Return from Death (Frankenstein 2000)

Return from Death (Frankenstein 2000) (1991)

Ritorno dalla morte

When a woman is beaten into a coma and saved from being raped by her handyman (Donald O'Brien), the local security force does a cover-up to save the town's reputation and frames the saviour. After he hangs himself, the woman's strange comatose psi-powers revive him from the dead to exact revenge.

Date of release
1991-01-01
TMDB
6.8 / 10 (20)
Runtime
1h 33m
Genres
Horror
Director
Joe D'Amato

Casting

Interesting facts

Return from Death is a 1992 Italian horror film directed by Aristide Massaccesi, and starring Donald O'Brien, Cinzia Monreale and Maurice Poli. In it, a crippled former boxer gets framed for beating a psychic woman into a coma, but the two form a telepathic bond during a neurological experiment, and her mind turns him into an unstoppable creature who wreaks vengeance on the real culprits. It was the final horror film directed by Massaccesi, also known as Joe d'Amato.

Production

The film marked Aristide Massaccesi's comeback as a horror director after several years away from the genre (excluding uncredited work on a few embattled shoots). This was in part due to his willingness to allocate his Filmirage company's best budgets to other members of his stable. At an early stage, the project was attached to Alberto Lonardi, usually an assistant director, perhaps for bureaucratic reasons.

Ultimately, it did not proceed and Massaccesi decided to transform the film into a modern re-imagining of Frankenstein. He asked fellow director Lucio Fulci, for whom he was producing Door to Silence, to introduce him to his writer at the time, Antonio Tentori. Tentori started the rewrites in early 1991, teaming up with Massaccesi's partner Donatella Donati while retaining sizeable components of Soavi's draft.

As the project marked Massaccesi's return to horror, he cast Cinzia Monreale, who had starred in his well regarded Buio Omega, in the female lead. Although Italian-based Donald O'Brien had previously worked for him as well, the Irish actor was hired through a twist of fate, after a domestic accident left him with a limp that reminded the director of the creature's gait in the classic Universal films.

Photography started in the Rome agglomeration in March 1992, using the former Dino De Laurentiis studios, then known as Kinepolis. Early into production, D'Amato announced that he intended to shoot the film's exteriors in Vienna, Austria, as he wanted the investigation scenes to have a different feel than the mafia movies that often used the Italian capital as a backdrop.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

Recommended