[yasr_overall_rating]
A dedicated student at a medical college and his girlfriend become involved in bizarre experiments centering around the re-animation of dead tissue when an odd new student arrives on campus.
I know a few people that like “Re-Animator” a lot. I have now seen the film four or five times in my life and it has grown on me greatly. I thought the plot felt very long because like so many exploitation films, its structure was not strong enough to retain a viewer’s interest. After all, it’s no secret that “Re-Animator” has a slightly uninteresting storyline. Allegedly, H.P. Lovecraft hated writing the stories on which the film was based but did so because he made $5 for each installment. The trick, however, to “Re-Animator,” is to focus less on each twist and turn of the plot and more on what the film is doing tonally. Perhaps with “The Evil Dead,” the only earlier film that attempts such a hurdle, “Re-Animator” tackles the often shady genre of gore based horror/exploitation and creates something that doesn’t squarely fit into that classification. That type of boldness in low-budget filmmaking is worth embracing and it’s ultimately how we, the audience, end up with truly memorable movies.
The film was directed by Stuart Gordon, who is a fascinating director and one of many unsung brilliant working film directors. In a lot of ways, Gordon is the perfect director for “Re-Animator.” Gordon has a talent for reinterpreting classic stories and has done so several times in his career including Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” in 1991. Gordon is also known for strange films and unusual special effects including the “Warp” trilogy. Lastly, Gordon has jumped around to reinvigorating several less than reputable genres including (and this comes as a shock to many) writing the screenplay for “Honey I Shrunk the Kids,” which mixed the mad scientist genre with kids movies and made a runaway money maker for Disney Studios in the late 1980s.
Again, much like “The Evil Dead,” the way that “Re-Animator” jumpstarts a plot about mad scientists and severed heads by taking a deadpan approach to the plot but I’d be hard-pressed to succinctly describe the plot of the movie. Many horror films are long acquainted with the film’s poster, which made an appearance down the detours I would take through the horror aisle at Video World while my parents were not looking. In the poster, a mad scientist is surrounded by vials and a severed head. The tagline on the poster reads “Herbert West has a good head on his shoulders…and another one on his desk.” The film’s mad scientist, Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) is hell-bent on creating living beings from the parts of dead individuals. There is a lot of gore and some nudity in the film, but there’s not much of anything particularly consequential. Instead of using a classic tripartite structure or anything that would please a traditional filmgoer, however, the film offers us a splendid assortment of shocking and nightmarish sights. While many of the actors in the film are forgettable, special attention must be paid to Barbara Crampton. Not only is Crampton unspeakably pretty, she’s a very talented actress who bounces well between the serious moments in the film and the surreal ones.
I’m not sure the film’s director ever found the best way to tell the plot either because there are two versions of the film: a 95 minute R-rated and an 86 minute unrated cut, both of which are available by Arrow. In addition to great remastering, “Re-Animator” is loaded with some remarkable documentaries, which to a fan of horror film history like myself is almost as enticing as the movie. Needless to say, if you haven’t seen the film yet, or you plan on seeing it, this recent Arrow compilation is the way to watch it.
Now available on a 2-Disc Limited Edition Blu-ray from Arrow Video
