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Doctors Herbert West and Dan Cain return in this sequel to the cult classic, Re-Animator. West and Cain return to Arkham after serving as medics in a violent civil war. While serving as medics, they’ve gotten lots of chances to test their re-animating agent. Once they’ve returned back to the United States, their ghoulish experiments continue as they work at a local hospital. Eventually West convinces Cain into helping him build a female creature from spare corpse parts, so they can re-animate it. Matters are only further complicated as Doctor Carl Hill’s head is resurrected and seeks revenge on his nemesis, Doctor West.
I’ve read on Wikipedia that the Doctor West stories were originally written by H.P. Lovecraft as a parody to the novel Frankenstein. This motivation becomes clearer with this movie than with the first. There’s a lot of dark humor to be found in this movie. Some of West’s lines are priceless and it’s hard to imagine anyone other than Jeffery Combs delivering them. Cain and West’s relationship is further explored in Bride. Cain still has moral objections to some of West’s experiments, but it’s a treat to see West talk his reluctant friend into helping him. When they do decide to build a woman with different pieces from various corpses, Cain becomes just as demented as West. Cain carries a lot of guilt because of the death of his girlfriend in the first movie, and when West gives him a chance to let her heart live again in the body of their creature, he can’t say no. When you consider this movie and its predecessor, it becomes clear that West and Cain are drawn together by their mutual need to find a way to cheat death. What drives them may be different, but they both want the same goal. West is given a chance to shine here. We find out that part of the reason he conducts such gruesome experiments has to do with a god-complex. The most interesting thing about West though, is that he should come off as a complete villain, but he doesn’t for some reason. West is willing to do just about anything to achieve his goal, yet there’s something very human about the character. It might be that West’s desire to cheat death is arguably a result of his own fear of death. This is a fear that most people share, so we can’t help but identify with him. The makeup and gore effects are great in this movie. There’s lots of blood and some of the creatures West creates look fantastic. As well, the zombies look very creepy. My suggestion to any aspiring zombie movie makers out there would be to cast an elderly woman as a lead zombie and just have her laugh a lot as she attacks people. With the right makeup, like in this movie, such a zombie character can’t help but be creepy. I will admit that not all of the special effects are top notch, but the gore effects and the zombies more than make up for these shortcomings. The title of the movie, Bride of Re-Animator, would seem to indicate somewhat of a love story. We do get a love story between Cain and Francesca, but the real bride in the movie is the female creature West and Cain create. It looks awesome and when it dies, we’re treated to some great gore. The best part involving the creature though is when Cain rejects it. The creature freaks out, which was expected, but then it tears its own heart out and offers it to Cain. I know that the scene I’ve just described isn’t the most subtle piece of film making in history, but it does give the viewer an incredible visual that rivals just about anything I’ve seen in any other horror movie.
I have to comment on Doctor Hill in this movie as well. He isn’t in a lot of the movie, but he does manage to gain some measure of revenge against West. Perhaps the coolest thing about Hill though, is that he has bat wings attached to his head and becomes a flying zombie head. If a flying zombie head isn’t the best definition of badass, I don’t know what is.
There are a couple of plot holes that anyone who saw the first movie can’t help but notice. First, there’s the fact that Hill’s head someone survived the beating it took in the first movie. This is somewhat offset by Doctor Graves’ comments that he could fix a collapsed skull, but it still an issue of contention for me. The second plot hole involves how Hill controls the zombies. I don’t think it’s too far of a stretch for him to control the zombies that survived the first movie. They were lobotomized in the first movie, so it makes sense that he would have some kind of control over them. The zombified Detective is another story though. He was never lobotomized, so how does Hill control him? Keep in mind though, that the character of Detective Leslie Chapham is interesting because his wife is one the zombies from the first movie, and as Bride progresses, we find out that he actually abused and killed her. He also gives Doctor West one of his best lines in the entire movie: “Shoot him Dan, he’s a wife beater!”
Another drawback to this movie is that it isn’t nearly as fun to watch if you’ve never seen the first Re-Animator. I think it’s great that so many characters return from the first movie, and in a lot of ways this movie feels like it just picks up shortly after where the first one ended. However, to someone watching it without knowing anything about the first movie, Bride might just seem weird. I know I actually saw this movie years ago before ever watching the first Re-Animator, and I didn’t think it was all that great. My rating of the movie back then would have been average, but after watching the first movie, I couldn’t help but find myself enjoying Bride immensely.
I would recommend this movie to anyone who watched and enjoyed the first Re-Animator. Keep in mind though that this movie isn’t a waste of time if you’ve never watched a Re-Animator movie before either. It’s just that this movie is a lot better if you’ve seen the first one. Overall, I would recommend this movie to all horror fans, but I would also recommend seeing the first one before watching Bride of the Re-Animator.
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