31 Nightmares: Re-Animator · 2:08am Oct 24th, 2014
Here is the sort of movie Re-Animator is: The opening scene has a man’s eyeballs exploding, squirting blood onto a screaming elderly matron.
Based H.P. Lovecraft’s serialized story, Re-Animator is the story of a young, brilliant med student named Herbert West, here played by the brilliant Jeffrey Combs who has discovered the secret to defeating death.
Unfortunately, dead people generally don’t come back doing too well and shit goes bananas pretty fucking fast.
He ropes in one of his fellow students to act as his assistant in his ghoulish experiments, which do not go unnoticed by the faculty, particularly one Dr. Hill who intends to steal West’s research and present it as his own, and incidentally get in the panties of the Dean’s pretty young daughter, whether she likes it or not…
This film is blackly comic and bloody hilarious, from the re-animation of a dead cat to a rather creative redefinition of giving head there is something here to gross out or amuse everyone.
The film spawned two sequels, both staring Combs and both continuing the combination of dark humor with marvelous practical gore effects.
Bride of Re-Animator is a direct continuation of the original film and uses elements of HPL’s original story that the first didn’t. It features some truly amazing patchwork abominations, which are basically West’s equivalent of doodling things while bored.
Beyond Re-Animator is also quite good, this one continuing West’s story some years later and behind bars, this time looking for more than re-animation, the seat of the soul in the body! Only don’t call it that. Dr. West tends to get annoyed. If it sweetens the pot for anyone, this movie features a fight to the death between a rat and a man’s severed penis.
Stuart Gordon directed these and several other Lovecraft adaptations, marrying cosmic horror with blood soaked slapstick in a potent cocktail with disturbing sexuality added for taste. I highly recommend all of them and we will be seeing one more before the month is done.
Tomorrow its time for a real Nightmare…
