Re-Animator (1985)

Dir: Stuart Gordon

Starring: Jeffrey Combs

More Info: IMDB

Tagline:  H.P. Lovecraft's classic tale of horror

Plot: A medical student and his girlfriend become involved in a bizarre experiment into reanimating the dead conducted by the student's incorrigible housemate in this campy sendup of an H.P. Lovecraft story. The emphasis is on humour but once the dead walk, there is gore aplenty.

My Rating: 7/10

Would I watch it again? Sure, why not?

My only real bitch with this this otherwise fun movie is composer Richard Band's blatant Bernard Herrman Psycho score ripoff. For me, the big film music freak, it's a real distraction. Poor taste to the extreme. Not only that but it's done with a synthesizer. Talk about putting salt on the wound.

"I ain't got nobody..."

With that out of the way the movie was just a gas to watch. It's not as frenetic and fast-paced like another horror/comedy I watched recently, RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD but it is funny in a dark way. Combs as Herbert West has some great lines ("Get a job in a side show"). When Dr. Hill is creeping everybody out when he starts coming onto Megan and her father (on the other side of the large looney bin glass window) suddenly bangs up against it - hysterical.

Animated body parts all over the place, lots of blood, sick jokes, boobs (hubba hubba), decapitations, it's alive - it's dead - it's alive - it's dead cat. West says as he's about to re-animate (for the second time) the cat whose bashed up pretty badly, "Don't expect it to tango; it has a broken back." This thing's got "family fun" written all over it.