertainment is more important than pinning a fantastic, outrageous title to the same old badly-acted, plodding and long 90 minute yawnfest, again and again. Which isn’t to say Full Moon hasn’t released its fair share of dross over the years, but there’s plenty of gold there too.
Like David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs, Doctor Mordrid was the by-product of a project that failed; Band had been intending to make a movie of the now ubiquitous Marvel comics character Doctor Strange, but in the end that didn’t happen, so he made some copyright-infringement-avoiding changes to the script and Doctor Mordrid was born. And in an age where it’s increasingly common for movies – or even episodes of TV shows – to be longer than Citizen Kane but to fail at the basic level of just telling a story from start to finish, Doctor Mordrid is a concise, entertaining 74-minute delight. Is it cheesy? Of course, but it has a refreshing lack of self-importance, and a sense of humour that isn’t just a debased version of James Bond’s already-pretty-threadbare smartass quips.
The story is set up with an admirable lack of labored exposition, the basic premise being this; for centuries, a powerful sorcerer, Anton Mordrid (Jeffrey Combs) has watched over the Earth from his sanctum in New York City, protecting the world from another sorcerer, his childhood rival Kabal (Brian Thompson). At some point in the past, Kabal and his followers were defeated and locked away in an interdimensional prison, but at the opening of the movie, Mordrid is informed by the mysterious deity figure he addresses as “Monitor” that “the Deathshead” – never really explained but seems to just be another name for Kabal – is free and is collecting the alchemical elements needed for the task of freeing his demonic followers in order to enslave the earth. Let the battle commence.
In addition to the two sorcerers, there are a smattering of normal mortals; most important of these is Samantha Hunt (Yvette Nipar) a researcher who works for the police department, specialising in cases with occult or Satanic elements. She works with Detective Tony Gaudio (Jay Acovone) who is, as you’d expect, impatient with that kind of mumbo jumbo. And then there are two dorks that become followers/assistants to and instruments of Kabal; Adrian (Keith Coulouris) and Irene (Julie Michaels). We first meet Hunt intervening in a squabble between two elderly neighbors as Doctor Mordrid – wearing a gold robe – looks on in benign amusement. We learn that although Hunt and Mordrid live in the same building, they have rarely met – or so it seems, because – as we also learn shortly thereafter – Doctor Mordrid has an amulet with which he can make people freeze and lose their short-term memory. Their paths cross again when Hunt attends a lecture that the Doctor is giving on “The Criminal Mind and the Supernatural,” which contains entertaining statements like “If a criminal embraces the fantastic as his motivation for violent behaviour can we afford to ignore that motivation simply because it doesn’t fit into our limited notion of the order of things? I think not.”
Before long, Mordrid find himself on the other side of the law when Kabal kills his acolyte Irene, branding her with an amulet that matches Mordrid’s own. Hunt, who has by now visited Mordrid’s apartment, recognises the sigil burned into the corpse’s forehead and advises Gaudio to speak to the Doctor; he arrests him instead. Along the way, Mordrid and Kabal come face-to-face in their astral forms, leading to priceless exchanges like “Why care you what happens to these vermin!? For ten of their centuries, we’ve been waiting to take our place as gods in a godless world!”
“A sorcerer is not a god!” etc, etc, culminating in Kabal’s charming promise, “Before this is over I will drink your blood and feed on your flesh and it will taste sweet!” To complete his apocalyptic plan, Kabal requires a Philosopher’s Stone – a vessel in which to mix the alchemical elements he has attained – and, handily enough there happens to be one in the “Cosmopolitan Museum.”
It’s at the museum, as the end-of-day crowds disperse, that Kabal sets up his altar and Band stages the not unpredictable but nevertheless inspired showdown. There are spells and campy dialogue, but above all there are duelling, stop-motion animated dinosaur skeletons (“I remember them being much bigger” laments Kabal). Before you know it, it’s all over, Kabal is defeated and Mordrid is recalled to another dimension by Monitor as he has become too conspicuous on Earth.
Doctor Mordrid is not a cinematic masterpiece – its special effects are pleasingly lame, its story is predictable – but its virtues far outweigh its flaws. The pace is fast and like most Charles Band movies, it boasts a classy, old-fashioned, full-bloodedly cinematic score by his brother Richard. The script is at all times knowingly cheesy, but it’s given life and heart by its cast, especially Jeffrey Combs. Combs, forever known as Herbert West from Re-Animator is an excellent movie villain, but he’s even creepier as the affable, otherworldly hero, Doctor Mordrid. He’s one of those actors, like Vincent Price and Tod Slaughter before him, who will give a good performance in any role, but who really excels when he’s allowed to go just a little over the top. He is – again like Price – capable of a genuinely disquieting intensity, but in Doctor Mordrid he uses it in the most unexpected places, not so much the scenes where he faces his old adversary, but those where the movie’s thankfully underdeveloped romantic subplot surfaces, especially the brief coda where he leaves the 4th dimension to visit Hunt – now looking after Mordrid’s apartment – on New Year’s Eve. This may sound like the indulgent praise of a lover of cheesy movies, but Combs is clearly doing it on purpose, and his performance is a large part of what makes the film transcend its formulaic storyline. Nipar, too gives a likeable and well-judged performance and Thompson, who looks, rather unpromisingly, like an ‘80s wrestler action figure, is a revelation of controlled, theatrical villainous camp.
Ultimately, Doctor Mordrid is that increasingly rare thing; a comic book movie that feels like a comic book, in a good way. Tightly plotted, visually inventive, action packed and most of all fun, it passes the viewer’s time without wasting it – and that’s what low budget cinema is all about. Big budget cinema could learn a lot from it.
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