A dedicated student at a medical college and his girlfriend become involved in bizarre experiments centering around the re-animation of dead tissue when an odd new student arrives on campus.
Well here is the start of my “Re-Animator ” franchise review, I’m excited about delving into this one as it’s a favourite of mine and I often feel it’s sequels get overlooked.
The film is very loosely adapted from H.P. Lovecraft’s “Herbert West – Re-Animator”. Stuart Gordon and Dennis Paoli originally intended to be faithful to H.P. Lovecraft’s story, but ultimately the film has little in common with the story, which was intended to be a parody of “Frankenstein”.
I don’t know about you but the first time I watched this film I was very confused, I’m talking about the opening sequence. The opening theme borrows heavily from Bernard Herrmann’s opening theme for Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho”, I’d never heard of a film using the same theme and I can’t remember any other film doing so since but it worked and set a great atmosphere for the film.
Originally director Stuart Gordon wanted to shoot the movie in black and white on 16mm film to give the film a gritty quality, I would have love to have seen that as the film does have a “Night Of The Living Dead” feel to it and I personally think it would have ranked up the creep factor. Ultimately though as we know the film is in colour but just try and imagine what that 16mm black and white version would have been like.
The film sports a fantastic cast with the likes of 80’s Horror star Barbara Crampton, Bruce Abbott, David Gale and the star of the film Jeffrey Combs. Not to take away anything from the other actors but Jeffrey Combs is just simply amazing, he puts in the type of performance we’ve become accustomed to from him now but this was very early in his career so we get to see where it all started.
“Re-Animator” is a great mixture of Horror, Sci-Fi and Comedy, if you haven’t had the pleasure of viewing this yet then put it up high on your priority list as you’re truly missing out.
Miscellaneous facts about the film:
The first man who is re-animated at the morgue is Arnold Schwarzenegger’s body double.
The special effects department went through 25 gallons of fake blood during the shoot.
The “brains” in the severed head were made up of steer meat by-products, ground beef and fake blood and when they shot the scene in the autopsy room with the severed head being thrown out the door and then smashing onto the hallway wall, the crew were all behind the cameras with garbage bags over their clothes because no one knew just how much the brains would splatter.
A poster for the Talking Heads documentary Stop Making Sense is visible above Dan’s bed.
The bald, bearded doctor at the foot of Megan’s bed who gets shoved away as Dan tries to revive her is underground cartoonist Kim Deitch (“The Boulevard of Broken Dreams”), son of legendary Jazz-era cartoonist Gene Deitch (“The Cat”).
David Gale was made to shave his head and wear a toupee, as this was found to be in keeping with Dr. Hill’s character. In the DVD commentary, it was revealed that this was also necessary for budgetary reasons, as there was no money available to match Gale’s hair on a prosthetic head prop.
Richard Band went over schedule by two days while composing the score in Rome, Italy. As a direct result of this, Band had to invest $1,500 dollars of his own money in order to finish the score.
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