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Re Animator The Millennium Edition | Year: 1985 Classification: Horror Directed: - Stuart Gordon Actors/Actresses: - Bruce Abbott - Jeffrey Combs Awesome! Herbert West (Jeffery Combs) is a mad scientist with an extreme messiah complex focused on cheating the gods of death. He has discovered a serum which when injects in the brain of the recently deceased makes the dead stand up and walk. Unfortunately, these are no longer our friends, relatives or loved ones, but rather adrenaline-driven super killing zombies. Realizing Herbert's potential, his professor Dr. Hill (David Gile) has been keeping a close eye on his research. Hill is determined to do whatever it takes to get his hands on Herbert's discovery and steal credit for his work. While forcefully trying to convince Herbert to turnover his findings, Hill's head is viciously separated from his body. Herbert than decides that now is the time for the final test of his magical elixir and re-animates Hill's head and body. Dr. Hill is still able to speak, even without a voice box and lungs and continues to be psychically linked to his body, which he controls to wreak havoc and seek his revenge. There's a scene where Barbara Crampton is forced to have sex with Dr. Hill's head (only available in the unrated version). This all leads to a bizarre ending with plenty of zombies and gore galore. Followed up by the equally impressive sequel "Bride of the Re-Animator". Great mix of drama-comedy and horror, very involving. This movie was referred in American Beauty as a representation of forbidden pleasures, dark sexuality and thumbing one's nose at conformity. While I'm willing to bet half of the audience of that movie wouldn't know what The Re-Animator is, it remains a cult classic that deserves a proper reissue and re-emergence into public consciousness. Director Stuart Gordon's background was in theatre, which accounts for the unusually adept acting in this film -- Bruce Abbott as bright young med student Kane; oddball Jeffrey Combs (last seen in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer) as madcap genius Herbert West; Barbara Crampton as Megan, Kane's innocent girlfriend who gets dragged into the maelstrom of gore, nefarious plots and strange happenings that is this movie's arc. Most horror directors today should bow their heads to Gordon's dramatic sense -- the story is urged forward with an inevitability, a sense of purpose that eludes nearly all of the entries in the plot-obsessed horror entries in the post-Scream boom. The Re-Animator, like so many other greats (the Night of the Living Dead series, Halloween, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), realizes that horror is different from whodunit (Scream created that dreaded prototype so that most horror flicks nowadays are guess-the-killer types, bad marriages between mystery and slasher). One look and you know who the bad guy is in The Re-Animator...and you'll keep watching. Dr. Carl Hill, played with great relish by David Gale, is one of the most memorable horror villains of all time thanks to some very human motivations (ambition, greed, sexual frustration) and an overwhelming weirdness that suits the atmosphere of the film perfectly. And the visuals? "Outrageous" only begins to describe them -- one writer described the SFX approach here as being "splashing blood on every visible surface". But because the dramatic sequences work beautifully, the gory effects take a back seat, where they belong in a truly good film. Some sequences may make your stomach turn (unless, of course, you've already sampled Dawn of the Dead or Maniac). But give it a shot and The Re-Animator will yield strange pleasures not found anywhere else -- not in the slew of Lovecraft adaptations that followed it; not in the wasteland of '90s horror; not even in Romero, Carpenter, Hooper or Craven. The Re-Animator is a true original, and worthy of classic status. Funny Gore Flick How they took HP Lovecraft's short story (which is one of the SCARIEST short stories ever written, in my opinion)and came up with this, I'll never know, but there's no denying the entertainment value. Buy Re Animator at Amazon.com Buy posters at Allposters.com Jamster - the latest ringtones for your phone!  Search with Walhello on the Internet on Re Animator Search with the Priority Search Engine on Re Animator This page in other languages: Suomeksi | Nederlands | Deutsch
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