RETRO ACTIVE: Re-Animator (1985)

[This week's "Retro Active" pick is inspired by Tim Burton's resurrected-dog saga Frankenweenie.]

Reviving the old through careful and colorful synthesis, Re-Animator creates something new and unique through its combination of parts borrowed from Frankenstein, Hitchcock, and zombie cinema. Stuart Gordon's 1985 adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's serialized tale of a doctor who discovers the key to "reanimating" the dead is a work that thrives not on originality but on tone, as its elements are, taken at face value, old hat. Setting Lovecraft's tale in the present day, Gordon's film concerns Dr. Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs), introduced trying to subdue his Swiss mentor Dr. Gruber (Al Berry), who's frothing blood at the mouth after having been given a glowing reanimation agent that's turned him into a raving monster. Cut to Massachusetts' Miskatonic University, where West later comes to study, renting a room in the house of colleague Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott)—who's shagging Dean Halsey's (Robert Sampson) daughter Megan (Barbara Crampton)—and sparring with Dr. Carl Hill (David Gale), whom West claims stole Gruber's ideas about "brain death." West believes resurrection is possible via his serum, and sets about experimenting first on Dan's dead cat and, later, on morgue corpses, a process that leads to hosts of rampaging undead creatures and is scored by Richard Band with piercing strings that more than slightly recall Bernard Hermann's iconic Psycho themes.

Nods aside, Gordon's aim isn't plagiarism, but cheekily nodding to past predecessors' influence on his hybrid horror effort, whose pitch-perfect balance of gore and goofiness later inspired countless B-movies. Working from a script co-written by Dennis Paoli and William J. Norris, Gordon manages to stage his most gruesome moments—eyes exploding, skin being pulled back off skulls, cranial drilling, decapitations—with a grotesqueness that borders on the ludicrous, thereby revolting audiences without truly alienating them. It's a not-inconsiderable feat that Re-Animator can make one squirm and laugh at the same time, and is achieved in part by Gordon's directorial style, which uses exaggerated angles and zooms, creepy shadows, and humorous reaction shots to straddle the line between the spooky and the cartoonish. That approach is matched by the performance of Combs, who has a weasely intensity that's disturbing and comical—his face waxy and his eyes beady, he's a mad scientist whose lunacy becomes more apparent and extreme as his dreams seem closer to being realized, with West eventually doing away with any pretense about morality and committing murder without batting an eyelash in order to protect, and further, his research.

Combs is Re-Animator's trump card, and the primary reason for the film's two sequels, but he's not the cast's only standout. As Dr. Hill, Gale has a regal malevolence that somewhat recalls Christopher Lee, and his professional disdain for, and jealousy over, West's accomplishment has a potency that's colored, in playfully deviant ways, by his lusting after Megan, a blonde whom Gordon presents as both a wholesome schoolgirl (all bouncy hair and cute sweaters) and a sex kitten (all bedroom screaming and gratuitous topless shots). Gale's evil and Megan's eroticism climax in the film's signature perverted scene, in which Hill—having had his head cut off, and then both his noggin and headless body reanimated, by West—licks Megan's ear and breasts as she lies, screaming, on a surgical table. It's a sight of delirious carnal nastiness that epitomizes the film's general fixation on bodily arousal and dismemberment, opposing states of being that are in constant conflict, especially once West convinces Dan to grant him access to the morgue and begins injecting cadavers with his agent.

From the opening brain-diagram credit sequence to repeated shots of exploding orbitals, Gordon laces the proceedings with a persistent eye motif that speaks to his characters' almost uniform inability to perceive the errors of their ways, but Re-Animator doesn't greatly bother with subtext, content to be just a squishy, silly genre work steeped in Frankenstein-ian horror. Thus, the focus remains on West using a bone saw to cut through the torso of a reanimated ghoul, on Hill's body knocking West out by conking his head against a table, and, during the hectic finale, on Hill's body, shot full of a potentially lethal dose of West's magic serum, bursting open to reveal a mutated tentacle that ensnares West, prompting the seemingly doomed doc to cry out to Dan to continue his work. Given Combs' iconic turn, it's no surprise that, despite his cliffhanger fate here, West returns to reanimate more stiffs in subsequent efforts. Nonetheless, it's this initial Gordon foray that remains the series' standard-bearer, one that culminates with Dan following West's advice once Megan dies, leading to a final bloodcurdling scream from the reanimated beauty that concludes the action on a decidedly ominous Pet Sematary note.

Posted by ahillis at October 8, 2012 2:57 PM