One of those sneaky little titles that I damn well knew existed but seemed to always escape somehow is the 1990 cheeseball monster fest Syngenor (pronounced sin-gin-or). In a smart move, it's being promoted by Elite Entertainment, as the "lost David Gale film". Aside from the gleefully goofy Syngenor creatures, David Gale (the infamous talking head from the first Re-Animator) is the real (and only?) reason to seek this flick out.

Hang on folks, cause this one is sure to get messy. Norton Cyberdyne has just created the ultimate killing machine. Prepped to replace human soldiers in battle, The Syngenor is nearly indestructible and doesn't need any water to survive as it "drains its victims spinal cord" for nourishment. Let me back up for a moment if I may. Ethan Valentine is actually the one who created the Syngenor, just before he handed in his resignation to Cyberdyne. In the mean time, our story opens as a Syngenor manages to escape from the basement of Cyberdyne Inc. somehow. It's first victim out of the hole? Yup, you guessed it, Ethan - come one down! Once Ethan is mangled, his niece Susan is left to fend for herself and avenge her Uncle's death. All with the help of a sneaky reporter named Nick.

In the mean time, things aren't going so well at Cyberdyne Inc. either. There's a lot of backstabbing going on, and CEO Carter Brown (Gale) literally goes nuts (thankfully) in order to cover his ass (as well as the Syngenor's). When someone's bugging you, what do you do? Send them to the basement of Cyberdyne Inc. with a task to take care of and pray to dear god that a Syngenor takes care of them instead, that's what! That's right, there's more than one Syngenor in the basement, and they reproduce every 24-hours!

Let's get something out of the way right from the start, Syngenor is not a great flick, hell - it's not even a good flick. If you lay its faults on the table (which I'm about to do) they'd stretch about a mile long. The script seems to have been written without the audience in mind. And as it's stated in the audio commentary "Let's wait and see what happens next...NOTHING!" I couldn't have said it better myself. OK, so the story does move at a pretty brisk pace and there is little to no emotional investment with anything that's happening on screen. But at the same time, the audience is glad that things are moving so quickly - the quicker the better, I always say. Dialogue is pretty inane with pearls of wisdom like "Hey, looks like we got an orgy here" and in response to seeing the Syngenor "It DEFINITELY wasn't human" ya think? (but not necessarily in that order). 95% of the onscreen action doesn't make a lick of sense. Why are the Syngenors locked in a padlocked freezer? And for a company doing such top secret military work, security is a fucking joke, it's almost as if they WANT the Syngenors to get loose (for the sake of the script at least). At one point a high-powered exec refers to the escaped Syngenor as "the cat out of the bag" and makes reference to just letting the rest of them loose as well, sure why not?

As I lay down the law as to why the film itself isn't all that good, I can't help but think that this is exactly why I enjoyed the flick to begin with. I dug the silly dialogue, bad optical effects and ridiculous motivations. But most of all I just loved the man in a rubber suit known as the Syngenor and David Gale's off the wall performance. Watching David Gale going apeshit is easily worth the price of admission and the chuckle inducing Syngenor only sweetens the deal. Then there's these guys who are finally sent out to exterminate the Syngenor, god help us all!

When you think about it in the end though, it all really does makes sense. Turns out that the Syngenor creature is just a recycled mold from a flick 8-years prior called Scared to Death. Producers got the bright idea to reuse the molds (cutting down on their costs) and write a story around them. When you write a story based around plaster molds, what do you get? Why, Syngenor of course! Haven't you been listening?

Elite has done a pretty impressive job here in regards to the audio and video quality, for such a craptacular flick. Presented in an anamorphic widescreen transfer image quality is pretty impressive. Print damage is minimal and colors are fairly sharp and vibrant. There is some slight grain in a few scenes, but nothing too distracting. Audio options include Dolby Surround and a new 5.1 mix. The 5.1 mix is pretty impressive with subtle yet effective use of the surrounds, crisp and clear dialogue with no hiss, distortion or background noise.

Extras include 5 trailers (all for recent Elite titles) including Syngenor, an extensive still gallery, a slew of filmographies, a cast and crew audio commentary and 4 featurettes. The featurettes include; David Gale at the Tokyo Fantastic Film Festival (from 1990), a Publicity Photo Shoot, Doug Beswick's Creature Shop and a David Gale Audition clip. Total running time for the featurettes is about 15-minutes, and there's an individual or play all option. The scenes of Gale in Tokyo are pretty cool, especially those of Gale onstage with one fella dressed as a Syngenor and another dressed as Michael Myers(?) throwing promo items out to a theatre full of screaming fans, now THAT's scary! Highly recommended to lovers of so bad its good style cinema or David Gale completists...you know who you are!

Visit Elite Entertainment online at www.elitedisc.com