Re-Animator 1985

[5.6/10] Here’s the weird thing about Re-Animator -- it is a narratively sound film. All of the major characters (of which there are only really five) have a clear motivation, and the film’s drama is centered around those places where those driving impulses conflict. That is the core of good storytelling.

Mad scientist Herbet West wants to explore the prospect of re-animation and further his mentor’s work. Dan Cain and Megan Halsey want to finish med school and get married. Dean Halsey wants to protect his daughter from suitor he doesn’t approve of and secure grant money for his hospital. Dr. Hill wants to keep stealing ideas to gain in power and prestige, with designs on Megan, despite being several years (decades?) her senior.

The tension points are obvious. Both Dean Halsey and Dr. Hill work against Dan’s courtship of Megan. Herbert West clashes with the Dean over his unorthodox experiments and with Dr. Hill over both the elder doc’s plagiarism of the work of West’s mentor and their disagreements on theory. Those story threads become entangled when Herbert becomes Dan’s roommates and basically browbeats him into joining his experiments, especially when it’s potentially Dan’s only means of proving himself to the Dean and not getting his student loans rescinded.

It’s too much to call these snarls between characters and their goals elegant, but there’s things that each of them wants, and despite the bizarre setting, some organic ways in which those wants clash and create conflict. It’s what I ask for from so many badly-plotted movies, while Re-Animator dutifully checks those boxes.

And yet, despite that, it’s an awful movie. The reasons are myriad. Despite those motivations, the characters in the film are all bland and generic, lacking in any real personality. Almost every role is poorly-acted, with unconvincing deliveries and wholly uncharismatic presences. Even for a film rooted in the supernatural, its internal logic of how the undead work and function makes no sense. It’s a film lacking in a point or a theme. And for something so bizarre, it is remarkably full of clichés.

It’s also almost startlingly sexist. Nevermind the fact that Megan is the most underdeveloped character and the one given the least agency despite theoretically being at the center of most of those tangles. She’s largely reduced to shrieking at whatever horror’s been unleashed and having to be caught or rescued by other characters. If that weren’t enough, the film basically finds any excuse imaginable to take off her top, which is, granted, not a new thing in horror films, but gratuitous nonetheless.

That’s all before you get to the film’s repugnant rape scene. There can be a place for grappling with sexual assault in the confines of horror, using the trappings of the genre to explore the pain and anguish of that sort of violation. Suffice it to say, an animate severed head being forced upon a screaming victim’s sexual organs shortly before the big climactic action scene utterly fails to qualify. Re-Animator just plays these repugnant scenes for shock value and calls it a day, which is almost as shameful.

The other major malady in this film is that it is a complete exercise in camp, but Jeffrey Combs (who plays West) is the only one who seems to know that. He has that laudable but regrettable designation of being the only person in Re-Animator who realizes what kind of movie he’s in. He plays it big, but in a sort of wry, tongue-in-cheek way that makes his the only performance, and by extension the only character worth giving a damn about in this thing.

Everyone else is an unconvincing cartoon character. Despite Dan Cain theoretically being the protagonist and hunky male lead in this one, he has all the presence of a soggy piece of wood. And poor Barbara Crampton, given nothing to do but wildly overemote, never grazes a legitimate feeling in all her high volume histrionics. David Gale plays the generic jerk professor until he’s reduced to growls and snarls, and likewise, Robert Sampson is the usual overprotective dad until he turns into an atavistic grunter. For such a narrowly-focused story, you need characters that pop off the screen, and most of these leave you wanting to recoil.

Despite, the film seems focused on its scares and set pieces, which are chintzy without the charm. Frantic meowing sound effects do little to make a shopworn cat puppet seem like a real creature. The prosthetics on the undead are cheap and fail to pass the smell test. And the cinematography does nothing to hide these problems or accentuate the suspense of a scene.

That said, there’s only so much you could do to save any of this given the other flaws. The rules of the film make no sense. While nit-picky questions like “Why can West’s ‘re-agent’ revive someone with heart failure?” apply to any zombie flick, there’s some unique head-scratchers here. Why is Dr. Hill able to command his body when he’s a severed head? How is he able to command his lobotomized minions without saying a word? Why does a set of brain chemicals result in prehensile intestines?

In a film that other things well, some of this could be forgiven as the conceits of the genre in a movie which adopts a sense of the ridiculousness given its omnipresent blood and guts. The film’s best interludes are when it adopts a more winkingly comic tone, like West propping up Dr. Hill’s teetering, severed head on a mail spike. But when so many other elements are this bad, especially when the film is bizarrely self-serious in places, it just adds fuel to this big, loud, dumb misfire.

That the film lands with such an overblown thud is telling in its way. The core of good storytelling -- characters with clear-cut desires and drama that emerges from the way those desires intersect and differ -- are necessary but not sufficient for a good movie. If your characters, your actors, your sexism, your effects, your set pieces, your logic, and your scene-to-scene writing are all bad, then not even the sturdiest, most well-thought-out story construction can save it. Jeffrey Combs is worth watching in isolated clips, and some expressly comic moments are amusing enough, but on the whole, you’ll wish that Re-Animator had stayed dead.

UPDATED 09/07/2023 Going through the aforementioned 20 Best Horror Movies Ever Made, According to Redditt (and let me again emphasize this is a list I pulled off of another movie site I subscribe to; the list should NOT be interpeted as my own personal preferences) this film stands at the #10 position (counting down from #20). Why, I have no idea and won't waste time watching it. The first 20 minutes that I did watch were painfully awful, unless you just really like the quality (or should I say "lack of") and stupidity of 80's movies. I've heard all about that one particular scene in the film, and never even made it that far: the acting, the story, the dialogue was all just too awful to sit through. So, although I haven't watched this in its entirety, the fact that I could only sit through 20 minutes before turning it off should tell you all you need to know. I love a good movie. This wasn't good.

After missing this one during its heyday back in the 80's, I found it on Tubi and decided to watch it. I made it through the first 20 minutes but found it just too dull, plodding, poorly-acted, etc. I learned about the - what I guess was "THE" scene - years ago (although I never saw it myself): something about the guy using his own decapitated head to give head to a female victim or whatever. While there's a part of me that just wanted to watch the movie for that one scene, at this point in my life and going by the standards of quality movies available today, I just couldn't sit through everything else. I know what happens (in that one scene, mind you; nothing else) and I just can't get into the 80's easy-cheesy horror anymore. Watching this movie simply for the sake of that one scene would be the equivalent of sitting through The Human Centipede simply for the "Feed her! Feed her!" scene (that you knew would eventually happen at some point because of dialogue/situations early in the film.) I turned this off around the 20-minute mark and have no intention of ever finishing it. Life is too short to waste it on bad coffee or bad movies.