Re-Animator
1985, US, Directed by Stuart Gordon
Colour, Running Time: 86 minutes
DVD, Region 1, Elite, Video: Anamorphic 1.82:1, Audio: DTS
Ostracised from a Swiss hospital for extreme malpractice, genius student Herbert West shows up at the American Miskatonic University to further his studies. It’s not long before he’s antagonising an eminent tutor with his extravagant and radical ideas about mortality, theorising that life is merely a complex series of biochemical processes that can be reactivated even following the death of an organism. Taking up a tenancy offer with a promising fellow student (Dan), he continues his covert personal experiments, gradually progressing towards solving the ‘problem’ of death through his invention of a serum that can alter the chemical status of a cadaver for ‘re-animation’. As Dan finds out what West is working on he’s drawn into the situation to a point where he‘s actually helping the unhinged young man, partly due to West’s threatening knowledge of Dan sleeping with the university leader’s daughter, Megan Halsey, partly out of personal scientific curiosity. Before long Halsey senior has clicked on to the fact that West’s proximity to his daughter is of concern and, as an attempt at a solution, expels West while revoking Dan’s student loan. Now immersed in their experiments, Dan and West sneak back into the hospital with the intention of obtaining a fresh human corpse to inject with the serum. Finding out that they’re back Halsey rushes in to have them removed but stumbles in on a struggle between the two students and a violent re-animated body - Halsey is accidentally killed by the zombie. Anxious to try his serum out on a fresh corpse West promptly injects Halsey before security arrives as the scenario continues to spiral out of control - the effects of reviving dead bodies are somewhat outside the realms of predictability it seems.
Probably not exactly as Lovecraft would have envisioned it, Re-Animator makes for a highly entertaining experience nonetheless. Gordon takes the character created by Lovecraft along with the central premise and mutates it into something thoroughly modern, utilising an excess of gore and pretty black humour to help. The obsessive scientist, Herbert West, is perfectly represented by Jeffrey Combs who effectively demonstrates the character’s callous mindset completely devoid of moral concern in the pursuit of progression. Dan is a person who balances between a scientific but moral desire to prevent death, and the ethical considerations of the experimentation required to bring such results to fruition. His dilemma is complicated by the presence of a girlfriend who obviously errs towards ethics while unintentionally fuelling Dan’s vocational and academic aspirations by promising to marry him once he’s graduated. Not only that but she’s the daughter of someone who’s political decisions at the university are influenced more so by emotion than careful logic, this of course proving to be his eventual undoing. West finds himself unable to control the events that unfold in the wake of his own actions as things get more and more out of hand until the film reaches a climax of mindless attacking corpses and bloody violence. Richard Band’s deliberately Psycho-esque score gives the film an offbeat edge to its identity. The blackly humorous scenarios (e.g. West using a paper holder/spike to prop up a severed head that he’s about to return to life) combined with interesting story and dialogue exchanges prove to be extremely engaging, Re-Animator being one of those films where all the conditions for a great movie seemed to be precisely in place.
Hard to believe this was once quite heavily cut (by over two minutes!) in the UK, the BBFC clearly failing at the time to recognise the over-the-top, fantastical nature of the gruesome violence. They finally saw sense when Anchor Bay put it through again earlier this year and their new disc was essentially based on the definitive edition released by Elite a few years ago, the latter providing the source for this review. It blew all previous incarnations out of the water with a THX-approved (not always the jewel it should be) transfer that even today looks incredible - I recently watched it upscaled to 1080p and projected onto a 70” screen and it looked better than I could ever have imagined, particularly given the low-budget origins of this project. Detail is amazing and colours are very natural. The DTS soundtrack got the best out of limited elements (though the mono track is present for purists) while a second disc supplied us with a mountain of worthwhile extra material, altogether rounding out a superb package of one of the best eighties genre movies.