Housesitter: The Night They Saved Siegfried’s Brain was directed/co-written by Robin Nuyen in the late 1980s but has sat unfinished without color and soundtrack…until now. Boasting some of the best impalings I have seen in a film, Nuyen’s Housesitter… is both humorous, bloody, and flat out weird. It is a horror-comedy full of fun characters and good clean kills, and though this movie was shot a few decades ago, I still found its comedy relevant and the movie to be very well put together even for today’s standards.

A university is grounds for a number of scientific experiments — one is being done by an intelligent student named Andy (Richard Gasparian), who indulges in his Elvis obsession while also working on a rat- to-rat brain transfer discovery. Meanwhile, Dr. Ambrose “Doc” Crosby (David Karsten) is doing similar but far more sinister experiments, ones which call for human brains to save his own failing brain. Though Andy once considered Doc to be a mentor, he must try to stop Doc from murdering his friends and beloved girlfriend, who Doc and his colleagues attempt to pick off one by one to complete an experiment that calls for 13 human brains.

At times Housesitter… looks straight out of the 1980s, at other times, the film looks like lost footage from Young Frankenstein (1974). The mad scientist scenes that seemed ripped from the frames of 1950s sci-fi slock films were great — black and white and laughable all over. The rest of the film was in color though the quality was definitely not modern, this datedness added to the film’s charm. The film’s surrealist horror felt Lynchian in style, with the anachronistic aesthetic, wholesomeness minced with dread, slightly eccentric characters, and an overall uneasy atmosphere with strange and unexpected happenings — this movie feels like a cult classic in the making.

Housesitter… has some very clever kills, ones that display director Robin Nuyen’s dark sense of humor and love of slasher films, with nearly every kill earning a cheeky one-liner for emphasis. Protagonist Richard Gasparian has all of the on-screen presence of Bruce Campbell, giving an over-the-top but endearing performance channeling Elvis, similar to Campbell’s ramped antics from Evil Dead 2 (1987) to the present. The magnitude of David Karsten’s performance as Doc cannot be missed as well, who perfectly performed the stock mad scientist with a conspicuously German accent trope, which was really needed to sell this character. The supporting cast, also, was very most enjoyable, delivering the lot of the laughs and supplying the bodies for Robin Nuyen’s innovative kills.

It is not often that the slasher is a scientist, and an elderly one at that, and such madness and teen-fodder killings can be found in Robin Nuyen’s Housesitter: The Night They Saved Siegfried’s Brain. It is the kind of movie that feels as if it would have been released right alongside the Troma Entertainment films, such as The Toxic Avenger (1985) or Dr. Hackenstein (1988). This wildly entertaining throwback film, that should capture the hearts of 1950s, B-movie, and classic science fiction enthusiasts is now available as of October 2nd on Blu-ray and streaming.

6 out of 10