Re-Animator
Year:
1985
Directed by:
Stuart Gordon
Rated:
R
Country:
United States
Runtime:
1 hr. 35 min.
Production Company:
Empire Pictures
Written by:
H.P. Lovecraft (source story)
Dennis Paoli
William J. Norris
Stuart Gordon
Starring:
Jeffrey Combs
Bruce Abbott
Barbara Crampton
David Gale
Similar Films:
Bride of Re-Animator
Return of the Living Dead
Weird Science
A wild display of reanimation and gore.
How much needs to be said about Re-Animator that isn’t revealed in its tagline, “Herbert West has a good head on his shoulders … and another one on his desk”? You already have a sense of not only what the movie is about but also of its unabashed humor, so it should come as no surprise that the film (based on a H.P. Lovecraft tale) is a deeply deranged sci-fi/horror picture, as clever as it is demented. It might catch some viewers off-guard that the film’s director, Stuart Gordon, and his star, Jeffery Combs, handle this melding of the comedic and the gruesomely visceral with such seriousness, but that’s all part of the film’s peculiar charm. Re-Animator is at its most commendable when it is being gravely serious about being wickedly garish.
We first meet the overly confident Herbert West (Combs) in Switzerland, where he has managed to reanimate the dead body of his mentor, albeit for only a few moments until the newly invigorated corpse’s eyes bulge out of their sockets and explode. West, whose experiment is seen as a colossal failure, relocates to the United States to further his research at Miskatonic University. He rents a room from Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott), a student and local morgue worker, to conduct his experiments, and he eventually enlists Cain as his pseudo-assistant. One of West’s first experiments involves reanimating the dead cat of Megan (Barbara Crampton), Cain’s secret beau and daughter of the dean. Although the experiment ultimately proves to be a failure, the valiant West decides to sneak into the morgue to test his serum on human corpses. Opposing West is Dr. Hill (David Gale), a professor at the University, who attempts to discover the secret of the reanimation serum and steal it for himself.
Gordon’s wisest choice as a director is to focus a majority of his film on Combs’ performance as West because it is so inescapably engaging. Combs is essentially performing as a mad scientist, a role normally characterized by fleeting outbursts of madness and cackling laughter (preferably with lightning crashes on the soundtrack). He reduces the caricature of the role to a few facial cues, the most prominent of which is a wide-eyed stare. See the scene where West details what his serum does while attempting to recruit Cain’s assistance, and watch as Combs’ eyes, filling with excitement and madness, expand beyond the boundaries of his horn-rimmed glasses. However, during that same scene Combs speaks with a calming contention that is frightening; when he uses the phrase, “we can defeat death,” he does so not as someone who thinks he can but as someone who knows he can. Combs provides West with a daring and confident personality through his speech; his eyes, however, offer a true window to his soul, one that must be filled with cackling laughter and lightning crashes.
Other performances are much less noteworthy, the fault of which is shared between the actors and the screenwriter, Dennis Paoli. There is a noticeable lack of motivation in the characters of Dan Cain and Megan Halsey (played, respectively, by Bruce Abbott and Barbara Crampton) as the film’s intended heroes, but Paoli likewise gives the two actors little to be motivated about. Abbott expresses little vigor and is inordinately dull, but the character has nothing interesting to say and is essentially there as a means for West to get into the morgue to set up a later scene there. How else could one explain the motivation behind Cain agreeing to be West’s assistant since there is never one implied? As for Crampton, her role is to wait around to either be frightened or captured, so her acting consists primarily of shrieks, screams, and worried looks. Beyond that, her dialogue, much like Abbott’s, is incredibly inconsequential, and her character exists so that someone in the movie can scream at all the horrors that are taking place (since none of the other characters seem too bothered). But if the character was really as terrified as she is written to be, why wouldn’t she attempt to leave town, distance herself from Cain, and call the police? It’s obvious from Paoli’s script that Re-Animator was intended to be West’s show.
Further shortcomings are present, but some are cleverly integrated, like the film’s special effects limitations. Gordon clearly has no qualms about the fact that, in the scene where West battles a recently re-animated cat, the animal in question is under no circumstances a real feline. He knows that strapping a stuffed cat to the back of one of his actors will not fool the audience, so he has Combs overact the attack to the point of absurdity, knocking over and destroying lab equipment and hitting an overhead lamp so hard it sways back and forth like a pendulum. As the scene’s primary light source, the swaying lamp works two-fold: It casts the dank basement setting in a jarring light, creating a mild fright for the audience while also effectively amplifying the scene’s intended humor. Gordon takes what could have been an unintentionally funny scene and makes it intentionally so, thus managing to uphold his film’s naturally creepy allure.
