Re-Animator 4K 1985

Jack London said that life is a game from which no one ever emerges victorious. But Herbert West, an ambitious medical student who recently arrived in the US from Switzerland, is ready to argue with the classic author. He has an experimental drug in his hands that has the power to resurrect dead bodies. And Herbert is not afraid to use it, because there is plenty of material for his work in the university morgue. It doesn't matter that his new idealistic friend Dan is tormented by vague doubts, that the head of the department has turned into a mindless, blood-drooling idiot, and that the reanimated bodies most resemble aggressive zombies eager to tear their resurrector to pieces. After all, one can make sacrifices for the sake of science, right?

Nowadays, Stuart Gorodon's film would hardly be released. Full of an excessive amount of blood splattering in shocking quantities, naked human bodies disfigured by burns and other injuries, and a completely insane script involving not only strangulation with intestines and murder with a lobotomy tool, but even sex with a severed (!) head... What distributor who isn't crazy would dare to release something like this today?

Fortunately, Re-Animator was created in the glorious eighties, when Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, and Mike Myers ruled the roost, which meant that even with a devastating rating (or rather, lack thereof), the film had nothing to fear from failure. Of course, only if it was made with integrity. And there's no doubt about that here, with the young director Stuart Gordon, bursting with health and sparkling with ideas, at the helm, the cult figure of B-movies Brian Yuzna as producer, and the living legend of horror films Mac Alberg as cinematographer.

Together, these guys have created a film that leaves you unsure how to react: whether to be scared out of your wits or laugh your head off. The path from scary to funny, as Re-Animator showed, is as short as Herbert West's memory, with his striking consistency in stepping on the same rake and flooding the university premises with flesh-eating living corpses.

The almost brilliant acting, subtly conveying the nuances of the situations, erases the line between horror and laughter even faster. Whether it's Jeffrey Combs' pursed lips, perfectly conveying the character of the Reanimator, or Bruce Abbott's raised eyebrows as Dan, everything hits the mark, not to mention David Gale's enchanting head (“West... You, bastard...”) and Barbara Crampton's piercing screams.

Add to that the chic makeup of the time, the eerie atmosphere, and the infectious musical theme, and you get an absolute masterpiece of low-budget horror. Perhaps even Howard Lovecraft would not be offended by his story.