Movie Review: Re-Animator

 I love the hell out of this movie. A lot of awfully cool stuff got committed to film back in the 1980s, especially in the horror genre and this is one of the best in my opinion. It is technically a zombie movie, although the zombies are not necessarily the creepiest things in the movie. It is also technically an H.P. Lovecraft story, but the movie deviates substantially from the source material.

Those two things aside, you are in for a treat with this one. Jeffrey Combs and David Gale compete for creepiest character as rival evil doctors, but Combs trumps everybody including the walking dead that his character creates. His performance is a thing of beauty, walking that fine line between terrifyingly convincing and so over-the-top that the cheese could endanger everyone with lactose intolerance in a five-mile radius. The man is truly inspired as the crazy guy who not only refuses to acknowledge that he's crazy, but is so charismatic that he drags the sane characters down with him and takes the audience along for the ride. Even though Combs' Dr. Herbert West is nominally the villain (at least for the first half of the film), you very quickly find yourself rooting for him to succeed in raising a corpse from the dead and then you don't know whether to be more repulsed with him or yourself. He never quite crosses the line into full Hollywood mad scientist territory, but his performance is infinitely more disturbing with its utterly calm self-assurance that his quest for re-animation of the dead is noble and justified.

David Gale plays a rather different evil doctor, one of West's med school instructors Dr. Hill. After initial clashes of will with West, Hill eventually reveals himself as the true villain of the piece. After all, West's research may be disgusting and demented, but at least his heart's in the right place. Hill wants to steal West's research, molestthe dean's daughter, and (apparently) take over the world or some similar villainly ambition. He winds up as a walking corpse himself, carrying around his own severed head in a truly remarkable set of effects shots from the era before everything could be done with CGI.

Graphic violence, graphic sex, gratuitous nudity, weepy star-crossed lovers... "Re-Animator" has it all. The makeup effects for the zombies are excellent and a review of the special features shows that the creators put a great deal of thought into such details. Even the glowing green fluid (courtesy of an old-fashioned toxic glowstick) that West injects into the dead bodies has an "Oh, neato!" quality to it. As I said, the plot veers pretty far from Lovecraft's original but this is one of those adaptations that I can forgive for such a sin. After all, they don't pretend past a few details of the characters and the overall premise that this is even meant to be Lovecraft's story, and the hybrid of genuine scares and black comedy is so appealing that I can't dislike it. Whether Lovecraft himself would have enjoyed it is another matter, but from all accounts he was a humorless, unpleasant little man so I really don't think we need to worry too much about that.

In summary, I give this five Cthulhu tentacles or whatever passes for a high recommendation on this kind of movie. Rent it, buy it, watch it, enjoy it.