What up, my lovely fuckfaces, it’s a brand new review here at B-Movie Enema!

So, check it out… A few months back, I covered 1980’s Scared to Death. In that movie, not only did a lady dress up like Sarah Jane Smith from the Classic Doctor Who serial The Hand of Fear, but it also featured an underground creature living beneath Los Angeles, running amok, and killin’ people left and right. The creature in that movie was genetically created by a science dude. However, the doctor who created the creature apparently died before he could kill the adult creature. The name of that creature is also the namesake for this week’s movie we’re going to review – Syngenor.

By the way, I think Syngenor was a mashup of the words SYNthetesized GENetic ORganism. But that’s not necessarily important at the moment. What is important is how this 1990 sequel was conceived and created. The original film’s production team is not involved. That said, Scared to Death director William Malone had a chance to make this movie, but he opted out to make the 1985 sci-fi creature flick appropriately titled Creature. It was producer Jack F. Murphy who led the charge of making the sequel after seeing the original and being mighty impressed by the monster. However, as is the case with a lot of movie sequels of the era, the original’s scarcity when it came to being seen by audiences led to Murphy keeping the monster, keeping the concept of a genetically created creature, but separating the film’s plot from the original to make it its own thing.

I guess you could say it’s somewhat similar to the Xtro movies, except those movies kept the original director and still tossed out any semblance of an actual narrative trilogy.

So with Malone out, even though he did offer some suggestions for scoring the film, that left the door open for writer Brent V. Friendman and director George Elanjian Jr. to step in to lead the project with Murphy. One thing of note, Murphy, while only about 23 years old, founded Criterion Pictures Corp. Ltd. in Canada. That’s not the Criterion you might be thinking of. No, this was a distribution company in Canada, and, at one point, they held 16mm distribution rights in Canada for studios like Columbia Pictures and Warner Bros.

As for the other two guys, Elanjian was coming off directing volumes of Playboy Video Magazine. Other than those three volumes in the early 80s, Elanjian was almost exclusively a TV director. Syngenor would be his only feature. Friedman, on the other hand, has a fairly good career. He wrote 1993’s Ticks and 1997’s Mortal Kombat: Annihilation as well as episodes of The Crow: Stairway to Heaven, Dark Skies, Star Trek: Enterprise (as well as holding a Consulting Producer credit), The Twilight Zone (the 2000s iteration of the series), and episodes of both Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars: Rebels. He also worked on some pretty popular video games like Halo 4 and the Call of Duty series.

So, how does Syngenor hold up to the low-budget-but-cool-monster-flick Scared to Death? Well, there’s only one way to find out. Let’s check it out.

To start, I like that the first movie started off by having the Syngenor creature walking through the sewers under the city while the credits played. In this movie, the credits play over aerial shots of the city. That’s what sequels are good for, my friends! Really mixing things up. But the movie starts with a couple of annoying drunk guys partying with some bitches. These girls might be hookers. They might just be drunk girls from a bar. Anyway, these guys have money and power. You know they are rich, powerful assholes because they parked in a handicapped spot in front of this building.

One of the guys calls a lady on the phone, and I gotta admit, I thought this guy was calling his wife and making an excuse for being out late, but he’s actually calling a board member named Paula to ask her if what he’s about to do is really what she wants to do. Apparently, this is all one of those set-up jobs where you go out to a bar, find a couple of chicks in shiny, 1990s dresses, and take them to a basement where they will be fed to Syngenors. I believe the maneuver is called a Wichita Misdirect.

So the guy who took the others into the building and into the basement is named Stan. He’s the one pulling off the ol’ Wichita Misdirect. The girls are named Candy and Brandy. The goofy guy in the picture above is Tim. The girls look into a chamber where they see the Syngenor. The girls are grossed out by the creature, but Stan’s like, “Oh, that’s just our synthetic creature,” like it’s no big whoop. Stan and Tim want to know if it’s time to get the sex to happen to them. The blonde just rips off the top of her dress, exposing her bazonkers, as if she was just waiting for the signal for it to be go time, while Stan rushes her friend off into another direction.

Right away, the Syngenor busts out of his chamber. I’m guessing this is because the doors to his chamber are kind of like those weak-ass doors in the meat section at your local grocery store. You know the ones I’m talking about, the thin metal ones with little windows? Yeah, those. Anyway, the girl with Stan hears Tim and the blonde screaming and getting tossed around by the Syngenor, and wants to go help her friend. But… I don’t think that’s going to do anything because she’s getting a glowy lightsaber dick in her throat.

Stan runs away after pushing the woman with him into a stack of empty boxes. He drives away quickly, presumably for the Syngenor to throat fuck her too. These girls, Tim, and Stan aren’t the only ones who know what a Syngenor is, though. We go to the Valentine home. In the garage is Ethan Valentine played by Lewis Arquette, the father of all the Arquettes guys my age grew up watching in movies. He’s messing about with some sort of invention when he hears something outside his garage, prompting him to ask, “Syngenor?”

By the time his niece, Susan, gets to him, he’s messed up pretty bad. He tells her to spray the reproductive pod with water… I think? Whatever he told her to do, she did not do it. Instead, she went inside to call the cops, only for her to be attacked by the Syngenor too. She eventually uses a lighter and an aerosol can to torch the motherfucker, and it may have melted in a bright burst of light?

Susan turns out to be adamant about going to the police for help because she went to the police station and waited in the office of Lt. Leo Rosselli. He tells her that he just got back from her place, and it was a mess. It was almost like a Syngenor went in there and ripped her uncle up with his sharp claws, and possibly sharp teeth got in on the action, and I dunno, he might have gotten throat fucked too. He’s dead. The patron of the Arquette family had about two and a half lines of dialogue and was killed. The man was in Tango and Cash for crissakes.

But I will say the cop and Susan both agree that something inhuman killed Ethan. The police captain is going to write this off as a chemical accident. They both basically agree that someone sent that thing after him. But the captain isn’t interested in doing any further investigation. Susan is going to have to do this on her own, which makes sense because this movie is like 99 minutes, and we can’t have it entirely agreed upon that a monster killed her uncle in the first 15 because how the fuck are we going to fill out the rest of the runtime?

What’s kind of funny is that there is ANOTHER uncle/niece relationship introduced in these early parts of the movie. We meet Nick, a reporter who wants to do a story on Norton Cyberdyne CEO Carter Brown. He arrives at the building and talks up the young woman at the front desk. She introduces herself as Bonnie Brown, Carter’s not-yet-eighteen-year-old niece. How do I know she’s not 18? Because Nick asked. But I know she is at least 18 because she just finished a tour of duty on the U.S.S. Enterprise as a yeoman, and I’m pretty sure you have to be at least that old to serve on a starship. Oh yeah… it’s Melanie Shatner!

Nick discovers through both Bonnie and an entering Stan Armbrewster that there were murders the night before. Tim was the public relations guy. He was killed in the Syngenor attack. Ethan Valentine, according to Bonnie, was employed by Norton Cyberdyne up until about a week ago when he quit. It would seem that these people were eliminated for their work with the Syngenor creature.

Also, for the second time in this movie, someone parked in the handicap parking spot. This time, it was Nick, and he got his ass towed for it. Is this a recurring joke? I… I kinda remember people being pissy about handicap parking back then when I was a kid. People were mad about seatbelt laws and how they infringed on their rights or whatever. I think people thought that way about not being allowed to park in handicap spots because, I guess fuck those lame ass people who aren’t able to walk good and shit.

I’m also positive the same people who got pissy about seatbelt laws got pissy about COVID vaccines 30 years later.

Whatever… We finally meet Carter Brown, the eeeeeevil CEO of Norton Cyberdyne. I am not kidding. He’s not only very obviously evil, he’s played by David Gale. Gale’s big claim to fame for most was playing Dr. Carl Hill in the Re-Animator movies. He was also a villain in The Brain. The dude made a career out of being a bad guy.

What is Norton Cyberdyne up to? Well, they created Syngenor to be sold to the military to fight wars. There won’t be any need anymore to use the youth of America to fight and die on foreign soil. These Syngenors can fight and kill with the best of any killer creature on the planet. They can also reproduce every 24 hours. Brown just up and admits that a Syngenor killed their marketing executive, Tim. He… He just tells the fucking board of directors this. Oh, and it also killed two hookers and the Syngenor creator, Ethan Valentine.

But don’t worry… Brown has already taken care of a cover-up with the authorities to make sure any attempt Ethan’s niece makes to have a further investigation into some sort of monster man going around killing uncles and shit is met with skepticism. I do kinda wonder how that conversation went with the police. “So… hey, listen. We have this biologically created synthetic monster man that we REALLY want to sell to the military for war and shit. We had an oopsie last night, and the thing got out. It killed our PR man, a couple of hookers, one of whom did have a decent rack, but that’s not important right now, and it got out into a suburban neighborhood and killed the shit out of some old man. Now, you see, the old man’s niece did not get killed, and she will probably ask you guys to look into a monster man killing her uncle. Can you do us a solid and not take any claims she makes seriously? Cool. Thanks. Byeeee!”

At the same time, I am appreciative that this movie takes place in a universe where crazy monster military men are just commonplace and the local cops are just aware this thing is out there killing people like it’s no big D.

Susan might not get any help from the cops, but she does end up making an unlikely ally. When she comes home, she hears someone or something rummaging around Ethan’s garage. She goes to check it out to find Nick. He’s looking to talk to Ethan about the “Dark Skies” project. It would seem as though writer Brent V. Friedman would like that “Dark Skies” term and use it for the title of a show he’d create later on.

Back at Norton Cyberdyne, there is a bit of a power struggle taking place. The stuff going on at Norton Cyberdyne reminds me a little bit of Robocop. Paula is working with Stan to try to get control of the company away from old man Brown. She wants to release all of the information about the Syngenor creatures and the Dark Skies project and create a PR nightmare for Brown. She tells Stan to go get all the files from the basement on the work that Valentine started, and she’ll call up that reporter who was poking around earlier and get it all out in the open.

Also, this movie reminds me of Re-Animator because not only is David Gale in this, but he’s also injecting himself with glowing green goo. Don’t worry about finding out what that goo is. It’s never brought up again. He gets progressively crazier, but that goo is never brought up again. Is it Goblin Serum that Norman Osborn injects to be crazy as fuck and the Green Goblin? Is it the Re-Animator shit? Is it Syngenor goop? Don’t know and the movie does not want me to care either.

So Paula tells Stan to go to the basement and get the files and stuff, right? Well, he’s a gigantic pussy. He refuses to go back to the basement where the Syngenor lives and kills hookers and shit. So he asks Bonnie to go down there instead. She gets some files and stuff, but then accidentally lets out not one but TWO Syngenors. While trying to escape, she stumbles into a fuse box and is electrocuted to death. I kind of think working at Norton Cyberdyne is more dangerous than being in the military. Maybe they should create a bunch of suit-wearing Syngenors to work in the office.

As part of the big plan, Armbrewster agrees to an interview with Nick. Nick has Susan tag along, posing as his photographer. Nick asks about Ethan Valentine. Stan asks for this to be off the record and explains that Ethan was in charge of the Syngenor project codenamed Dark Skies. Basically, Ethan turned into a loose end that needed to be dealt with, and it was Carter Brown who had him killed. But there’s some doublecrossing going on too. Paula is trying to seduce Carter as part of her power play. They have Stan’s office bugged and listen in on him telling this reporter that Carter had Ethan Valentine killed.

Meanwhile, you gotta love a movie that has a whole room dedicated to all the nefarious shit an organization is up to for one of our protagonists to stumble upon. Susan goes into a room that has all the Norton Cyberdyne shit on display. The stuff ranges from the mundane (like an aircraft carrier) to the funny (a missile silo built into a suburban home) to the “why the fuck do you have this on display?” (a wax statue of a Syngenor). Like, seriously, if I’m a company making angry, militant, murderous monster guys, I’m not sure I would have one on display in my hall of cool shit my company builds. There is also a video explaining how Syngenors work, and they have one in a jeep waving at the camera. It’s pretty funny stuff.

Carter confronts Nick and Susan after she’s caught by security. He gives Nick a piece of paper with his story written for him, stating that Stan Armbrewster killed Ethan Valentine. He makes no real threats in this scene. He just says Nick is going to publish the version of the story he wants. I mean, David Gale is acting up a fucking storm and chewing all the scenery. He’s dancing around the office as he tells our protagonists what he wants them to do. He’s also growing more and more paranoid as he injects himself with green goop. He takes the film from Susan, preventing them from getting pictures of the Syngenor out. Good thing she has another roll of film, so she and Nick can sneak around more before they leave.

Carter tells the executives that he’s going to have security go down into the sub-basement labs and eliminate all the Syngenors. So some guys dressed up like they were a team of bad guys from the old cartoon M.A.S.K. gear up as Nick and Susan eavesdrop on them. Realizing they need to get down into the lab too, or they will not have the evidence they need to prove that these Syngenors are a real thing, Nick and Susan dress up as security guys as well. They take pictures as a group of Syngenors attack the security team and lay waste to them.

Nick and Susan narrowly escape. When the security team leader goes to tell Carter that the situation is fucked because there are at least 20 unkillable Syngenors just running around all over the place, Carter’s all like, “Yeah, I decided I want to keep those monster guys.” Instead, Carter wants the security team captain guy to go kill Nick and Susan. Again, Nick and Susan narrowly escape and go to the police.

Meanwhile, David Gale has gone completely batshit insane in this movie as Carter Brown. He’s killed one of his own front desk security dudes (someone who has had a surprisingly large role in this movie, and I’ll talk about that more later). He then decides to call another meeting of the Executive Leadership Team to tell them that he’s decided to keep the Syngenors. He thinks they aren’t the problem in the company. It’s one of the executives.

Norton Cyberdyne was shown earlier to create a mega cannon thing that is basically a laser gun. He tells the other executives that he’s got it nice and loaded up and that he’s going to use it to root out the real problem at the company. He points it at Stan and fires it. It basically atomizes Stan while also painting the walls with his blood. All the while, Gale is grinning and cackling like a madman. I do like that he is constantly ordering these meetings, and they are progressively getting crazier and crazier. What’s more, the meetings turn into the epitome of “this could have just been an email.”

Although, to be fair, I would like to be in this meeting.

Things continue to get crazier and crazier in this movie. Susan and Nick get into bed together after revealing they are terrified of what they’ve uncovered at Norton Cyberdyne. That’s pretty standard stuff, but David Gale continues to just go off the fucking rails here. I should start referring to him as David off the Rails instead. He calls the cops to say he’s got all the evidence for who killed Stan Armbrewster. He is tightening every goddamn muscle in his neck as he delivers these lines. What cracks me up, though, is that I don’t have any reason to believe the police know anything about Stan’s murder. So they are just getting this knowledge, which makes Carter Brown look REALLY suspect. After he says he wants justice for Stan’s murder, he does this thing that he’s done a couple of times. He whimpers and pouts that he wants the police captain to hold him. Whenever he gets really upset and stressed, he tells whoever is near him to hold him.

This David Gale performance is one for the ages, I’ll tell you what.

The sex scene even ends up with some weirdness. Before getting into bed, Nick and Susan were talking about being scared. But then, in bed, he tells her to close her eyes and relax while on top of her. She then tells him she’s scared. Is… Is this supposed to mean that she’s a virgin? You normally don’t get on top of someone and tell them to close their eyes and relax, and they don’t normally respond by saying they’re scared if they’ve done the deed before. These are things that are said when one of the sexual partners is a virgin. Susan is not a child. She’s played by an adult. She acts like an adult. When we first met her, she told her date that she had to be home by 1am because that’s what her uncle told her. Why would a full-grown adult woman have a curfew? I think she is meant to be, like 18 or 19 years old, but is played like a 25-year-old (or older). But then this dialogue in the sex scene makes me think she might be a virgin and, ostensibly, younger.

She then has this dream where she’s walking to her uncle’s garage with only the sheet wrapped around her. She sees her uncle in the lab, and I started getting really worried she was going to drop the sheet. But then her uncle turns into a Syngenor, which leads her to remember what he said about destroying the pod. Nick says he knows what she’s talking about because he saw the pod in the garage when he was sneaking around. The only problem is they waited too long, and it’s hatched. The newly hatched Syngenor attacks. She tries using a giant drill to kill it, but then they run away because the Syngenor now has the drill and is chasing them – like an episode of Scooby Doo.

They nearly get away with the help of Lt. Leo, who tells them that Carter Brown named them as the murderers of Stan Armbrewster, but he agrees to let them into the car so they can escape the rampaging Syngenor. But it attacks and kills Lt. Leo as Nick commandeers Leo’s car and drives away without helping.

Also… Shouldn’t the cops really be curious about all these damn deaths that are connected to Norton Cyberdyne? Eh, fuck it. These two clearly are the murdering type.

When Susan and Nick get back to Norton Cyberdyne, Carter is on the intercom spouting off crazy dialogue. He’s also tied up all the other executives. Only a couple of them are still alive, namely Paula and another guy named David. I like that we have seen more executives doing work here at this business than the grunts. As someone who has a lame corpo job, I’d rank the reality of Syngenors slightly above executives doing as much work as they seem to do at this company.

Carter releases the Syngenors. I guess he’s so bonkers he’s come all the way around to nihilistic. David tells Nick and Susan that the laser gun in the showroom can vaporize Syngenors. On the way to get that cannon, a Syngenor pops out and kills David. They do get to the laser cannon. I like that Nick and Susan are dubious about whether the cannon will work. But… wouldn’t Armbrewster’s blood and guts and brain and stuff all over the wall of that very same room be evidence that it would work? Or… or did Carter Brown have some poor janitor clean it all up, like, right away?

The good news is that the cannon does work. Paula wipes out a shit ton of those Syngenors in one blast. She says there is still one more, and is more than willing to kill it with Nick stuck in the crossfire. Luckily, the Syngenor attacks Paula, and the laser cannon blows both it and her up.

Nick wants to take down Carter Brown. Susan wonders why, because before Nick and the Syngenors arrived to be blown up, Paula admitted that she was the mastermind who led to her uncle’s murder. Nick doesn’t care. Carter is fucking bonkers and dangerous. He’s got a bunch of Syngenors he could make and release if they don’t get rid of him.

But, uh oh Spaghettios… It looks like Syngenors can heal. So this one that was blown up with Paula heals with chunks of Paula incorporated into it. She’s there to chew bubblegum and eat Carter Brown, and she’s all out of bubblegum. The Paula Syngenor crushes Carter’s head. It’s at this point that Susan suddenly remembers that water, of all things, utterly destroys Syngenors. At least that’s what her uncle told her to do to get rid of the pod. She and Nick turn on the fire sprinklers, and it melts the Paula Syngenor. As they leave, the Syngenor that Susan saw in the display case earlier suddenly comes to life and looks at the camera to let us know there will definitely not be a third one of these.

So I have some complicated thoughts about Syngenor. Generally, it’s a better-made movie compared to Scared to Death. The production value is on display for Syngenor. Part of that is definitely due to this not exactly having as low a budget as Scared to Death. On the other hand, this is still very schlocky. Scared to Death is only schlocky by nature. It’s a monster movie made on that aforementioned lower budget. It’s also a monster movie that deals with it prowling the streets and mostly targeting women, etc.

But Syngenor is on a whole other level, brother. This is a movie that is almost unabashedly schlock. Everyone knows what they are doing. Sure, our protagonists are kind of playing this straight. However, all the villains, and in particular David Gale (especially him), Riva Spier (Paula), and Charles Lucia (Stan Armbrewster) are hamming this way the hell up. Good lord, David Gale alone is chewing so much scenery, I’m surprised there’s any kind of a set left to shoot on.

I also like that they add a whole lot to a character who typically wouldn’t get as much screen time as he did. There’s the lower-level security guy who watches the closed-circuit cameras at the security desk. This is not one of the militaristic guys who is sent in to destroy the Syngenors. This is just a guy who talks sassy and would typically only show up for a scene or two, but he more than doubles that. You don’t normally get such a down-ticket guy like that get that much attention in the plot, but he does. That’s a good indicator of what we’re dealing with here. Characters are just allowed to be weird and more present than you’d expect.

There’s nothing to this plot that really makes any logical or realistic sense. Norton Cyberdyne is just an evil corporation that makes monster soldiers and laser guns. They can call the cops up and just tell them not to investigate something. They have so much power and so much cartoonish evil going on in their company that this just cannot be anything but, well, a cartoon. It makes for a really fun watch, and I don’t think you can ask for anything more. It is certainly much better paced, and you do get to see the Syngenor monster in much better lighting, and you get to see a lot of them. There are certainly worse ways to spend a little more than an hour and a half.

Next time, let’s go back to the early 80s for a slasher that is mostly known for the gore effects, which is considered the master of the craft’s best work by the man himself. It’s the 1981 slasher that spans 35 years, The Prowler. Until next week, I think I’m gonna go check out one of David Gale’s office parties. Those look like a lot of fun to me if I can only avoid the rampaging Syngenors and the scenery-chomping teeth of Gale himself.