Medical student Herbert West returns from Switzerland after having worked together with a well known scientist who died under mysterious circumstances. West enrolls at Miskatonic University to continue his research where he also meet Dan Cain who becomes his roomate, and who he later involves in his experiments. West uses Dan to get him access to the morgue where he can experiement on the dead, trying to re-animate them. But bringing the dead back to life has its price, something that both West and Dan soon will be aware of.
Nothing beats an old good horror movie, and Re-Animator is one of those classic horror films that can be watched over and over again. Watching re-Animator is way better than sex or drugs, but it might as well be a good idea to combine the three. I'll have to try that some day. Together with the Evil Dead trilogy and the Return of the Living Dead trilogy, I consider the Re-Animator trilogy to be among the best horror flicks that are to be found out there. I know that some people will disagree with me, but everyone has different kind of taste so no need to send emails about that, thanks. One of the reasons why this movie's so great, is for the fact that it mixes dark humour and excessive amounts of gore in a really good way.
A young man named Herbert West returns from Switzerland and enrolls at the Miskatonic University to study there, even though he seems to know more than the actual professors who works there. What West is interested in is how to bring the dead back to life again, and he's struggling to make that happen. Once at the university, West immediately has different opinions with Dr. Carl Hill on the subject of the brain and what happens when a person dies. And the two of them soon becomes great enemies to each other.
Dan Cain who's also a student at the university is looking for a roommate, and soon West shows up at his doorstep and wants to move in as fast as possible. Dan's girlfriend Megan who's the daughter of the Dean at the school, immediately becomes suspicious of West, but Dan ignores her warnings and lets West move in. Soon after, West starts to set up a lab in the basement and Megan's cat goes missing and is later found in West's fridge which only makes both her and Dan more suspicious of West's real intentions. It doesn't take long before West drags Dan down with him conducting his re-animation experiments, and people start dying and things go chaotic.
Even though Re-Animator features a few scenes that might seem to be somewhat disturbing and that has a lot of violence, it's always made with such amount of dark humour it's hard to take things too seriously. And that's what they have really succeeded in doing here, combining real horror with a big dose of humour. There's a fine line between what's enough and what's too much, and they've really done well in not crossing that line either. When talking about gore, it's over-the-top, but if it wouldn't have been like that, this movie wouldn't have turned out to be half a good as the actual gore is a huge part of the overall experience.
When it comes to acting Jeffrey Combs truly stand out as the mad scientist, and might as well be the very best mad scientist in movie history. Bruce Abbott is great as his assistant who gets involved in all the crazy stuff West is doing, and we get to see him as West's assistant in the sequel Bride of Re-Animator as well. The score is brilliant and fits the movie perfectly. Actually, the whole movie is quite brilliant.
Re-Animator is a fantastic horror comedy that spawned 2 great sequels. It has a lot of great humour and a massive amount of gore. It's super entertaining and takes an unexpected turn halfway through the film which is a really cool and different thing as well. When it comes to Re-Animator, I have absolutely nothing negative to say. A true horror classic
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ALTERNATIVE TITLE:
MOVIE YEAR: 1985
DIRECTOR: Stuart Gordon
WRITING CREDITS: H.P. Lovecraft, Dennis Paoli
GENRE: Horror, Comedy, Sci-Fi
CAST: Jeffrey Combs, Bruce Abbott, Barbara Crampton
COUNTRY: USA
RUNTIME: 86 min
RATING: 10/10
Re-Animator Website/IMDB Click here
Re-Animator Trailer Click here
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