Re-Animator

It’s H. P. Lovecraft alright, but not quite as you know it. Stuart Gordon’s marvellously over the top 1985 schlock-fest is a celebration of Lovecraftian themes combined with gore, exploitation and laugh-out-loud black humour. Jeffrey Combs is terrifyingly terrific as the re-animator of the title - a medical student who takes his obsession to unimaginable levels!
RE-ANIMATOR celebrated its 40th anniversary last year and what better way to celebrate than with a Limited Edition 4K UHD/Blu-ray release.

In a short prologue scene set in the Zurich Institute of Medicine in Switzerland, medical student Herbert West (J. Combs), obsessed with bringing the dead back to life, has chosen the dead Dr. Gruber as his ‘guinea pig’. While initially successful, the administered serum turns out to be way too large a dosage and after a gamut of grisly side effects (like, one per second), Gruber is not only dead again but a ghastly sight to look at.

Time to change location and - how could it be otherwise - West arrives at the Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts. Also studying medicine at the university is Daniel Cain (Bruce Abbott), who happens to be in a secret relationship with Megan (Barbara Crampton), the daughter of Alan Halsey (Robert Sampson) - university dean. Oh dear! When Dean Halsey introduces Daniel and West to his colleague Dr. Hill (David Gale), a medical researcher and neurosurgeon, It doesn’t take long before West verbally attacks Hill and accuses him of teaching (and practising) outdated theories. While West may have a point (according to him anyway), one look at Herbert West should be enough to realise that he’s several syringes short of a full medical kit!

Things are about to get a lot worse (or hilariously gory, depending on one’s point of view) when Meg and Dan are advertising for a flatmate and who should ring the doorbell? Not wishing to turn his new colleague away, Meg and Dan accept West as their new lodger… biggest mistake of their lives! While Meg is somewhat suspicious (and rightly so!) of their new flatmate, as he never joins the couple for dinner or otherwise socialises with them, Dan defends him by pointing out that he is busy with his studies, that is to say he carries out experiments in his makeshift lab (which is the house’s basement). Some days later, Rufus, the couple’s black cat, goes missing, with Meg desperately searching for the animal. She finds the cat eventually, albeit dead and in West’s fridge! When West tries to explain that the animal was already dead when he found it, Meg doesn’t believe him and accuses him of having killed the cat deliberately. When the couple make it clear they want West out of their house, he begins to blackmail them and threatens to reveal their secret relationship to Meg’s dad…. Never mind the blackmail attempt, because the following day - and to Dan’s horror - West has succeeded in re-animating the dead and mutilated cat, with side-splittingly funny results.

When Dan proudly reveals to Dean Halsey that West has succeeded in re-animating a dead animal, Halsey dismisses Dan’s claim as nonsense and implies that both students must have gone stark bonkers. Outraged, he barres them from further studies at the medical school but we just know that this is almost a cue for both Dan and West secretly sneaking into the morgue and continuing their experiments on human corpses. Evil always seems to be more memorable and it’s no different here, because soon all hell break loose not only when various experiments go spectacularly wrong but when Dean Halsey, alarmed by the strange noises coming from the medical school’s morgue, gets killed by one of West’s re-animated corpses…. only to become re-animated himself. In no time, meddling Dr. Hill gets a taste of his own medicine when West severs his head with a shovel and… wait for it… re-animates both head and body separately, well, Hill’s brain anyway. Meanwhile, Meg - the only one seemingly down to earth - fights a hopeless battle in her attempts to make Dan see sense and take West for what he really is: a deranged individual who wants to play God. Let the gore-fest begin!

Loosely based on the 1922 Lovecraft serial novelette ‘Herbert West - Reanimator’ the film takes considerable liberties while maintaining the essence of the original source. Kudos to the special effects department who must have worked 24/7 to come up with all the prosthetics and fake blood and guts, not to mention the actors enduring the special make-up. Combs and Abbott are the perfect match, with the former the manipulating puppet master and the latter hopelessly entangled in the strings. Not for the squeamish!

RE-ANIMATOR is available is available as a 3-disc edition (one UHD and two Blu-rays) with an insane amount of bonus material, including ‘The Cosmic Horror of HP Lovecraft’ video essay by Mike Muncer, and ‘A Guide to Lovecraftian Cinema’.
The Limited Edition boxset furthermore includes six collector’s art cards and a 120 page book with new essays.