Re-Animator

Re-Animator, 1985. Directed by Stuart Gordon. Jeffery Combs, Bruce Abbott, David Gale, Barbara Crampton, Robert Sampson.

Synopsis: After an experiment goes awry at his previous educational establishment, Dr. Herbert West takes an internship at the Miskatonic University Medical School in Arkham, Massachusetts. There, he takes a room with fellow intern, Dan Cain, who is on a track to a bright future: he’s an up and coming doctor and he’s dating the dean’s daughter, Megan. West’s unorthodox theories about death run afoul of hidebound Dr. Hill, whose views run diametrically counter, and once again is forced to perform his experiments on his own. He sucks in Dan and soon, demonstrates his success at re-animating dead tissue on Dan’s cat. Unfortunately, Dean Halsey is stumbles onto one of their experiments and is accidentally killed in the process. West uses his re-animation reagent to revive him in hopes of covering everything up. Unfortunately, Dr. Hill gets wind of West’s success, and covets the discovery for his own reputation. He decides to blackmail West. West, nobody’s patsy, decapitates Dr. Hill with a shovel, then, in a fit of intellectual curiosity, reanimates Hill’s body and head separately. But Dr. Hill is STILL jealous of West’s discovery, and has a discovery of his own to add a wrinkle to things...

The trend in horror movies during the 1980s was towards the horror comedy. Most of these were of a teen-aged variety. Movies like Fright Night, Return of the Living Dead, Vamp, The Lost Boys, and even The Evil Dead II played horror film conventions, including the genre’s penchant for violence, for slapstick. In this mainstream, Re-Animator is something of an anomaly. It’s a genuinely funny movie, but it’s one that plays fair with its horror movie trappings. It functions like a horror movie better than just about any of its contemporaries. The humor is so deadpan in Re-Animator that some audiences will miss it entirely amid the various dismemberments and zombie rampages. Stuart Gordon, directing his first feature, eschews the comic role models of Porky’s and the Three Stooges, and goes in for the more cerebral comedy of Monty Python. Like the Pythons--especially the Pythons of The Meaning of Life--Gordon is in the business of one-upsmanship. For every ghastly idea Gordon puts on the screen, the next one trumps it. It’s almost as if Gordon is challenging himself to provide an ever-escalating series of "oh my god" moments for the audience, culminating in a marvelous defilement of the creamy Barbara Crampton. But in spite of its intent to outrage, Re-Animator builds deliberately towards a magnificent punch line. The signifiers are all in place as the movie goes on: Gordon wittily prefigures the movie’s denoument by placing a Talking Heads poster in Dr. Dan’s apartment, and to make sure that the audience hasn’t missed the true thrust of the gag, gives West the line (putting down the now decapitated Dr. Hill): "Who’s going to believe a talking head? Get a job in a sideshow..." Re-Animator is a one-joke movie, but, damn, it’s a GREAT joke.

The real key to Re-Animator is the tone. The actors and the director play everything perfectly straight. The source for the story is the Dark Prince of 20th Century horror, H. P. Lovecraft himself, a writer notoriously short on humor. The score recalls the most baroque of Bernard Herrmann’s scores for Hitchcock. The LOOK of the film is as clinically gloomy as a film set in a medical school can look. If you are dead set against laughing at the audacity of the film, it still manages to function as a terrific horror movie, as the characters’ and the audience’s worst fears are not only realized, but exceeded. The movie, surprisingly, meets Lovecraft on his own terms. The source material, in reality a series of the pulpiest stories Lovecraft ever wrote, lends itself wonderfully to the screen, even if Gordon and company freely abandon the text for their own concerns when it suits them. Certainly, this is the best feature film ever made from Lovecraft, a writer who has been ill-served by the movies. Even so, I can’t really imagine Lovecraft himself enjoying this movie much. It shows more than Lovecraft would.

The tone of the violence in the movie walks a knife’s edge between slapstick and horror. Gordon knows what makes the gorge rise, and he knows how to pitch his gore so that it is right at the edge of what the audience can take. One of the first scenes in the film, where Dr. Hill demonstrates to his class how to remove the top of the skull for brain surgery is a portent of things to come. It’s funny, though it elicits a nervous laughter at best because it has the audience guessing about what could possibly be worse. Gordon provides worse, but he’s wise enough to cut the violence with wry wit. Watching Dr. Hill’s body stumble around without the guidance of his head, for instance, is hilarious in spite of being sick as hell.

The movie belongs to Combs, though. Jeffery Combs is among the cinema’s all-time great mad scientists: he’s never really been able to escape Herbert West in his subsequent roles, his recurrent appearances on Star Trek not withstanding. West is a tremendous pop creation: part Norman Bates, part Whit Bissell, and part Colin Clive, he seems rational behind the twitchy exterior; he’s even sympathetic. But the only reason West isn’t the film’s marquee monster is because David Gale’s Dr. Hill is even more monstrous. Gale’s performance isn’t the glue that holds the film together--that’s Combs’s job--but his character throws West into stark contrast and permits the audience to sympathize with West. No small feat, truth to tell, especially considering that he spends the last half of the movie as a head in a pan. These dueling personalities manage the astounding feat of upstaging the baroque violence Gordon puts on the screen.

Re-Animator is one of those rare one-of-a-kind weirdies that manages to gain a substantial cult following while remaining largely untouched by would-be imitators. In part, this is because what Re-Animator manages is so difficult--not even its principle creators have been able to match it (Combs comes closest as the deranged FBI agent in Peter Jackson’s The Frighteners). Comedy, as they say, is hard, but dying is easy....and the same is true of horror. Doing both well at the same time? Hell, that’s a minor miracle... .