Year: 1985
Runtime: 86 min
Director: Stuart Gordon
Starring: Jeffrey Combs, Bruce Abbott, Barbara Crampton, David Gale, Robert Sampson
Here’s a question for you, do people still do dinner and a movie? I mean, as a regular thing? I do, but then I’ll take any excuse to make someone else cook for me and I love watching movies. I guess the real reason I ask is that you should probably skip the meal portion of your evening if you intend to watch Re-Animator.
Man, that was a lousy segue, wasn’t it?
This is a gory film, is what I’m getting at. Like, don’t bother with an MPAA rating gory.
Directed by Stuart Gordon, his first proper theatrical movie, Re-Animator is ostensibly a horror film based on one of the lesser stories by H.P. Lovecraft. I say ostensibly because honestly this is not a scary movie. It is, however, one hell of a weird trip.
The original story was a serialized tale by Lovecraft following the life of Herbert West, a doctor Frankenstein analogue who has a bad habit of bringing the dead back to life. We all know how well that tends to work itself out, don’t we?
If you’ve seen movies like The Evil Dead (particularly the second film) then you will have a good idea of what to expect from this little gem. Buckets upon buckets of gore. I don’t mean like a little bloody nose gore, I mean like full on disembowelments every ten minutes gore.
The movie is set in the fictional Miskatonic University and follows two medical students played by Bruce Abbott and Jeffrey Combs. One, Abbott’s Dan Cain, just wants to be a good student and help people, the other, Herbert West as portrayed by Combs, is a narcissistic man with a penchant for lying and, apparently, murder. Typical college student behavior.
There have been a great number of vampire movies, an ungodly amount of zombie movies, and plenty of ghost stories, but Frankenstein parables are a bit more scarce. Sure, you could make the argument that zombie movies qualify, but they don’t. Replace the zombies with rabid badgers or especially unruly toddlers and the gist of the films would be the same. A proper Frankenstein clone must be as much about the man who creates life as it is about the twisted forms of unlife he creates.
Re-Animator is nearly perfect in this regard. Herbert West is the ideal modern Frankenstein. He is arrogant and the very definition of weaselly. Like a tiny emperor, he tries to dictate the events around him. A Napoleon of gore. Combs is fascinating to watch, because his character is the exact opposite of charming, but it is impossible not to transfixed by him. He oozes his way into Dan Cain’s life without any particular grace, but with a creeping inevitability, like perhaps a fungus or mold, quickly becoming a permanent part of his impressionable roomie’s existence.
Combs finds the sweet spot in-between camp and serious and I was left wanting more of this maniacal medical miscreant, even as he was buried among the blood and guts.
And the blood and guts flow rather quickly in this snappy flick. It begins with a reanimated cat, but once West sways the easily manipulated Cain to his side, he moves onto bigger test subjects. But when he gains the attention of one of his professors, Dr. Carl Hill, who is played with old money aplomb by David Gale, West makes the decision to take things to the next level with a much fresher body.
Or parts of a body, as the case may be.
After decapitating Hill, West reanimates the severed head because, uh, science, and the dismembered form of the good professor becomes somewhat irate over this turn of events, orchestrating an undead uprising in the university morgue.
This is a wild movie. Gordon keeps the film moving at a fast pace and it shares the same kind of manic attitude that movies like Evil Dead cultivated. Though we have lots of gore, it’s all filmed with severed tongue in bleeding cheek. I found myself laughing at what would have been a disturbing bit of ultra-violence in any serious film, with a highlight being West’s interaction with his former teacher’s disembodied head. They refuse to stop hurling insults at each other, even while one rests in dish filled with his own blood.
Speaking of blood, and I know I’ve mentioned the gory nature of this movie at least a half-dozen times, but this movie has some inventive splatter effects. It’s not on the same level as Carpenter’s The Thing, but it has plenty of creative juice, so to speak. The effect of Dr. Hill’s headless body stumbling around while his head directs the action is good and the final scene, what I would describe as an orgy of zombies, blood, and guts, is pretty damn epic.
With the capable direction from Stuart Gordon, the impressive acting from Combs, and a solid 80s soundtrack from Richard Band, we get a splendid genre film with only one hurdle it stumbles over, and that hurdle is in its treatment of female characters. Uh, or should I say character, since there’s only one?
Barbara Crampton, before she became a Charles Band regular, plays Cain’s girlfriend, and she does a good job, but the script relegates her to victim almost from the word “Action!”. She spends a lot of time screaming and being put through hell, including her father becoming one of West’s early, incidental subjects, but she never reacts with her own agency. Everything she does is dictated by the circumstances or by her boyfriend.
And then there’s that scene.
Anyone who has seen the movie will know what scene I mean. If you watched the original Evil Dead, a similar scene occurred in that movie, in which one of the female characters was sexually assaulted by an evil tree. In this case, it is the lecherous Dr. Hill who has a very uncomfortable obsession with Crampton’s young Megan, and even when he is undeceased his zombie lust is uncontrollable, leading to his kidnapping of the poor girl and the most disgusting use of the phrase “giving head” that I could imagine.
It’s really an unnecessary scene and is profoundly icky. A different sort of icky from the rest of the movie, I should clarify.
Sure, it will be a minor point for some that watch the movie, but it was the low point for me, and it’s a shame because otherwise this was a prime slice of outlandish horror-comedy. Even with this hiccup, the movie is great fun for any gorehound, or even someone like me, who doesn’t typically enjoy the average slasher movie and prefers my splatter flicks a little more creative.
It’s enough to make me want to look into a few classes at good old Miskatonic University!
