Re-Animator

Re-Animator (1985) takes place at a medical school. A student named Herbert West has developed a bright green serum that brings the dead back. He makes use of his flatmate's job in the morgue and carries on with his experiments. The trouble is that what comes back is not the same person. The source is H. P. Lovecraft's serial Herbert West: Reanimator from 1922. Lovecraft regarded it as among his weakest work; he had written it in instalments for money. Stuart Gordon directed. He came from theatre and this was his first film. He first thought of it as a television series before turning it into a feature. Jeffrey Combs plays West, and the cold, never surprised register of the character carries all the comedy. The part made him a permanent name in genre cinema. It was released unrated in America. Rather than cut it to avoid an X, the producers chose to go out without a certificate, a common route for low budget horror at the time. The effects are entirely practical. Its best known sequence, in which a severed head moves separately from its body, was done with prosthetics and puppets. Richard Band wrote the score, which openly resembles the theme from Psycho as a deliberate reference. It runs 86 minutes. Good for: horror comedy, eighties practical effects, and Lovecraft adaptations. Less good for: the violence is extremely graphic and disgusting. One scene contains a sexual assault framed as comedy and is indefensible now. There is no scientific explanation and the film is not looking for logic.