Re-Animator (1985)

Re-Animator is an old love: a grisly horror adaptation of one of H.P. Lovecraft's more obscure tales (printed in the crumbling pages of a forgotten magazine called Home Brew sometime about the Good Year 1920), first serialized and then lost for a short period. It's his take on the Frankenstein theme of "reanimating" the dead. The unnamed narrator and the titular "Re-Animator" (Mr. Herbert West) embark on a series of ghoulish experiments that lead to West, in Lovecraft's original story, being pulled below the earth by hordes of the infernal, unclean "tomb legions." Make of that whatever thou wilt.

Lovecraft was a quiet, eccentric, self-educated old-world New England prude and curmudgeon whose parents both died insane and who lived in the book-strewn attic of his ancestral home with a couple of great aunts. He held some rather extreme views on race which would "cancel" him today, but which were only a bit more racist and xenophobic than his average contemporary, by the era's standards. Regardless of racist views, he married the Jewish Sonia Haft Greene and moved to New York for a short period, where, whatever anti-Semitism bubbled beneath the surface of his character, didn't stop him from mainly having Jews as a part of his literary circle of close friends. His marriage to Greene failed, not due to racial animus, but because he was a failure in the world of making a conventional living (mostly selling stories to pulp magazines such as Weird Tales to make ends meet. (Which, in his case, they barely ever did.)

He created the "Cthulhu Mythos" of creatures (Shub-Niggurath, Yog-Sothoth, Azathoth, etc.) and several fictional "forbidden books", such as the much-fabled Necronomicon, which he encouraged his large circle of penpals to utilize for their fictional creations. One book he invented, the fictitious Necronomicon, was so convincing it has passed into popular urban myth, and several books claiming to be THE "Necronomicon" have been published, all claiming to be the authentic one (Anton LaVey even features a ritual called the "Call to Cthulhu" in his book The Satanic Rituals).

Toys, games, video games, radio programs, comics, t-shirts, collectibles of every kind, and, of course, MOVIES, have all been based on Locvecraft's enduring legacy of "cosmic horror," a literary trope in which man faces the forces of the unknown, who do not care about him one single whit, and who, once having ruled the earth, seek to return from their "undimensioned, angled spaces between" to rule once more, once the "Stars are in alignment."

(Everything in his world is sort of freakish and dripping and has tentacles. And are incredibly ancient.)

Mr. Lovecraft died at Jane Brown Memorial Hospital in his beloved Providence, Rhode Island, of intestinal cancer in 1937. He considered himself, on the whole, a literary failure. Today, he is defined as one of the chief progenitors of modern gothic horror fiction.

All of that is quite an intro for Re-Animator (1985), a cult-classic horror flick directed by the late Stuart Gordon, who virtually made his entire career making Lovecraft adaptations of varying degrees of quality. Most starring Jeffrey Combs.

Medical student Dan (Bruce Abbot) is going with the daughter of Dean Halsey (Barbara Crampton), and is in medical school at the fabled "Miskatonic University." We see him struggling, trying to revive an obese woman that has died before Dr. Harrod, the character played by Caroline Purdy-Gordon, the director's wife, tells him "She's gone!" Dan is not a guy that accepts death readily.

Before that, though, we get a glimpse, in Switzerland, of Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) and his "work" at an institution there, which consists of trying to bring his professor Dr. Gruber (Al Berry) back from the dead, in an intensely gory scene with popping eyes and all the horror you can expect to unfold in the subsequent hour and twenty-six minutes. "You killed him!" accuses a nurse to West, who then replies, "No, I did not. I gave him life!" There is something almost loving in the way Combs delivers this line, cueing you into his mentality; he genuinely thinks of himself in messianic or semi-godlike terms.

Shades of Henry Frankenstein from...Frankenstein (1931).

Back in America, West pays the somewhat leery Dan to be his "roomie," after first thoroughly insulting the creepy, cadaverous Dr. Hill (David Gale). West is an arrogant little shite, but somewhat reminiscent of Dwight Frye with his weird, Renfieldesque laugh and small, neat stature. Hill hypnotizes Dean Halsey (Robert Sampson) to hate Dan because Hill now hates West, and Dan and Meg discover West has the body of Meg's cat Rufus in his fridge. It's only a short time later after West has tried to cool meg's jets by explaining that he found the cat dead, that he tries to reanimate the cat with disastrous results, injecting a hypo full of his glowing green "reanimation reagent" into the cat, which viciously attacks him, ala Pet Sematary (here also, when dead things are brought back to life, they are insane and hyper-violent).

Dan realizes that, whatever social charms or sanity West may lack, the man has discovered a way to bring the dead back to life. And, understandably, he's pretty impressed by this fact. The both of them sneak into the hospital morgue, where they try to reanimate a "fresh" cadaver (it's West's strange belief that the fresher the dead, the less likely they will be a hyperviolent maniac upon reanimation) and they bring back to life a hulking, muscle-bound dude, that drops a door on Dean Halsey. The duo bring Dean Halsey (who has previously threatened Dan with the suspension of his student loan for assisting West) back to life, and he becomes a mucous and blood-dripping zombie nightmare, quickly locked away in a padded cell.

Dr. Hill realizes that Halsey is, in point of fact, DEAD but seemingly UNdead, and confronts West, telling him he'd better play ball and allow Hill to steal his reanimating thunder. West promptly murders Hill by shovel blade decapitation, and then rather unwisely reanimates his head ("Whole parts. I've never done whole parts!"). Hill becomes a head carried around in a zip-up bag by his headless body, which utilizes a plaster medical bust in its place.

That's not the end, but it's getting close.

Re-Animator is a chest-bursting, mucus-oozing, blood-splattering, organ-stomping, decapitating 1980s-style good time, that even features a huge living, snake-like intestine. The performance of Jeffrey Combs as West is dead-on and virtually classic for this genre, coming across as a cool, emotionless, creepily-arrogant, death-obsessed little psychopath. The other performances are solid and adequate, and the gruesome, gory fun proceeds at a good clip.

Getting back to Lovecraft.

There is a movement afoot to expunge ("Cancel") everything and anything that doesn't meet our modern, politically-correct standards. This also applies, I suppose, to the works of H.P. Lovecraft, whose writings, at times, exhibit the racism and xenophobia of the author, and will be blasted by some as "immoral." Give me a break. The man died in 1937. These stories are all quite old and must be judged by different standards based on their HISTORICAL CONTEXT.

As Oscar Wilde put it, in the "Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray," "There is no such thing as an immoral book. Books are either well-written or badly written. That is all."

The Orwellian trend toward "goodthink" has brought a spate of book bannings from schools, libraries, and even those fanatic anti-capitalists at Amazon. I don't suppose Lovecraft is safe either, as I heard that some "Fantasy Award" or other is changing their trophy from a bust of Lovecraft to something less "politically sensitive." Yeah. A horror fiction writer that has been DEAD since 1937 is a reason for people to get upset.

I might remind you that Lovecraft's predecessor, Edgar Allan Poe, married his THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD COUSIN; an act that, in our modern era, would see him writing his great masterpieces behind prison bars for a long, long time. If we started 'cleansing" the literature based on the moral or ethical failings of the authors of said literature, we should have nothing to read or ponder at all.

And that my Dear and Loyal Readers, would be a fate worse than reanimation. It would be literal intellectual DEATH. And not even Herbert West could do anything to bring us back.