Green, Glowing, and Alive

Happy Halloween, everyone. Though, of course, I already had my Halloween yesterday here in Japan. What good luck it fell on a weekend this year. I spent the day watching horror movies and television, watching some things I hadn't seen before and revisiting some others. Nearly all of my DVDs and blu-rays are back in the U.S. but two DVDs and two blu-rays, randomly stashed in boxes of books, found their way here to me in Japan. One of the DVDs was my big, two disk special edition of 1985's Re-Animator, still complete with the syringe highlighter pen.

From this you might be led to assume I'm a massive fan of the film. Actually, I came upon the box set at Cosco fourteen years ago for around ten dollars and just thought it was a nice little deal. I do like the movie.

Based very loosely on H.P. Lovecraft's Herbert West--Reanimator, the film takes the great author's Frankenstein pastiche and makes it into something Pauline Kael compared to Luis Bunuel. I might argue it's closer to William S. Burroughs than Bunuel or Lovecraft except the libido infusing the grotesque action has a more youthful blush than Burroughs'.

Certainly all that sex wasn't in Lovecraft. Lovecraft's story doesn't even have the alien horror sexuality that bubbles up in many of his more famous works. Stuart Gordon's film, meanwhile, climaxes in a free-for-all of naked, mutilated, re-animated corpses, one of whom was a headless megalomaniac.

Gordon frames Herbert West like a hero, giving him some charged close-ups with key lines punctuated by beats on the score early in the film. But he's an anit-hero WHICH DOES NOT MEAN HE'S A ROUGH AROUND THE EDGES "DARK" HERO. It irritates me how many people misuse the word "anti-hero" now. Herbert West is an anti-hero because he's positioned like a hero in the plot but he's a straight up murderer out for his own interests.

The film's version is much further gone than Lovecraft's is for most of the story. Film West is already murdering people and cats as part of his effort to find a way to make people immortal. It's pretty credible, if you think of it; how many political hard-liners promise salvation for humanity at the other end of massacres, massacres that somehow never seem to be final?

There's not really a moral centre to the film. Dan is presented that way, sort of, but Bruce Abbott's performance is so weak he renders the character practically invisible.

Jeffrey Combs as Herbert West, meanwhile, knocks it out of the park with every breath. It's stunning how good he is in this. Choices for his line deliveries are so weird yet credible. He never projects a corny duplicity when he tells an obvious lie. When he tells Dan he found his cat dead, there's no projected wink for the audience. He's really trying to lie. Just as credible is the passion he can't subdue when talking about his work. Here is a man with a single focus dominating everything. He's the only one not in love with Megan.

Barbara Crampton's performance isn't much better than Bruce Abbott's but you have to admire how game she was for the nudity and violence. We need more Barbara Cramptons in the movie industry.

David Gale, as the film's worse to West's bad, is an unsung asset to this film. That leer from his decapitated head when Megan's naked on the table next to him is worthy of Lon Chaney.