leeper@mtgzz.UUCP (m.r.leeper) (10/20/85)
RE-ANIMATOR
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: A sort of a cross between the
Frankenstein and zombie genres, RE-ANIMATOR is horror done
for laughs. It definitely works better as comedy than as
horror.
Less than 24 hours after admiring how well Martin Scorsese's AFTER
HOURS combines comedy and horror at the expense of neither, I saw RE-
ANIMATOR, a film which also combines comedy and horror, though much less
successfully. The publicity said that the film was based on Lovecraft's
story "Herbert West, Re-Animator." I guess I don't know Lovecraft very
well, because the title rings no bells with me.
In any case, West is a medical student who studied under one of the
great medical mad scientists of Europe, a Dr. Gruber, who had strange ideas
about how to bring the dead back to life. After Gruber's two untimely
deaths, his assistant West has returned to the U.S. to be a pain to the
faculty at Miskatonic Medical School in Arkham, Massachusetts. It isn't
long before West is using his drug--which looks like Mellow Yellow soda
except that it glows in the dark--to turn corpses into zombies that bang
their heads against walls and drool something that looks like cream of wheat
flavored with Lavoris. Chief among the zombies is a professor who hated
West, is killed and re-animated. ("Is he dead?" asks a student. "Not any
more," West assures him.) The head and the body have become separated but
the head still controls the body through telepathy. The whole film comes to
your standard bar-room brawl scene except that it takes place in a morgue
and most of the brawlers are dead and some are missing inconsequential body
parts like heads.
There is, as you might imagine, a fair amount of gore in this film,
including some graphic shots of an autopsy. Nothing looks particularly
real, but if just the thought of what you are supposed to be seeing bothers
you, you may want to keep your distance. There is a rather interesting
musical theme used under the credits and ofttimes in the film itself. The
theme, by Richard Band, is just barely different enough from the title music
of PSYCHO to avoid a lawsuit...or perhaps not quite.
As for an overall rating, some of the comedy is worth seeing but as a
horror film, this is pretty much a washout. The comedy saps any suspense
the film might have. I'd give RE-ANIMATOR a -1 on the -4 to +4 scale. If
it had tried real horror rather than just gore to make itself frightening,
it could have done better.
Mark R. Leeper
...ihnp4!mtgzz!leeper