Violence/Gore: Oh you’ll get your fair measure of blood and guts here, my friend. As we all should know, re-animated corpses spew blood at every turn, and there’s plenty of head-chopping, bone saw-churning, finger-biting, eye-popping, head-crushing action throughout. The question is, when isn’t there gore on screen? Very rarely, and that’s why we like it so much. Hey, there’s even a writhing undead kitty. Now that’s entertainment.

Sex/Nudity: Ah yes, the reason this film became the modern classic that it is. Not for the over-the-top special effects or the superb performance by Jeffrey Combs or even the macabre cinematography and roller coaster ride plot - no it’s all about the one scene where a deranged re-animated head goes down on the lovely Barbara Crampton (who happens to be starkers at the time and strapped to a morgue table). And isn’t this why we all fell in love with the magic of cinema? Hell yes it is!

Best Line: “Parts. I’ve never done whole…parts.”

Score:

The true power of this film begins and ends with Jeffrey Combs and his uncanny portrayal of modern horror’s most compelling mad scientist - the Re-Animator himself, Herbert West. Combs’ West is almost an anti-hero in a literary sense, desperately striving to find the secret of eternal life - a laudable goal, surely - but utilizing methods that clearly mark him as a dangerous man of questionable morals and even less empathy for other human beings. His re-agent (actually luminol, but let’s not quibble) does indeed bring back the dead, but only as mindless, enraged, blood-spitting zombies. Still, West soldiers on, secure in the knowledge that his “work” is serving the Great God Science even if the path to enlightenment is strewn with the gory remains of his failed experiments. It’ll all be worth it in the end.

Remember the scene in GODFATHER when Michael helps a nervous Enzo light his cigarette after the two stare down a car filled with hitmen? Enzo is shaking like a leaf, but Michael looks down at his hands holding the lighter and flips it closed with nary a tremor; he’s cold as ice. West has a similar defining moment when he calmly takes up the bone saw and brings down a raging zombie, his steady hand and quiet controlled voice speaking volumes about his character. Michael Corleone is a cold-blooded murderer, but we somehow sympathize with him. So is it any wonder RE-ANIMATOR fans tend to harbor some small bit of affection for Herbert West

Every hero - even a demented amoral one - needs a foil, and West finds one in Dan Cain, as played by the somewhat wooden Bruce Abbott. Cain loves the dean’s daughter Megan (Barbara Crampton), has a rival in the evil Dr. Hill (who harbors a sexual obsession for Meg and an abiding hatred for West), and now finds himself inexplicably drawn into West’s private crusade to unlock the secrets of life and death. And he thought he was just getting a medical degree and a hot future wife.

Inevitably, things go horribly awry, and soon lots of people are dead and brought back to life, and what will come to be known as the Miskatonic Massacre is in full swing at a sleepy little New England hospital. Hill tries to steal West’s re-agent, West cuts Hill’s head off with a shovel, but that insatiable curiosity brings a telltale twinkle to West’s eye. And soon enough, the now two-part Dr. Hill is shuffling around and planning to kidnap Meg and engage in the most perverted oral sex scene ever seen in cinema. And there’s something that much more twisted about Hill using the hypnotized re-animated corpses of Meg’s father to assist in stripping her naked. Ew.

While not strictly faithful to the Re-Animator tales written by H.P. Lovecraft, the movie does pick and choose some elements and manages to mold them into what stands as one of the most memorable excursions into gross-out film-making ever made (and the climactic massacre sequence does feature an intestine-tentacle creature that offers a brief nod to its Lovecraftian roots). But it’s also more than that. RE-ANIMATOR is a superb exploration of the classic Frankenstein scenario, enhanced by performances that each sketch a complete personality despite the potential for two-dimensional characterization. From the start, everyone in the cast is bouncing off one another in a series of overlapping relationships that define their needs and determine their fates. And I still maintain that in certain respects, you can interpret West’s need for Cain as a sort of sublimated love. Just look at how he bristles when Meg is around. We’ll talk more about this in the review of the sequel, BRIDE OF RE-ANIMATOR.

But while everyone is drenched in blood and seriously discussing the location of the will in the brain and their supremacy over the forces of life, there’s still room for humor too. Hill’s body doesn’t always obey his mental control all that well, and West’s solution for how to keep Hill’s severed head propped up is an inspired bit of invention from Combs himself.

But despite the fact that most of us really enjoy this movie, there’s no denying that at its core, it’s a horribly tragic dark fable in which the real hero of the film in a literary sense - Dan Cain - loses everything he holds dear all due to his unfortunate proximity to a clever but narrow-minded madman. And at the very end, when the hospital is a bloody ruin and his future lies dead in his arms, he loses one last thing - his grip on sanity - and turns instead to the glowing elixir to take away his pain. Of course, as the audience knows too well, this decision only seals his doom. Poor bastard. But it does give us one of the more powerful final shots in genre film, so it’s a trade-off, isn’t it?

DVD Extras: No question about it, if you’re a RE-ANIMATOR fan, you owe it to yourself to get the “Millennium Edition.” This two-disc set features a plethora of extras, including: two (count ‘em) audio commentaries (the one with the full cast is the one that really delivers on the exuberant reunion factor, and Combs proves he still remembers all of his lines, but the director’s commentary reveals that one of the zombies was nicknamed “Gesundheit"); trailer and TV spots (do you have a weak heart?); the usual bios and photo galleries; a section in which composer Richard Band explains the shaping of the score in several key sequences (though he doesn’t deal with the whole cribbing PSYCHO thing); and a number of enlightening crew interviews (but…Fangoria editor Tony Timpone?). There’s a fairly neat multi-angle storyboard section where you can compare the original boards to the finished footage (I suspect most people will select the Megan/Hill head scene more often than not), but the angle function just isn’t fast enough to really make use of the idea - it would have worked better if they were presented side by side or top to bottom instead. The best extras, however, are all the deleted scenes, which fans will mostly recognize from the television edit of the film, which sacrificed the gorier stuff for deeper character moments that definitely improve the film. Would that there were a branching feature that would enable you to watch a cut complete with gore and the additional scenes, but alas. As it is, you learn that Hill has powers of hypnosis only hinted at in the final cut, and a scene revealing Herbert’s own addiction to a weak solution of the re-agent adds a lot of dimension to West and his somewhat dependent relationship with Dan.

As if all that wasn’t enough, we even get more naked Barbara Crampton (and you can never have enough) via a deleted dream sequence that also features a subtle but clever color saturation effect. So when are they going to release her leather-clad turn in FROM BEYOND on Region 1 DVD already?

ATB