• Directed by Stuart Gordon
• Written by Dennis Paoli, William J. Norris and Stuart Gordon, based on the story “Herbert West: Reanimator” by H.P. Lovecraft
• Starring
  • Jeffrey Combs
  • Bruce Abbott
  • Barbara Crampton
  • David Gale
  • Robert Sampson
• Produced by Brian Yuzna
• Executive produced by Michael Avery and Bruce William Curtis (and Charles Band, uncredited)

Over the last two decades, director Stuart Gordon (with frequent collaborator, writer Dennis Paoli) has proven most consistently able to bring the stories of H.P. Lovecraft to the movie screen. But Re-Animator, his first such adaptation, would have proved an especial challenge, as it’s based on one of Lovecraft’s lesser works, the serialized “Herbert West: Reanimator,” which Lovecraft himself regarded as an inferior piece of work-for-hire garbage. It was a stroke of genius, though, for by working with a Lovecraft story that no one liked anyway, Gordon, Paoli, and producer Brian Yuzna were free to throw away everything except the character names and the basic concept, and craft a movie which went far more into black comedy than Lovecraft ever dared. (Not that movie producers usually feel fettered by any obligation to the original source work, but in this case it was justified.)

As rendered here, Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs in his first starring role) is a medical student, recently transferred to Miskatonic Medical School in Arkham, Massachusetts, because his tutorship under noted brain surgeon Dr. Gruber in Zurich had ended… badly. He makes some very definite first impressions with all the people he meets at Miskatonic, including Dean Halsety (Robert Sampson), fellow student Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott), and the school’s resident surgical superstar, the sepulchral Dr. Hill (David Gale). In fact, West goes further than simply “making an impression” with Dr. Hill, going out of his way to call Hill’s work “derivative” and “outdated.” This to a man whose course he has to pass, mind.

Dude, we don’t need to SEE your cue cards…

Dan’s more of a conventional medical student, intelligent and with his heart in the right place. Unfortunately, other organs, not so much. While he’s got a good relationship with Dean Halsey, he kinda has to keep it quiet that he’s also “playing doctor” with the dean’s daughter Megan (Barbara Crampton). And everyone’s life gets more complicated when Dan has to advertise for a roomie to share his small rental house, and Herbert West shows up, eager for any digs with a private basement. See what kind of trouble could have been avoided if Dan had been in a one-bedroom apartment?

Megan doesn’t care for West, and neither does Dan’s cat Rufus. But Rufus’ objections aren’t going to be an issue for long; the cat soon disappears, and Megan discovers his body in West’s private refrigerator. There’s no way to tell whether West’s claim that the cat suffocated itself in a jar in the garbage is true, but it soon becomes moot, as the cat doesn’t stay dead for long. That night, Dan is awakened by a ghastly caterwauling from the locked basement, and when he forces his way in, he finds West locked in bloody combat with something that looks a lot like Rufus, but alive.

“Dinner… is served. Just kidding! …Actually, I’m not.”

Only by killing the cat again and then resuscitating it for a third time with his glowing green serum does West convince Dan of what he’s done: He’s found a way to restart the biological processes of life. Naturally, small-minded old-timers like Dr. Hill will try to block West’s necessary research, but Dan’s got an “in” with Dean Halsey, and if perhaps he can arrange a demonstration of what West’s reagent can do on small animals, perhaps they could gain some backing and facilities for larger tests…

Unfortunately, Dr. Hill has been poisoning Dean Halsey’s mind against both Herbert West and Dan Cain — West because of his obvious insubordination, and Dan because Hill’s got a hankering for Megan himself. So Dan’s attempt to arrange a demonstration with Halsey results instead with his student loan being cancelled and his hospital access priveleges cut. In desperation, West and Dan arrange a demonstration of their own, something big enough that it can’t be ignored — something fresh from the hospital morgue…

“No, I think the idea of having separate fridges is a GOOD idea.”

Unfortunately, when Dean Halsey storms into the morgue, he finds himself on the bad side of a cadaver which has just been revived with an overdose of West’s reagent. Very soon, West finds himself with an even fresher corpse to experiment upon, ignoring for the moment that a man who died by having his skull pulped against the tiled morgue walls probably isn’t the best candidate to demonstrate the utility of West’s live-giving serum. As far as anyone else can tell, Halsey is alive but utterly insane and uncommunicative, and is placed in the care of Dr. Hill, who finds some very unusual findings during his examination of the former Dean Halsey.

Which leads, essentially, to the image we all know from this movie. When Hill confronts West in his basement lab about his research and tries to blackmail West into handing over his secrets, West responds by severing Hill’s head from his shoulders with a shovel. Then, because West can never ignore an interesting experimental subject, he injects both the head and the body with his reagent. The good news is that Dr. Hill, having died without head trauma, displays conscious thought and retention of personality. The bad news is that Hill can also somehow control his severed body, and it doesn’t take too long before a deranged killer who holds his head in his hands (or carries it in a duffel bag) is stalking the corridors of Miskatonic. Its corridors, and its former dean’s nubile daughter.

To clarify: Brains belong in jars, but whole heads can go in pans.

The cut of this movie released on the unrated DVD is touted as being the preferred, original cut approved by producer Brian Yuzna, and shown in its brief original theatrical release; unfortunately, for its subsequent videocassette release, much of the gore had to be excised to gain an R-rating, and thus the cut most commonly available for a decade instead had several quieter character scenes to fill out the running time. Having seen both versions, I have to say: un my mind, the R-rated cut is actually a better movie. Several of its exclusive scenes give valuable motivation to characters’ later actions, and plenty of setup for later payoffs which, in the unrated cut, come out of the blue. Of special note is the scene, missing in the unrated cut, which establishes that the sepulchral Dr. Hill possesses some kind of uncanny hypnotic power (which the same actor would exhibit again in The Brain (1987)). It’s because of this that he can so easily turn Dean Halsey against his prize pupil Dan, a character flipflop that instead seems entirely unmotivated; this ability of Hill’s also explains how he almost gets the drop on West in his own laboratory, and possibly why Hill’s head can control his own detached body, as well as a dozen cadavers that he resuscitates later.

Other missing scenes flesh out Dan’s financial situation and his relationship to Megan, whose absence lessens the impact of his confrontation with the inexplicably-hostile Dean Halsey. And further scenes absent in the unrated cut show why West and Dan decide to experiment on a human cadaver, and how Dan realizes that the decapitated and revived Hill will go after Megan instead of the two of them. All of these scenes are included as extras on the unrated DVD, but they really belong in the main narrative of the movie. Even the unrated cut as it presently stands comes in well under 90 minutes; Yuzna’s contention that adding back those scenes would slow the pacing too far really isn’t supportable, as an additional ten or twelve minutes would flesh out the story while still leaving it with a spare running time.

Say what you will about zombies, but they just love to be backlit.

My advice, then, is to see the movie, or show it to others, first in the R-rated cut (if you can find it on VHS); while the gore is severely toned down, the story doesn’t get short shrift. Then, if you feel that the dimensions of the tale told aren’t extreme enough for you, go for the unrated version with the better version of the narrative already in mind. Until someone comes out with an “ultimate” edition which harmonizes the two cuts, you’ll pretty much have to assemble such a combined cut in your memory to get the best of both versions.

Some Notable Totables:

(all from the unrated cut)

• body count: 4, plus 1 cat
• breasts: 8, only 2 of which are on a live woman
• male sausages: 2
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• springloaded cats: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 3
  • Jeffrey Combs is a regular in the Star Trek universe, with three recurring roles on DS9 (”Tiron,” “Brunt,” and “Weyoun”), a spot as “Penk” in the Voyager episode “Tsunkatse,” and the recurring role of “Commander Shran” on Enterprise
  • Robert Sampson (Dean Halsey) played “Sar 6″ in the classic episode “A Taste of Armageddon”
  • Ian Patrick Williams (the Swiss professor) played “Doc Fitzgerald” in the Voyager episode “Spirit Folk”