DOCTOR MORDRID: MASTER OF THE UNKNOWN (1992)

There are some movies that tend to stick with you as you grow up and then there are those that you forgot about because you probably only saw them once and could never remember the name of the movie or simply because you weren't too impressed by it. For me my childhood into my teenage years I spent a lot of Saturday nights watching videos from the local video store. Now I watched whatever I conned my parents into letting me rent simply based off the cover of the box. The sheer awesomeness of the cover art itself doesn't make the movie that it represents often at times that much better but then again this was the 90's and everything was made for VHS and it meant anything was game.

For me I have fond memories of picking up various titles from the Full Moon Features because nothing sounded better than watching a b-movie from them. Sometimes the film was good other times the film was bad but cheesy and felt right because you knew that some way shape or form you got your money's worth out of that film. Now my first Full Moon film wasn't Puppet Master like so many other people's firstbtaste into their film library. No my first taste was a science fiction film that dealt with giant robots and simply called "Crash and Burn". Now this film helped kickstart my obsession with this company as soon discovered titles like Sorority Babes in Slimeball Bowl-A-Rama, Laserblast, Puppet Master and then a movie that peaked my interest because well I confused it for Doctor Strange.

Doctor Mordrid: Master of the Unknown

Doctor Mordrid (JEFFREY COMBS) is the chosen guardian who can protect the Earth from eternal darkness; Kabal (BRIAN THOMPSON) is his vengeful enemy whose implacable wrath has escalated with time. Kabal has arrived on Earth and is planning to use his infinite powers to unleash a horde of hellish demons to devour and destroy humankind. Bound by hate and a mystical amulet that holds the powers of life and death, the immortal wizards will meet for the last time. Their centuries-old rivalry has matured into the ancient struggle of good versus evil. Now, their battle takes on majestic proportions as Mordrid and Kabal give life to prehistoric skeletons and begin their final conflict… Doctor Mordrid has been remastered in high-definition and looks better than ever!

 Now with a title like that how could you not want to grab this bad boy and run home just to watch it. Because if you guessed it that's what I did and the rest is history. So let's fast forward history now and move to today. I am grateful to the fact that me and my crew have come this far from a simple like pagenon facebook to a full on website where we bring all things horror, sci-fi and well the more which falls into the exploitation categories and with that said this review is more like a trip down memory lane because its one of the few films that sticks out in my memory of films I watched from  Full Moon. Now for the longest time I could only find this film on VHS and in fact I owned it at one point on VHS but I kept wanting to get my hands on it again on DVD. But sadly that never happened and when I heard the news that Full Moon was releasing the film on Blu-Ray I had to get my hands on a copy.

Upon watching this I was extremely excited to watch it again in its new lease on life is truly superb. I mean the restoration fully restores to life the hard work and hand work that went into the films production and stop motion work. Jeffery Combs performance in the movie is spot on because you feel as though he can actually pull off being a wizard of sorts even though you've seen as a doctor bringing the dead back to life, a FBI agent on the hunt for the supernatural and well practically anything. Full Moon is the home of Combs as most of his films rests in their library should be seen, you can even go ahead and purchase Full Moon streaming service to see first hand these films and various other.  The special features for this film  include

-Brand new audio commentary with star Jeffrey Combs and producer/director Charles Band
-Original VideoZone making-of featurette
-Rare William Shatner interview with Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton
-Uncut behind-the-scenes footage from the Full Moon Vault

A little history lesson about this film is that a young Charles Band actually owned the option to direct a Doctor Strange film for Marvel before the whole Marvel/Disney Universe took over the world. But his option ran out just before he could actually start to film the movie and had to change the title of the film to Doctor Mordrid and created the main villain who seemingly had some form or another a tie to Doctor Strange's own villain. The original working title for this film was Doctor Mortalis but was changed to Mordrid shortly after. So if you haven't gotten your copy of this film then you need to do so because the transfer is beautiful and brings out the hard work put into this film by so many people. So grab this and whatever else you can from Full Moon Features and enjoy or even grab a subscription to their streaming network to watch all of their personal library and even Blue Underground's material. So grab that popcorn and trust me you'll thank me later.


         

reviewed by Bucky