Stuart Gordon’s 1985 film “Re-Animator” has a trashy fun with some goriness to be savored and admired, and its morbid sense of humor remains fairly intact even after more than 40 years. As an outrageously gruesome mix of horror and black comedy, it will surely make you cringe more than once for good reasons, but you will also be amused a lot by its many darkly humorous moments as appreciating a considerable amount of wit and craft behind them.
The story, which is based on H.P. Lovecraft’s short story “Herbert West – Reanimator”, is pretty simple in terms of story and characters. Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs), a young medical student as ambitious as Dr. Frankenstein, has worked on developing a very special reagent which can reanimate dead animal tissues, and, needless to say, his little experiment runs amok when several other characters around him get involved with it along the story.
And what we will get next is not exactly a pretty sight to watch. Besides a disturbing scene which will make any cat lover wince (FULL DISCLOSURE: I do whenever I watch the movie), there is a gory sequence where West and his fellow medical student Daniel Cain (Bruce Abbott) get a very nasty experiment result from a certain recently diseased body. When they subsequently come upon another fresh dead body, they cannot possibly resist, and, of course, things only get worse for them as well as several other characters who unfortunately happen to be around them.
Nevertheless, its main characters are absolutely serious about what is happening around (and to) them, and that is another source of fun for us. No matter how much he tries to be sensible, Cain only finds himself getting more and more involved with West’s increasingly loony experiment process, and this inevitably affects his romantic relationship with Megan (Barbara Crampton), who is incidentally the daughter of the dean of the medical school where he and West are studying at present. The mood becomes a bit tender whenever the movie pays some attention to Cain and his girlfriend, but their romantic subplot is often interrupted by what is caused by him and West, and then there comes that infamous scene where Megan is about to be forced to have a sexual encounter with one of West’s latest experiment results.
That scene is surely a good example of how willingly the movie goes for more bad taste. While we get more blood and goriness along with a bit of full-frontal nudity, this deranged moment somehow rises below vulgarity just like many of Mel Brooks’ comedy films, and it certainly helps that the performers on the screen play straight to the end without any self-conscious wink to us.
When it eventually shifts onto a full-throttle mode during its climactic part, the movie goes all the way for more blood and goriness to decorate the screen, and you will be alternatively shocked and impressed by how intensely it presents a series of gruesome moments via its fairly good special effects and makeups. Nevertheless, the movie still does not lose any sense of its black humor, and there is even a little poignancy from when Cain decides to do something drastic just for love.
Several main cast members of the film have always been associated with the film since it came out. Jeffrey Combs, who subsequently collaborated with Gordon again in “From Beyond” (1986) and “Bride of Re-Animator” (1990), is quite committed in his character’s mad ambition, and his intense performance here in this film certainly boosted his acting career a lot. Since the success of “Re-animator”, he has appeared here and there in a number of genre films during next several decades, and I still fondly remember his wacky supporting turn in Peter Jackson’s “The Frighteners” (1996).
In case of the other main cast members, they naturally take backseats to Combs’ showier acting, though they are all as effective as required. Although his character feels rather flat and colorless compared to Combs’ character, Bruce Abbott acquits himself well on the whole, and he and Barbara Crampton did a good job of giving a little sense of normalcy to the story. In contrast, David Gale and Robert Sampson eagerly go over the top when their characters are reanimated later in the story, and Gale has a lot of naughty fun as his reanimated character becomes an unexpected opponent for West and Cain (“Who’s going to believe a talking head? Get a job in a sideshow.”).
The movie is also a career high point for Gordon. Although most of his subsequent works including “From Beyond”, which is also based on one of Lovecraft’s short story, failed to reach the level of success attained by “Re-Animator”, he steadily worked for many years at least before sadly passing away in 2020, and he certainly solidified his own place in horror genre as “Re-Animator” gained more appreciation and admiration during next several decades (Raise your hand if you were reminded of that special reagent when you watched Coralie Fargeat’s Oscar-winning film “The Substance” (2024)!)
In conclusion, “Re-Animator” may require some tolerance for goriness from the beginning, but it ultimately works as an entertaining genre film which will alternatively jolt and tickle you once you go along with what and how it is about. This is indeed trashy to the bone besides being quite gory and bloody, but you will definitely agree with what my late mentor Roger Ebert wrote in his review: “I was reminded of Pauline Kael’s sane observation: “The movies are so rarely great art that, if we can’t appreciate great trash, there is little reason for us to go.””
