#the film literally even the army have become involved. it's a fascinating study of a situation spiralling way beyond the control of any of

[therealkn]

David’s Resolution - Day 1

Day 1 (January 1, 2019)

Re-Animator (1985)

“Herbert, you’re insane, now what happened here?” “I had to kill him!” “What? He’s dead?!” “...Not anymore.”

When most people think of movies in the 1980s, they think of a lot of things. They think of Steven Spielberg - this was the decade that really cemented him as a household name, with the Indiana Jones films and E.T. earning critical praise and loads of money. They think of science fiction - The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi come to mind, along with Tron and The Last Starfighter and Blade Runner and Aliens. They think of action movies - this was the era of Stallone and Schwarzenegger, with Rambo and Terminator making them action hero gods, and there was also Die Hard and Lethal Weapon.

You know what I think of? The effects-heavy movies. You know which ones I’m talking about. The ones that took the advances being made in special effects and makeup and used that to give us things we'd never seen before and in some cases, never even fathomed before. The werewolf transformation in An American Werewolf in London, the creature effects in The Thing, the Alien Queen in Aliens... the ‘80s was a great decade for sci-fi and horror and all that good genre fare.

I’ve done three respectable classic movies in a row, I think it's time for something else. I think it's time to get fucked up and dig into the gory stuff. We need the right movie for that, and I think Arrow Video will have just the thing for us.

As I typed this, I realized that all three “minus days” before the actual resolution began were Criterion releases. So now we’ll have something from Arrow Video, the European cousin to Criterion and more or less the fusion of Criterion and Shout! Factory. Like Criterion, Arrow Video is a high-end film distributor whose releases are top-tier quality. They too take the greatest care in film preservation and restoration, their restoration work is on par with Criterion’s, and their releases are loaded with bonus material about the film and those who made it. And like Shout! Factory, they deal largely in genre fare: spaghetti Westerns, Japanese crime movies, cult horror films, things like that. I have several Arrow Video releases (nowhere near as many as Criterion), but we’ll cover some more, trust me.

Now, on to Re-Animator.

The movie is based on H.P. Lovecraft’s “Herbert West - Reanimator” series of short stories, although it makes several changes, but that’s not really important. The movie is about Herbert West, played by Jeffrey Combs in a role that defined his career (though I also know him as the Scarecrow in The New Batman Adventures and the Question in Justice League Unlimited). West is a brilliant medical student who’s just left an institute in Switzerland to study at the Miskatonic University in New England, where a large majority of evil shit in the U.S. happens. And he’s developed a remarkable breakthrough: a re-agent that looks a lot like glowstick fluid and that, when injected into a dead creature, brings it back to life... with violent results. One may think that this means glowstick fluid can re-animate the dead. I do not recommend you inject glowstick fluid into your dead cat to try and resurrect it. It doesn't work.

West, upon arriving at the university, meets with two other major figures in the story: Dan Cain (played by Bruce Abbott), a bright young student with a good future ahead of him; and Dr. Carl Hill (played by David Gale), a shitheel of a professor who plagiarized West’s teacher in Switzerland and who immediately clashes with West. West begins renting a room in Dan’s house so that he can continue his work, which Dan soon finds out about. After Dan sees that West’s work in re-animation is not, in fact, doo-doo, he ends up helping West by getting him into the university morgue.

And I think I’ll leave the details of the story after that vague because hoo boy, shit gets crazy and I won’t spoil it for you. But I will say that at some point, Dr. Hill ends up literally losing his head, which then causes him to figuratively lose his head, yet he can still talk and even control his body without his head attached. This eventually leads to one of the most memorable sequences in the movie, where he has a re-animated subject carry a woman he lusts for into the morgue, where he ties her down and admires her naked body before holding his disembodied head between her legs so that said head can go down on her.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen and others, this movie has a disembodied head about to give head. Whatever your opinion of this movie, you have to admit that that is one of the best visual puns ever put to film. Thank you, Stuart Gordon and the people who wrote this movie.

This is an example of one of the film’s strengths: despite being an adaptation of Lovecraft’s work, this is a horror-comedy. (Come to think of it, we had a lot of horror-comedies in the ‘80s, didn’t we?) There’s some really disturbing stuff in the movie, especially involving the re-animated corpses, and the comedy helps to make that more digestible by giving us much-needed levity. A good amount of comedy comes from Jeffrey Combs’ performance as West, who makes the most insane character in the whole film the most reasonable and cool-headed throughout the movie and who somehow serves as straight man to everyone else, especially to Dr. Hill.

I don’t think it’s acceptable to talk about Re-Animator without talking about Jeffrey Combs as Herbert West. All of the actors in the film are great - Bruce Abbott as the audience surrogate who’s boarding the crazy train with us, Barbara Crampton as his loving and sweet girlfriend who’s also the victim of Dr. Hill’s perverted desires, Robert Sampson as Miskatonic’s dean who gets wrapped up in all these shenanigans - but the standout is Jeffrey Combs. His take on West is one of the most fascinating characters in modern horror. He is a man who does what he does for science. He doesn’t care about money, power, fame, or anything other than to study his re-agent and learn all he can about it. He seems disinterested or even turned off by sexual attraction: there’s his reaction to Dr. Hill’s attempted head-giving (“You steal the secret of life and death and here you are, trysting with a bubble-headed co-ed.”), and in the first sequel, Bride of Re-Animator, he warns Dan not to let the little head rule the big head. He doesn’t even eat or sleep to our knowledge, something that’s addressed in the “integral version” of the film (we’ll get to it soon). He’s become a cult favorite and a very popular horror film character from the ‘80s, which led to his character coming back for two sequels as well as appearing in comic books, including official crossovers with Hack/Slash and Army of Darkness. Yep. Ash Williams and Herbert West together.

And then there’s the gore. I did mention that, yes? This movie is not shy about gore or blood. The film begins with West at the Switzerland institute, having given re-agent to his mentor Dr. Hans Gruber - who I imagine recently died a hard death - and it causes Dr. Gruber’s eyes to explode and spray blood onto a female co-worker. The re-animated corpses are cool to look at and distinctive because of how they were when they died, from a burn victim whose body is charred to no end, to the victim of a shotgun blast to the head, to the separation of head and body that is the re-animated Dr. Hill, who controls the other re-animated through a strange psychic/hypnotic power he possesses.

I brought up Arrow Video earlier because their release of Re-Animator is, to me, the definitive release that you should seek out if you want to see this movie. The release I have has two versions of the movie: the unrated version that was originally released in theaters, and an “integral version” that features additional and alternate scenes that were originally in an R-rated home video release and were later edited into the unrated version for a 2013 German Blu-ray release. Both are good, but the integral version has a little more story-related stuff in it. It fleshes out Dan and Meg’s relationship a bit more and better details exactly what the deal with Dr. Hill’s power is. If you want to get the movie, get the Arrow Video release. You will not regret it. It will scare you to pieces.

Next time: ...Goddammit, Borowczyk.