Re-Animator has more in common with the latter, as its humor is rarely of the strictly physical variety, relying more on verbal asides and the sheer absurdity of its situations. It is an incessantly gory movie, to the point that producer Brian Yuzna didn’t even bother to submit it to the MPAA ratings board and instead released it unrated. Yet, like the gore in the original Grand Guignol theater and the movies it inspired, the most gruesome scenes in Re-Animator are both repellent and utterly intriguing. They are so over the top that they demand your attention—it’s literally impossible not to watch.

The story involves the Frankenstein-esque activities of one Herbert West, a nerd gone terribly, horribly wrong played in deliciously deadpan manner by then then-unknown Jeffrey Combs, who is now a cult figure beloved by horror fans around the world. West’s nondescript suits and oversized square glasses are appropriately geekish, but the narrow, devious eyes and furrowed brow are those of someone hanging precariously at the edge of insanity, held back only by his sheer will and arrogance. Holed up in his basement laboratory, injecting glowing green re-agent fluid into a dead cat, he is the perfect epitome of science gone bad.

West is a brilliant young medical student who is bent on defeating death by finding a way to beat the “6- to 12-minute barrier” after which someone cannot be successfully revived. However, he is so resolute and calculating in his desire that any sense of moral purpose is left in the dust of his mad, ego-centered pursuit. He immediately gets on the wrong side of the fictional Miskatonic Medical School’s resident genius, Dr. Carl Hill (David Gale), whose ideas West openly disputes in class. West is so sure of himself that he can’t help but verbally (and, later, physically) assault those who might stand in his way, intellectually or otherwise.

Another medical student, the squeaky clean Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott), becomes involved in West’s experiments, despite the pleadings of his girlfriend, Megan (Barbara Crampton), who also happens to be the daughter of the straight-laced dean of the medical school, Alan Halsey (Robert Sampson). Dan is the movie’s conscience, although as played by Abbott, he is something of a dullard, too plain and nondescript to truly engage our sympathies. If we feel for him, it is only because he is the only “normal” character in the movie. We might feel the urge to sympathize with Megan, but she spends so much of the movie being traumatized in various ways that we are almost forced to view her from a distance.

Of course, character sympathies are not at the heart of what makes Re-Animator work so well. Rather, it is first-time director Stuart Gordon’s refusal to let anything be off limits. Yet, at the same time, he doesn’t simply open the floodgates. Rather, everything shocking in Re-Animator is carefully arranged and stylishly directed in the manner of a gaudy horror comic book. Gordon, whose background was as an art director and founding member of Chicago’s infamous Organic Theater (which was the first to stage David Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago), was working on a tiny budget (every single scene takes place indoors), but he made every bit count.

Like a deranged musician, Gordon keeps increasing the pitch of his movie, piling on ludicrous situation after ludicrous situation. Things begin to reach a fever pitch when West decapitates Dr. Hill with a shovel after Hill tries to steal his re-agent formula, then reanimates his head and headless body. This leads to the movie’s most ghoulishly comedic moments, as the decapitated Dr. Hill, filled with pipe dreams of fame, combines West’s re-agent research with his own development of a laser drill used for lobotomies to create an army of reanimated corpses under his control.

No review, of course, can go without mentioning the movie’s most deliriously sick moment—the ne plus ultra of mixing sex and horror—as Dr. Hill’s body holds out his disembodied head in an attempt to sexually assault Barbara, who is naked and strapped to a gurney. The scene is heightened all the more by the fact that Barbara has been kidnapped by her own father, who is himself a reanimated corpse that has been lobotomized by Dr. Hill and is under his control, thus injecting a weird Freudian twist as the father delivers his own daughter to a lascivious head. The sheer audacity and tastelessness of this scene demands a kind of awe, and Gordon and the actors pull it off with such comic aplomb that it becomes hilarious rather than repulsive—or perhaps both.

Needless to say, Re-Animator is not for everyone. The easily offended, those with weak stomachs, and anyone who is unable to find humor in gruesome scenarios need not apply. Yet, those who appreciate both horror and humor and recognize when the two have been seamlessly intertwined into grisly black comedy will find much to enjoy in Stuart Gordon’s twisted near-masterpiece of the horror absurd.

Copyright ©2012 James Kendrick

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