It had been over twenty years since I last saw Re-animator, so I was looking forward to re-watching this classic from the last great decade of horror, the 1980s. I was 17 when I first saw this low budget gore-fest and remember thinking it was the dog’s dangly bits at the time. Would it impress me as much the second time around? Well, the answer is ‘very nearly’. The film is an excellent example of ‘grand guignol’ splatter and there is plenty to admire in it’s sheer verve and gloriously twisted approach, but it isn’t quite the flawless masterpiece that I had thought it was.
In director Stuart Gordon’s adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘Herbert West: Re-animator’, Jeffrey Combs plays eccentric genius Dr. Herbert West, who is able to bring the dead back to life by injecting them with his incredible discovery, a luminous green ‘re-agent’. Unfortunately, results thus far have been less than successful, with subjects flying into an uncontrollable rage on reanimation. West suspects that a combination of correct dosage and freshness of subject is the key to success.
After the suspicious death of his professor in Switzerland, West relocates to the Miskatonic Medical School where he enlists the help of fellow student Dan Cain to help continue his research. Dan stupidly reveals the nature of his experiments to the dean of the school (who also happens to be the father of Dan’s tasty girlfriend Meg), resulting in his student loan being rescinded and West’s expulsion from the school. In a last ditch effort to perfect the reanimation procedure, the two men sneak into the school’s morgue for one last attempt at bringing the dead to life. Things don’t go as planned and the dean is accidentally killed when he interrupts proceedings; West promptly reanimates the dean, but he comes back as a drooling mess.
When the university’s top professor, Carl Hill (who secretly lusts after Meg), sees the dean, he makes it his mission to discover what has really happened. He discovers that the dean is technically dead and, realising that West is on the brink of a major medical breakthrough, he tries to claim the discovery for himself. But West isn’t about to give up his ‘re-agent’ without a fight…
Where ‘Re-animator’ succeeds is in its gleeful no-holds barred approach. The story is extremely preposterous and Gordon and his cast do not attempt to lend proceedings any gravity, opting instead for an over-the-top, anything-goes, tongue-in-cheek style. From the opening pre-credits scene, in which a characters eyes bulge and burst from his skull, viewers know that this is going to be all about the gore. And what a lot of gore we get!! The FX team deliver a huge range of splattery effects which certainly impress, given the limited budget of the movie. Most are extremely effective, so I am able to forgive the odd less successful moment. Highlights include a brain removal, a juicy finger biting, a bone saw through the torso, a decapitation with a spade, a crushed head thrown at a wall, an exploding stomach with writhing intestines, and the infamous scene in which a stark naked Meg receives a bit of (severed) head!
So what, in my opinion, stops ‘Re-animator’ from being perfect? The answer is in the editing.
The ‘original cut’ of the film ran for over two hours. It was severely edited to improve the pacing. The ‘unrated’ theatrical version kept all of its gore but missed moments which I felt were vital to help clarify certain plot points; the result is a ‘choppy’ narrative which leaves unanswered questions. The ‘R’ version had much of the gore removed and some of the trimmed scenes reinstated. Neither version is perfect.
Funnily enough, the Psychoesque score, which seems to be a problem for many viewers, never bothered me. Yes, it was a blatant case of plagiarism (very closely resembling Bernard Hermann’s classic theme), but it worked well.
I highly recommend ‘Re-animator’ to all fans of gory horror, but I do suggest that they watch the ‘unrated’ version and then the deleted scenes afterwards to fully appreciate what might have been.
