Directors: Eugene Frenke and James P. Hogan
Writers: L. Wolfe Gilbert, John F. Goodrich, Arthur T. Horman, and Mary McCarthy, from a story by Eugene Frenke and James P. Hogan
From: Sci-Fi Invasion
Watch: archive.org
A scientist intent on developing a formula to bring the dead back to life gradually loses sight of the important things in his own life.
Opening title cards inform us that this movie is based on True Events! The feature you’re about to see includes the Real Dr. Cornish who may have Conquered Death Itself! Of course it has Dr. Cornish present in the first few moments of the movie and then detours into its inane melodrama.
To be fair, the movie’s not blowing smoke when it says it’s based on the work of the real-life Robert Cornish. Wikipedia has more, but the basics are that Cornish was working on a way to resuscitate the recently dead and managed it successfully with two dogs. His process was using a “teeter board” to keep blood moving through the body and injecting it with a mixture of adrenaline and anti-coagulants. If that sounds familiar, it’s pretty similar to what John Travolta does to Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction after she OD’s.
Anyway, the point is Cornish wasn’t an obsessive nut pursuing some mad whim. He was a respected scientist who’d managed to demonstrate some of his theories. Narratively, this presents a problem. While Cornish’s story, 80-some years later, is interesting on its own, “scientist works hard, makes marginal progress on project” isn’t a compelling story for 1935. What audiences wanted, or what producers assumed audiences wanted, was a story of an obsessive nut pursuing some mad whim and the terrible consequences thereof.
Enter Dr. Kendrick in Life Returns.
We open with a trio of med students: Kendrick, Stone, and the actual Dr. Cornish. They’re pursuing their goal of bringing back the dead and working through all the social events of college. This is communicated through a montage of college sports and dances intercut with the trio in the lab. I won’t mention it beyond this point, but this movie loves its montages. Everything in the first half is communicated through montage and it’s exhausting.
They graduate and Kendrick tells them they have an offer from Arnold Research. It’s a non-profit that develops goods for sale (so not a non-profit). Stone and Cornish don’t want to go because Arnold will want to monetize their work and take all the credit. Kendrick doesn’t care about the money or credit, he just wants to get the research done and Arnold’s equipment will make it easier. The trio split up and Kendrick goes to Arnold.
Time passes, Kendrick gets married, has a son, and has his project canceled by Arnold because it’s not producing any marketable results. He presents his findings to the scientific community and is laughed out of the room. Then he’s working on his experiments on his own in a barn while his precocious son Insufferable Child is there. Insufferable Child, of course, now becomes the focus of the film.
Kendrick’s wife dies, off-screen, of something, and that’s the final blow to Kendrick’s sanity. He becomes a shell of a man and the court rules, since he doesn’t have a job, that Insufferable Child will have to be sent to juvie. IC runs away with his dog and is taken in by a group of kids with their own clubhouse. IC’s dog gets taken by the pound, gets gassed, and IC confronts Kendrick about being a bad dad. Kendrick swallows his pride, gets the dog’s corpse, calls Cornish, and Cornish brings the dog back to life. IC’s happy, Kendrick is validated, and he gives all credit to Cornish. THE END
It’s pretty stupid. I mean, it’s a movie about a guy trying to develop a resurrection serum that gives very little time to developing a resurrection serum. Once IC is introduced it’s his movie and, golly, isn’t is sad that a boy like that don’t got no mom? Gee mister, how could you say anything negative about a movie like that?
Easily.
The movie’s hilariously bad in terms of its own self-importance and in its constant digressions. We spend a good minute on several screens of text telling us about the amazing work of Dr. Cornish and then the movie runs as quickly as it can away from Cornish and anything to do with his work. Imagine watching the opening crawl to Star Wars and then cutting to a high school in suburban Newark. That’s what’s going on here. On top of that, the movie loses its nerve halfway through following Kendrick and telling the tale of a genius driven to destitution and turns instead into a low-rent version of Our Gang.
One great moment is the conclusion where the dog’s being brought back to life. IC runs into operating room and is held back by his dad so as not to interfere in the experiment. The looks on IC's face in both the wide and close-up shots are hilarious for how wrong they are. He looks like the guy from Un Chien Andalou rooting for the androgyne to get hit by a car. His face isn’t communicating hope that his dog will come back to life, it’s hope that he’s going to see some real blood. His demonic countenance is glorious.
One interesting note is that Insufferable Child is played by George P. Breakston who went on to become a director. One of the films he did was The Manster, a movie I featured here almost exactly a year ago. That movie isn’t great either, but I’d watch it a dozen times over rather than return to this.
Life Returns is in the public domain and I’ve added an MPEG-2 version to archive.org here. While I don’t think there’s a lot of fun to be had editing the film, except for the final sequence with the dog, it is highly riffable. Melodrama lends itself to easy mockery and this film is at once so self-serious and so saccharine that you can’t help but laugh. On that level, check it out. For watching on its own, stay away.
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