Re-Animator
Trilogy
This
is a trilogy of films very loosely based on the story, Herbert West, Reanimator
by H.P. Lovecraft. All three films star Jeffery Combs as the title character
and all three were either directed or produced by Brian Yuzna.
Re-Animator
1985
Director- Stuart Gordon
Cast- Jeffrey Combs, Bruce Abbott, Barbara Crampton,
David Gale, Robert Sampson, Gerry Black
Herbert
West (Combs) is a genius studying the mysteries of life and death. He has
developed a serum that brings the dead back to life. Unfortunately, the
recently revived are violent and insane. Well, can’t make an omelet without
breaking some eggs, right? He has had to flee medical school in Europe after
bringing someone back with disastrous results, and he ends up at good old
Miskatonic University, home of the Fightin’ Shoggoths (not really).
He meets
up with another up and coming student, Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott). Dan is pretty
straight laced and is dating the Dean’s daughter, Megan (Barbara Crampton).
Dean Halsey (Sampson) seems to be an OK guy but another member of the faculty,
Dr. Hill (David Gale) is a real creep. Hill is a plagiarist, ripping off other
people’s ideas, and has a perverse obsession with Megan. Herbert and Hill soon
butt heads and Hill makes it his mission to ruin Herbert (while also finding a
way into Meg’s pants).
Meanwhile,
Herbert goes on about his business, conducting his experiments in reanimation.
Dan finds out about it when Herbert reanimates Dan’s dead cat (which Herbert
may or may not have killed in the first place). Dan and Meg are initially
appropriately horrified, but like Dr. Pretorius seducing Frankenstein to the
dark side, Herbert soon lures Dan in to helping him.
Meanwhile,
Dr. Hill has brought Dean Halsey under his spell (more about that later) and
Halsey has his eye on Herbert and Dan. He interferes with an experiment, things
happen, and Halsey ends up dead. No worries, right, because Herbert can just
bring him back to life, which he does, but now Halsey is a gibbering idiot.
Meg is
freaked out and accurately blames Dan and Herbert. Dr. Hill, meanwhile, has discovered Herbert’s
secret and tries to steal it (he is a plagiarist after all). Well, I guess Hell
hath no fury like a grad student scorned because Herbert retaliates by chopping
off Hill’s head and then bringing him back to life. Herbert didn’t count on
Hill’s extraordinary mental prowess, however. Not only does Hill’s decapitated
head retain all of his intelligence, he can also remotely control his headless body.
The rest of the movie gets more insane from there
including the most memorable scene of the film where Meg is the unwilling
recipient of oral sex from Hill’s decapitated head as it’s held by Hill’s
headless body (you read that right). The finale of the film is a Grand Guignol
of gory violence as Hill reanimates all the bodies in a morgue and sics them on
Herbert and Dan.
Stuart
Gordon had a long and illustrates career so I hate to say that his best movie
was his first because that makes the rest of his career seem anticlimactic,
which it wasn’t. Actually, I think his best film was Dagon, but his best loved
film, his most famous film, and the one that he will always be remembered for
is Re-animator. The film just works on
so many levels. It has a good blend of
humor and gore, excellent casting, and really nice effects. It’s hard to classify
this as a B movie because the production values seem so good.
The real
jewel in the crown of this film though was the casting of Jeffery Combs as
Herbert West. The casting director deserves a gold star for it. This was early
in Comb’s career and this was his first leading role, so it was a gutsy move to
put so much of the movie in his hands, but it paid off. The film made Combs a
genre star and ensured a long career that is still going. I simply can’t
imagine any other actor playing that part so well.
This
movie was a staple of the video store era. Any video store worth its salt was
going to have a copy of this film on its horror shelf. Depending on where you
lived (and rented videos) you may have seen one of two versions. The most
common version was “unrated” and had all of the gore that made this film
legendary. However, some of you may have been unlucky enough to see the “R”
version. This version had some of the gore edited out. HOWEVER, it did have
extra scenes that the unrated version didn’t have. Several of the scenes show
that Dr. Hill had Svengali like mental powers that he uses to dominate the
wills of the other characters in the film. Another scene shows Herbert shooting
up some of his reagent to keep his mind fresh so that he doesn’t have to sleep.
These added scenes, while kind of slow and boring, do help the movie make more
sense. It helps us understand why Hill retained his personality after
re-animation and why he was so easily able to control other re-animated bodies.
Luckily there is a newer version out now that contains both the gore and the
extra scenes (coming in at 105 minutes as opposed to the original 86 minutes).
Re-Animator
is a film that belongs in every horror fan’s library. If you were making a list
of the best 80s horror, or best horror-comedy’s, or best gore, this movie would
make it somewhere into your top 10. Highly recommended.
Bride
of the Re-Animator
1990
Director- Brian Yuzna
Cast- Jeffrey Combs, Bruce Abbott, Kathleen Kinmont, Fabiana
Udenio, David Gale, Mel Stewart
This
movie picks up with Herbert and Dan working as battlefield medics in some
banana republic. All the dead soldiers give them lots of raw material. More importantly,
using tissue from a local species of iguana, Herbert has found something that
he thinks will improve his reagent.
Herbert
and Dan make their way back to the states and get jobs as doctors in a hospital.
Dan is ready to put all the bringing back the dead nonsense behind him, but
Herbert is keeping his eyes on the prize. Dan has become a little fixated with
one of his patients. Gloria (Kathleen Kinmont) is dying slowly from an illness
and Dan experiences some doctor-patient counter transference. He sees in her
his old girlfriend, Meg, whose life he couldn’t save at the end of the last
film.
Herbert’s
new re-animation techniques enable him to combine parts and reanimate them in
crazy new forms. This allows for some disturbing combinations like a dog with a
human hand, an eyeball that walks around with fingers and other abominations.
Herbert piques Dan’s interest when he reveals that he saved Meg’s heart after
she died. They concoct a plan to build a Bride of Frankenstein like creature
from different women using Meg’s heart as the centerpiece. Dan gets a two for
one special when Gloria dies and he decides to use her head to top off the
body.
Dr. Hill
from the first film returns to harass the pair and has his mobility restored
courtesy of some bat wings sewn on to his decapitated head. He is really just a
peripheral villain though. The real antagonist is Herbert and Dan’s hubris that
we all know is going to get them in the end.
Brian
Yuzna (who produced the first film) directed this one, but there isn’t a big
change in the tone. Yuzna and Stuart Gordon worked together a lot over the years.
Though Yuzna’s style was very different than Gordon’s, for whatever reason,
this film feels very much like the first. That may be because so much of the
original cast came back. Bruce Abbott and Jeffery Combs made a great team,
playing off of each other well. That combination would be missed in the third
film. Bride of the Re-animator isn’t as classic and “must see” as the first,
but fans of the first film will definitely want this in their collection.
Beyond
Re-Animator
2003
Director- Brian Yuzna
Cast- Jeffrey Combs, Jason Barry, Elsa Pataky, Enrique
Arce, Santiago Segura, Raquel Gribler, Nico Baixas, Simón Andreu
The film
starts with a young kid seeing his sister murdered by one of Herbert’s
reanimated corpses and then watching Herbert being hauled off in the back of a
patrol car. Fast forward 13 years and that kid is now a doctor. Dr. Howard
Phillips (yeah that’s his name) is starting work as the medical director in a prison
that has an unsavory reputation. It is run by a cruel warden (Simón Andreu) who
delights in abusing his prisoners. Elsa Pataky (who you will recognize from her
numerous appearances in the Fast and Furious franchise) plays Laura, a young
reporter trying to do a story about the prison.
It’s no coincidence
that Howard is the new prison doctor. He chose that location precisely because that
is where Herbert West has been incarcerated. Herbert, bereft of his laboratory
and bodies, has had to take his experiments in a different direction. Using
rats that he catches he has devised a technique to capture an essence, which he
calls nano-plasm energy, which he thinks will cure the problem he has had with
his re-animated subjects going crazy. Howard and Herbert set up a lab and start
experimenting; all the while Howard is carrying on a relationship with the
young reporter.
The
Yuzna style was a lot more evident in this film than in the last. It’s not so
much that the gore is gorier as much as it’s sillier and more outlandish. The
film was shot in Spain (just like other Yuzna productions Faust, Love of the Damned and Dagon) and there is no way to hide that.
Besides the many Spanish actors there are other things (like the Euro style
ambulances) that keep reminding you where they are. This is not really a bad
thing, it’s just a little jarring after the American settings of the first two
films.
Fans of
Spanish horror will recognize Santiago Segura as a drug addicted inmate who will
do anything to get a high, including shooting up a massive dose of Herbert’s
reagent. His best role was in El día de la bestia, but he also had smaller
parts in Dance with the Devil, The Killer Barbies, Blade 2, Hellboy, The Last
Circus and Witching and Bitching.
The story
really just rehashes themes from the first two films. The warden is just a
Spanish version of Dr. Hill and there is the whole trying to re-animate a lost
love. Unfortunately, it’s missing the chemistry of Combs and Abbott. On the
plus side, there is very little CGI. The high point of the film though is Elsa
Pataky who is not just hot but also provides some of the more interesting
scenes after she gets reanimated.
Not a
great film. I certainly wouldn’t recommend it for someone new to the series.
But for hardcore fans of the first two films, this is as good of a swan song as
we are likely to get. Another sequel was planned, a kind of Island of Dr. Moreau
story, but it never materialized and after this much time it’s unlikely that it
will.
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