The legend of Thomas Edison's Death Machine comes to the present as the director of antiquities at a museum comes across the machine right at the same time as the museum is being robbed by a group of art thieves who ultimately steal the machine to use it for their own gain, but with all good things comes a price.
So the story starts out with a silent film style footage of Thomas Edison as he's begged to bring a family's dead daughter back to life with a machine he supposedly has that resurrects the dead. At first he denies that the machine even exists but gives in and brings the girl back to life. The scene then cuts and comes back to Edison in his lab as his assistant runs into the room claiming that the resurrected girl apparently killed her entire family. The scene then cuts again and the credits roll.
When the credits finished we're at a bar where museum worker Henry runs into a beautiful young woman named Karen, and after a few drinks and Henry's explanation about his job and his boring work, she convinces him to bring her back to the museum to have a look around. So off they go to the museum to a secret room where the museum keeps the artefacts and antiques that they don't show the public, and after a little kissing and fumbling around they come across the supposed Edison Death Machine from earlier, though they just believed it was an old piece of junk before hand. So as Henry's explaining the legend of the machine he and Karen are held at gunpoint by a group of art thieves lead by a big bald guy named Renee. About the same time we find that Karen works for Renee and conned Henry into letting her in so the thieves could get in to steal some expensive art. Of course Karen convinces them that the machine is worth a lot more than any art so they take off with it to their hide-out, or a seedy hotel room. So after a little talking and history lessons Renee decides he wants to take the machine for a test run, so they go to the grave of an Elvis wannabe, Buddy Gilbert, and at first they try to use the machine just to talk to him but Renee decides to go one step further, turning the machine up a notch and bringing the corpse of Buddy back to life.
 
After getting back to the hide-out Renee comes up with a plan to bring back dead people to get "gifts" of significant worth to sell instead of having to steal them. I know it sounds confusing but stay with me here. So Renee and Henry bring back a group of dead historical figures and it seems to work until word gets around to mobster named Dominic that wants his hand in the little deal with the machine. What's to become of the machine and everyone involved? Will Renee's greed get him in a really hot spot? Watch and find out.
Now let me say that this movie isn't entirely too bad, a little bit of the story is pretty interesting and original but it really starts to get confusing about half way through the film. Toss in some middle aged wanna-be Chuck Norris, a really bad sword fight, the only set of boobs in the movie not being so great, cardboard haunted house style sets, bullet holes in cars being the sticker decals you can get at your local Auto Zone and some not so great acting by the main characters... and it doesn't have much to salvage the film.
Now I will give it credit for trying, it seems that they put a lot of effort into developing the story and I commend them for that, I just think it's a little short on everything else. With a LITTLE big bigger budget and some better actors topped with a less confusing story line this movie would have been pretty good. For the "Its so bad it's good" crowd you should definitely give this movie a shot, but for die hard horror fans this movie is more of a action flick than anything, just caked with zombies.
The Edison Death Machine has potential but I think it should have been better planned out; George Bonilla made a good effort but you figure with most of his cast having done many movies prior with him, they would have learned something along the way, maybe he should talk to Eric Stanze, that guy had constant cast and every time it got better. Check this movie out if you're bored but if your looking for something spectacular this isn't it.
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ALTERNATIVE TITLE:
MOVIE YEAR: 2006
DIRECTOR: George Bonilla
WRITING CREDITS: George Bonilla
GENRE: Horror
CAST: Stacey T. Gillespie, Ashley Arkels, Billy W. Blackwell
COUNTRY: USA
RUNTIME: 106 min
RATING: 5/10
Edison Death Machine, The Website/IMDB Click here
Edison Death Machine, The Trailer
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