Re-Animator (1985)
Re-Animator (1985), directed by Stuart Gordon.
I saw this just once before, probably on a crummy video tape. I remember not liking it much because (a) the gruesomeness is way beyond what I need to see, (b) this is really not representative of Lovecraft's better work, and (c) I wish they would leave the cats out it.
Now, on Blu-ray: it's still excessively gruesome but undeniably funny. To my astonishment I read that critics really liked it. Was there something in the water that year?
Mainly I want to praise Barbara Crampton for a courageous horror/sexploitation performance: stark naked, strapped to a cold metal table, fondled and molested by a decapitated head. ("My mother's favorite scene", she says dryly). What a good sport. She did similar great work the next year in From Beyond (1986) with the same crew.
Revisiting these small 1980s films, I am always shocked and pleased by their natural color. It has become rare in the age of digital color grading.
What I learned from the commentary tracks:
Made in 18 days, working all day and all night. The director said he went blind for a while at the end.
He researched real morgues and says his depiction is more accurate than most films. No long refrigerator trays, just plastic bags on tables.
He says he really doesn't have the stomach for this material, but gets used to it.
Similarly, Jeffrey Combs had never done any horror work. Freaked out at the time, he seems like a natural since.
If the first reanimated corpse looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger: that's his body double.
The original actress dropped out at the last minute, probably because her mother read that special scene in the script.
They watched a lot of horror movies to prepare. The director says he was most influenced by Roman Polanski, the camera movements in Rosemary's Baby (1968).
They were naive enough to expect an "R" rating and the MPAA just laughed at them. They released it Unrated and surprisingly it got shown and was well-liked by critics.
Later Vestron Video did a cut with additional footage to produce an R-rated video tape. Problem: once it was rated it became illegal to show the original unrated version. They had to ask that the R rating be revoked, said to be the first time that ever happened.
For the last scene of the glowing serum and the scream in the dark, Gordon credits Stephen King's Pet Sematary -- the book, since the film was not made until four years later.
The Herbert West stories were at one time long out of print. It took months for Gordon to get special permission to read them in the rare book collection of the library. (Since then a Lovecraft volume has appeared in the literary Library of America series, where I read the stories. The volume is edited by Peter Straub. Paperbacks have been issued since the movie appeared).
Someone gave him valuable insight about the Frankenstein myth: it is about masturbation, the attempt to create life without women. Naturally, it is the female character who sees the flaw in the plan and she is the only one with ethical objections to these loony experiments.
Available on Blu-ray. My thumbnails are from the earlier Image disc; there is a newer Arrow special edition.
The Image disc has several extras, an informative commentary track from the director, and a fun hysterical cast commentary similar to their efforts on the From Beyond (1986) disc: non-stop stories, shout-outs, yelling and screaming at the movie.
