In the opening scene of this film,
set at a hospital in the University of Zurich, two policemen are lead by
employees of the hospital to investigate the source of crashing sounds and
unearthly screams emanating from Dr. Gruber's locked office. The police break
in to find Dr. Gruber seizing on the floor, with Herbert West (played with
terrific zeal by Jeffrey Combs) hovering over him with an empty syringe. West
is pulled off by the police, shouting that he needs to record the data of
Gruber's vital signs and that a vital experiment has been interrupted. Gruber
screams, squeezes his head until his eyeballs burst and then collapses on the
floor, dead. One of the employees accuses West of killing him, to which he
calmly responds "No I did not. I gave him life." Herbert West is a
little cracked. Maybe more than a little. But with his calmly clinical attitude
he’s also the man you want in your corner when the shit hits the fan, as it
most assuredly does later in the film.
Re-Animator is an over the
top horror film with tongue planted firmly in cheek, based on a series of
stories by H.P. Lovecraft but just as equally indebted to the Grand Guignol
theater in its depiction of graphic horrors with very little in the way of any
moralizing. Providing the film’s moral center is the couple Dan and Meg – Dan
(Bruce Abbott) is a promising medical student at Miskatonic University (an
invention of Lovecraft’s), an ivy-league college in New England, and Meg
(Barbara Crampton) is the daughter of the dean of the school. This is our
normal couple about to enter into the maelstrom and madness unleashed by
Herbert West. After the tragic demise of Dr. Gruber, West relocates to
Miskatonic, bringing his re-animating solution that can give new life to dead
tissue – a scientific research gone awry as he pursues results further and
further afield (at one point he’s hovering over a recently deceased corpse
yelling at Dan’s qualms about reviving the corpse with a curt "Every
moment that we spend talking about it costs us results!"). Rounding out
the central characters are Meg’s father, an old-fashioned, out-of-touch
fuddy-duddy, and Dr. Hill, the school’s star brain surgeon and “grant machine,”
played as a perfectly arrogant, slavering creep by David Gale. Conflicts
between Herbert West and Dr. Hill are set up from the get-go as West accuses
Hill of stealing Dr. Gruber’s ideas, and Meg has an understandable and
immediate dislike of West’s cold and creepy demeanor when he asks to move in
with Dan and set up a crude laboratory in the basement of his house.
As West demonstrates the
effectiveness of his re-animating serum to Dan, things quickly begin to slide
downward for everyone involved and before long we get to witness a re-animated
head, several severed limbs, mind control via laser brain surgery, and many
other ghastly horrors, all delivered in a spirit of gleeful excess by director
Gordon (a founder of the noted Organic Theater Company) and his cast, who do
the film a great service by playing it completely straight. It’s to their
credit that despite the film’s panoply of grotesque (and funny) horrors they
also make sure that its characters read as true – too often horror films
populate their casts with clichés just waiting to be bumped off so it’s always nice
when one spends the time to make us believe the people we’re watching, even if
we know that they’re actually going to play second fiddle to a shambling
headless corpse at some point.
Along with other horror films of
its time like Evil Dead 2 and Dead Alive, Re-Animator
marries comedy to the horrific proceedings in a perfect mixture and would
certainly be a lesser film if it merely went for scares. And though they pay
homage to Lovecraft’s spirit, they take his ideas pretty far out in a way the
author himself never did in his preference for horrors insinuated and alluded
to rather than displayed. And that’s where it comes back to the Grand Guignol’s
displays of excess and gore. And despite being very much of its time in the
spirit of what other horror films were doing, there’s just something about its
rootedness of Gordon’s work with his actors and his experience on stage that
makes even the most outrageous effects and scenes of the film seem like they’re
as natural as the characters they’ve made. It’s a spectacularly entertaining
film, certainly not for everyone, but if you’ve read this far, it’s most likely
a film for you.
- Patrick Brown
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