Re-Animator: 1985, dir. Stuart Gordon. Seen at Alamo downtown (Oct. 11).
I decided I had better see Re-Animator because it’s one of the better known horror cult films, because I hadn’t ever seen any Stuart Gordon films, because I don’t see enough horror movies, and because this is one of my little brother’s all-time favorite films and he would just die if he found out I missed the opportunity to see it in a theater. Not to mention it was Dollar Night at Alamo Downtown (part of a tribute to the film’s art director, Robert A. Burns, who recently died).
I don’t always agree with my little brother (he adored Napoleon Dynamite) but I definitely enjoyed this movie. “Enjoyed” is kind of a weird word to use about a movie that contains graphic images of brain surgery, the use of a bone saw to kill a reanimated corpse, a very sad and gory little cat, a decapitation with shovel that eventually resulted in a reanimated severed head, sexual assault involving the aforementioned severed head, reanimated decomposing corpses with gore streaming from their mouths, and other nasty stuff. But I had a good time and even laughed a lot at some of the more outrageous gore.
Re-Animator is loosely based on some H.P. Lovecraft stories about Herbert West, stylishly updated and adapted. I have tried reading some Lovecraft stories (not the West ones), and couldn’t quite get into the whole Lovecraftian thing. However, what doesn’t work for me on the printed page apparently transforms beautifully on the screen.
I got through the more graphic bits of this movie by marvelling over what they’re doing with special effects these days. (“That’s just a wig. They probably bought it at a costume store. And that’s probably just wax. And that’s maybe a cow brain.”) This strategy worked much better in the beginning of the movie, before I got caught up in the storyline. Fortunately, the most graphic parts near the end of the movie are so removed from reality that I found them more entertaining than disgusting. My boyfriend said that the hardest part of the movie for him to watch was the classroom demo near the beginning (“just like peeling an orange”) and again, that’s possibly because it was so realistic. I think the scene that was most difficult for me was the decapitation.
I am realizing that in graphically violent movies, what disturbs me even more that what I am seeing is often what I am hearing. Realistic noises can be terribly disturbing. In Night of the Living Dead, the most harrowing part was the little girl attacking her mom with the garden spade … and you didn’t see much, but you heard the spade digging into her flesh, which is a noise that particularly disturbs me. (If you’ve seen Psycho, it’s similar to the noise of stabbing in the shower scene.) The sounds at the end of Heavenly Creatures, in that bluntly realistic scene, are horrible to hear. When I heard that noise in the decapitation scene in Re-Animator, I shuddered.
Despite the violence throughout Re-Animator, I don’t quite understand why it was unrated, unless the filmmakers decided it was best not to submit that version for a rating in the first place. I don’t know the story behind it. I know there are maybe a half-dozen versions of this movie: the unrated one I saw, an R-rated one, some even milder versions suitable for UK theatrical and home video release, an Australian edited version, and so on. Yes, it was gory and violent and intense, but so are a lot of R-rated horror movies.
Re-Animator was a fun movie, in the same way that Evil Dead 2 and Dead Alive are fun. It’s not quite as broadly funny as Evil Dead 2 (I wouldn’t use the word “splatstick” for this movie, but then I don’t want to use the word at all because I think it’s kind of lame).
And was it just me, or did Dr. Hill look a leeeeetle bit like Sen. John Kerry? Weird.
I’d see this movie again, although (as with Dead Alive) I don’t think I’ll eat first. Fortunately, I am pretty sure my brother has at least one version of this movie (if not more) on DVD.