RE-ANIMATOR
*****
Directed by Stuart Gordon.
Starring Jeffrey Combs, Bruce Abbott, Barbara Crampton, David Gale.
Horror, US, 86 mins, Certificate 18.
Released in the UK on Limited Edition 4K UHD & Blu-ray by Second Sight on 15th December.
1985…what a year for 80s horror kids drawn to the gaudy gruesome VHS sleeves that dominated the shelves and that tantalising, blood-red “18” BBFC rating. Romero’s DAY OF THE DEAD, Dan O’Bannon’s punk rock Romero riff RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD and Stuart Gordon’s RE-ANIMATOR were must-haves for junior gore hounds, even if two of them were BBFC-censored by the time they arrived at your local, pre-Blockbuster (yes, they ruined everything) video shop.
Gordon’s rebellious and loose appropriation of Lovecraft’s text is the only one of the three to prompt a conversation between characters in a Best Picture Oscar-winner. An affectionate, pot-addled scene between Wes Bentley and Kevin Spacey in AMERICAN BEAUTY reflects the kind of chats some of us had in the playground about that scene with the head and the naked girl. Earning RE-ANIMATOR instant notoriety, it also reflected the anarchic, controversy-courting tendencies of Chicago’s Organic Theatre co-founder Gordon, here making his film debut with buddy/screenwriter Dennis Paoli for Charles Band’s expanding B-movie factory Empire Pictures.
A knowingly mischievous 80s remix of FRANKENSTEIN and Lovecraft’s prose, it delights in crossing the bad taste threshold, while understanding the secret of a great horror comedy is to let the dark laughs emerge naturally from the escalating absurdity of extreme situations. It nimbly dovetails between slapstick gore and straight, blood-splattered tragedy involving likeable characters. The Grand Guignol mood is set in the very first scene: perfectly cast Jeffrey Combs (channelling Tony Perkins and part smug computer geek, part steely psychopath) tussles with a renowned M.D. who gouges out his own eyes in front of horrified onlookers. One of them yells “You killed him” before Combs’ Herbert West looks directly into the camera and deadpans the line “I gave him life!”
Richard Band’s groovy pastiche of PSYCHO’s famous musical motifs seems to confirm everyone is in on the joke. While the plot spirals into increasingly outré territory, Paoli and Gordon develop characters worth rooting for; there’s genuine heart beneath the grue. Barbara Crampton instils her potentially thankless abused / doomed heroine with natural appeal, while Bruce Abbott – as an ordinary bloke pitted against the maniacal Combs and David Gale’s Karloffian lip-smacking, power-hungry senior Dr. Hill – grounds the outrage in some kind of reality. How often do you see a male horror hero receding into catatonic shock after a traumatic experience and sobbing when he fails to save his beloved?
The dialogue is often very funny (“Don’t expect it to tango, it has a broken back”) and unsung strengths include Robert Sampson, as Crampton’s Dad, transitioning into a drooling, self-harming zombie in a way that is both hilarious and harrowing. Elsewhere, playful heads-in-gym-bags physical comedy alternates with all too real unpleasantness including cadavers in morgue garbage bags. Everybody remembers the sequence in which lecherous Hill drugs and molests the nude Crampton but there isn’t a bum note in the entire film. Following the indignities suffered by Meg, Crampton was rewarded with a far less passive (and more erotic) role as the “girl wonder” psychiatrist in Gordon’s FROM BEYOND, while two sequels, a stage show and inferior imitations tried to recapture RE-ANIMATOR’s unsurpassed lightning in a bottle.
Many genre fans have already purchased this movie in half a dozen formats with accompanying extras and ever more impressive audio and visual presentations. Second Sight’s ravishing new 4K release retains two engaging commentaries dating back to the Elite laserdisc of the 1990s, when Stuart Gordon (typically erudite and thoughtful on a solo track) was working on SPACE TRUCKERS. A separate track reunites Yuzna, Abbott, Combs, Crampton and Sampson to lively effect, while a new commentary features British academic Eddie Falvey.
Other archival extras include 23 minutes of extended scenes – among them, alternate takes that were used, without Yuzna or Gordon’s involvement, to create the interesting, if vastly inferior “Integral Cut” featured in this set. There’s a deleted dream sequence, trailers, TV spots, Perry Martin’s terrific 2007 “Re-Animator Resurrectus” (69 mins) documentary, interviews with Paoli and Richard Band and a particularly entertaining 50 minute chat between Yuzna and Gordon. Jake West’s “A Guide to Lovecraftian Cinema” (54 mins) has scholar / podcaster / filmmaker Chris Lackey delivering a fun trawl through an eclectic array of H.P. inspired films from THE HAUNTED PALACE and THE RESURRECTED to THE THING and THE EVIL DEAD. Alan Jones chats to the ageless Crampton in a 35 minute interview from 2015’s FrightFest, and “The Horror of It All” (18 mins) has directors like Joe Lynch, Mike Mendez and Mick Garris discuss RE-ANIMATOR’s astutely judged tone, equal opportunities nudity and their first viewings at an impressionable age.
The standout new feature is “Re-Animator at 40” (45 mins), in which Yuzna, Crampton and Combs share fond memories of (among other things) the production and the first screening at Cannes while offering moving thoughts on Gordon and Gale – the latter of whom passed before a cast and crew screening of RE-ANIMATOR 2. Mike Muncer looks at the challenges and triumphs of translating the revered / reviled author in “The Cosmic Horror of H.P. Lovecraft” (9 mins) with clips from the likes of COLOR OUT OF SPACE and THE MIST, and editor Lee Percy talks of battles with the MPAA in “Piece by Piece: Cutting Re-Animator” (15 mins). Gordon’s widow Carolyn Purdy-Gordon touchingly recalls their professional and personal relationship in “Suzie Sorority and the Good College Boy” (14 mins), and how moved he was by the fanbase his films developed.
This is a truly definitive release of one of the greatest modern American horror films, from a consistently much missed, subversive filmmaker. The film has never looked so colourful and (ironically) gorgeous – though the distributor sent us the Blu-ray discs so we can’t comment on the UHD presentation – and you couldn’t wish for a more comprehensive package of extra content. Get someone you love to treat you to the Limited Edition for Christmas, so you get the rigid slipcase (beautiful artwork by Krishna Shenoi), art cards and 120 page book of new writing.
Steven West