Classic Horrors Club

Today we have another mid-80’s horror film that I’d never seen. It may be surprising to learn it’s one that’s been so popular over the years: Re-Animator (1985.) There was a time when I had little interest in a movie that featured over-the-top gore, as well as prejudice against what I perceived to be a low-budget straight-to-video release.

Of course, it wasn’t a straight-to-video release and I know it’s hypocritical to badmouth an industry that was my bread and butter for so many years, but I knew so little about modern horror straight out of college. For me, if I didn’t see an ad for it in the newspaper, it was never a theatrical release, and Re-Animator never played in a cineplex near me.

Despite my youthful ignorance, there are so many firsts in Re-Animator that I should have seen it before now:

• First film in the Re-Animator series
• First collaboration between actor Jeffrey Combs and director Stuart Gordon
• One of Combs’s first leading rolls. (Does anyone remember him two years earlier as Dr. Jones in The Man with Two Brains? That’s a fun movie.)

What matters now is that I have finally seen it, and I liked it a lot… up to a certain point. The opening was terrific and I appreciated the tongue-in-cheek variation of Frankenstein. Somewhere midway through, though, just as the action was picking up, it grew tedious for me. Repetition, even at a breakneck pace, can still be tedious.

I caught a lot of the fun references to other films before I read about them in my post-viewing “research.”

• In Zurich, Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) is a student of Hans Gruber, the same name as the villain in Die Hard… three years before Die Hard came out. 
• The score by Richard Band “borrows” from Psycho (1960.) He claimed it was purposeful, but critics were in an uproar over it.
• A poster for Stop Making Sense hangs in Dan Cain’s (Bruce Abbott) bedroom. The significance clicks when the classic line is uttered, “Who’s going to believe a talking head?“

The acting isn’t great, nor does it need to be. It’s part of the over-the-top approach to the story. However, Abbot is as easy on the eyes for women (and some men) as Barbara Crampon (as Megan Halsey) is for men (and some women.) David Gale (as Dr. Carl Hill) brings soap opera-style acting with him, but again, it doesn’t need to be any less melodramatic.

Re-Animator doesn’t need to be any better than it is. Even though it wore me out, I don’t know what would have improved it for me. In fact, I was surprised by how much more I enjoyed it than I thought I would. That’s faint praise, but I do recommend it for two groups: modern horror fans (to see where the genre was headed) and classic horror fans (to remind where it had been.)