 
|
A medical student, Herbert West, creates a serum the re-animates dead tissue. As West tries to perfect the serum, his roommate, Dan Cain, can’t help but become involved with his ghoulish experiments. To further complicate matters there is Doctor Carl Hill, who wants to steal West’s work once he discovers the truth about re-animating corpses.
Doctor Herbert West is one of those movie characters that is best described as having a “cult following.” Any hardcore zombie movie fan knows who Herbert West is. The mad Doctor West is so popular that he is the only character to appear in all three Re-Animator films. Jeffery Combs does a great job in this movie of playing the mad scientist, West, who befriends a regular medical student, Dan Cain. It becomes clear as the movie progresses that West does actually care for his friend Dan, and this relationship is dealt with in further detail in the sequel. In this movie though, it’s clear that West trusts Dan when he gives him his notes on the re-animation serum at the end of the movie as he is West trapped by the zombified intestines of Doctor Carl Hill. If you ask me, the odds are that any movie that features zombified intestines is going to be pure gold. The main villain, Doctor Carl Hill, is fantastic. I’ve said this in my top ten list of zombies, but it has to be said, how many headless zombies could do what Hill does in this movie? The man raises and commands an army of lobotomized zombie using a laser surgical drill and West’s re-animator serum, and he does all of this while his head is not attached to his body. If that isn’t a prime example of being badass, I don’t know what is.
Perhaps one of the most enduring things about Re-Animator is its humor. According to wikipedia.org, H.P.Lovecraft, who wrote the stories that the movie was based on, actually wrote Re-Animator as a paraody of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. This would explain why Doctor West is so over the top throughout the movie. I found myself actually laughing out loud at a few parts because Doctor West.
Some of the special effects aren’t the greatest in this movie. I read somewhere that this was done intentionally because the movie was supposed to be somewhat of a dark comedy. The problem is that Hill’s decapitation and his stint as a headless zombie are actually done pretty well. However, the zombified cat looks terrible. The cat looks so bad that it’s laughable, and I can’t help but think some of the poor special effects weren’t intentional, but that this excuse was thought of just to cover them up. Another problem viewers might have with this movie is its zombies. The zombies in Re-Animator aren’t like the traditional zombies we’ve seen in other movies like Night of the Living Dead. For example, the zombies in this movie can still talk and they don’t attack people because they hunger for human flesh or brains. Apparently the only reason they attack people is because of the shock and pain of being brought back from the dead. I find that an interesting motivation, but I can see people having problems with zombies that don’t crave flesh. The Re-Animator zombies can also be killed just like any other person. They don’t need their brains destroyed, which might be upsetting to zombie purists.
Something that always bothered me about this movie is that it had two sequels made after it. Doctor Hill appears only in this movie and the second Re-Animator movie, but what we see happen to him here makes me wonder how he could have survived for a second movie. His head gets its eyeballs pushed in and then it looks like his skull is crushed, so how could he have survived that? I know zombies are supposed to be hard to kill, but for him to have survived, he would have needed some sort of super human healing ability. The same thing is true of West. He looks like he’s dead meat at the end of this movie, but then stars in the sequel. At least he doesn’t die on screen, so it’s possible for us to assume that he may be made some sort of heroic escape.
How can any zombie movie fan pass on this movie? Doctor Herbert West is an awesome character, and Jeffery Combs’ performance as the mad doctor is something of legend to most zombie fans. I even recommend this movie to horror movie fans, who I’m sure will find something to like about Re-Animator.
|