Beyond Re-Animator is a 2003 horror film directed by Brian Yuzna and starring Jeffrey Combs, Jason Barry, Elsa Pataky, Simón Andreu and Santiago Segura. It is the third and final installment in the Re-Animator film series. An international co-production of Spain and the United States, Beyond Re-Animator premiered on the Sci-Fi Channel, though it was produced independently and acquired by the channel only as a distributor; this showing was cut to a TV-PG rating. The film received a limited theatrical run in the U.S. and was assigned an R rating, and a slightly longer unrated cut was released on home media in some countries. Plot For the past 13 years, Dr. Herbert West has been serving a prison sentence due to a murder at the hands of one of his zombies. With what scant supplies he has on hand in the prison medical center, Dr. West has been capable of performing only extremely basic experiments on rats. However, his lack of supplies does not prevent him from uncovering a key element in his re-animation process. Dr. West has discovered "NPE" (Nano-Plasmic Energy), an energy that can be extracted from the brain of a living organism through an electrocution-like process, to be stored in a capsule resembling a small light bulb. The capsule can then be connected to a corpse and used in conjunction with West's previously developed reagent to restore the former dead to a lifelike state. The NPE prevents the degeneration seen in previous instances, where the reanimated are nothing more than mindless zombies. Used together with the re-agent, reanimated corpses regain their skills, memories, and motor functions and nearly fully resemble normal humans. When a young doctor named Howard Phillips comes to work at the prison, West is assigned to assist the new doctor. Due to Phillips' interest in Dr. West's research, West is able to attain the supplies and tools needed to bring his experiments to the next level. It is revealed that Phillips is the younger brother of the teenage girl who was killed by West's zombie (he is shown watching West being taken away by the cops) and came to the prison for the explicit purpose of working with him. Despite his interest, Phillips still maintains an ethical reluctance to allow West's research to full completion. In the meantime, journalist Laura Olney, covering a story for her newspaper at the prison, meets and begins an