#brian yuzma

[jmroscoe]

Halloween Review #4 — Bride of Re-Animator (1990)

It’s not hard to see why Brian Yuzma was chosen to direct Bride of Re-Animator, the sequel to Re-Animator, Stuart Gordon’s absurdly gory adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft’s story about a mad scientist obsessed with bringing the dead back to life. Just four years after Re-Animator premiered in 1985, Yuzma directed Society, a movie about a teenage boy who discovers the social elite are all part of a gruesome cult, and it was even grosser and scarier than Re-Animator was.

But Yuzma’s Bride of Re-Animator is not as gross or scary or clear in its messages as Yuzma’s Society or Gordon’s Re-Animator. It’s more a screwball comedy with a horror backdrop than a proper horror movie. Bride of Re-Animator is closer to Scooby-Doo or Young Frankenstein than it is to Re-Animator. 

Is that a problem? No, of course not. There’s a very fine line between being horror and humor. Yuzma has a good grasp on the distinction and delivers an enjoyable hour-and-a-half movie that doesn’t drag on too much.

Its cast of characters includes a cartoonishly evil Dr. Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) who is more obsessed with reanimation than ever, a Dr. Graves (Mel Stewart) who displays more emotion when a disembodied head insults his thesis than when it comes back to life and a fat, wife-beating, bumbling police officer who misses the obvious clues all around him.

Dr. West reanimates a body only to immediately shoot it in the head with a gun, killing it again. West steals a dead body from the hospital by putting dark sunglasses on it and wheeling it out while propping its head up with his hand, a clear riff on Weekend at Bernie’s (which came out the same year as Society). All while a playful, silly score by Richard Band plays in the background. 

Yes, there’s gore. But nothing on the scale of Re-Animator or Society. There are some morals you can glean from the movie — living things are more than the sum of their parts, it’s unhealthy to never let your mistakes go, giving birth can be a traumatic experience — but none that aren’t explored better in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which the movie obviously borrowed a great deal from.

Perhaps Yuzma, in taking apart an H. P. Lovecraft story and a Stuart Gordon film then re-assembling it into something unlike its parents, is telling us about originality of ideas or death of the author?

No, I genuinely think he just wants to make us watch a bunch of gross-out gags and say, “Oh man, that was so gross, haha.” It rules.