Jeffrey
Combs stars as Doctor Mordrid, an immortal sorcerer who lives in an apartment
in New York City and has a pet raven named Edgar Allan. It’s up to him to stop the evil Kabal (Brian
Thompson) from bringing about the apocalypse.
When Mordrid is arrested for one of Kabal’s murders, his mystical amulet
is confiscated by the police, leaving him in a mortal state. Mordrid then relies on a pretty detective
(Yvette Nipar) to help him escape prison and save the world.
Directed
by the father and son team of Albert and Charles Band, Doctor Mordrid plays
like a half-assed low budget version of Doctor Strange. His inner sanctum lair has a cool retro-art deco
look and the production design probably cost more than anything else in the
entire movie. The chintzy effects have a
certain charm about them too, it’s just that the budget was too small to
realize its fantastic vision.
Doctor
Mordrid has ambition, I’ll give it that. Unfortunately, the pacing is erratic at
best. The opening is rather sluggish,
and overall, it feels much longer than the seventy-four-minute running time
suggests. (The second act feels like a
Law and Order episode.) Luckily, the
film really comes alive during the rousing finale. The stop-motion dinosaur skeleton fight is
simply awesome, and it’s a shame there wasn’t more scenes of this caliber
throughout the picture.
It
also benefits from a great performance by Combs, who lends considerable gravitas
to the cheapjack surroundings. He can
earnestly spout mystical gobbledygook like few can and he really sells the
character’s sense of impending doom. Thompson
is a blast too as the badass villain who looks like a lost Mortal Kombat
character. Whenever they are squaring
off against one another, Doctor Mordrid is just what the doctor ordered.
AKA: Rexosaurus.
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