Re-Animator
H.P. Lovecraft’s Re-Animator is The Absent-Minded Professor of ultraviolent zombie movies. It is the story of Herbert West and his quest to reanimate cadavers, and although he’s pretty well unconcerned with the practicality of reanimating cadavers, this doesn’t stop him from reanimating almost an entire cast of characters – some that die accidently, and some the cadavers of the fools who cross him. Gore, betrayal and blackmail, necrophilous-zombie sex, and still more betrayal ensues, making Re-Animator one of the most uninhibited, and therefore enjoyable, zombie movies ever made. The movie opens at a University where a group of intent-looking men march down the halls. They stop at a door and plead for Herr West and Herr Gruber (who will turn out to be Hans Gruber) to open the door, and when the door isn’t opened, the police break the glass and find Herr West bent over Herr Gruber with a syringe that is almost empty of a green chemical. The chemical doesn’t react well with Dr. Gruber; blood pops out of his eyes like venom from a spitting cobra. The nurse accuses Herr West of killing him after a policeman pronounces Gruber dead, but West says that he gave him life. After the credits the movies starts at Miskakatonic University in Arkham Massachusetts. Inside is a hospital where a young med-student is attempting to resuscitate a fat woman. Despite his best efforts, the corpulent corpse will not respond and remains dead. The Doctor in charge of the scene is displeased when the med-student tries to revive the patient well past her sense of decorum and for punishment tells him to take the dead woman to the morgue. After he rolls the corpse into a large refrigerator, he sees another doctor burn a hole into a corpse’s forehead and dip a Q-tip into it. He’s startled by another doctor and West. The med-student tells the other doctor that he “didn’t know anyone was in here”, to which West retorts “you mean anyone else”. West, aside from being a murderer, is also a snoot. Introductions are made: the med-student is Dean Cain, the doctor is Dean Halsey, and the doctor who drilled into the corpse’s brain is Dr. Carl Hill. West immediately insults Dr. Hill – and their relationship will remain sour from here – by calling his work outdated plagiarism. In the next scene Cain puts an advertisement on a bulletin board for a roommate in his apartment. He only asks that they keep quiet and have “regular hours”. His girlfriend Megan comes around the corner, and when Cain kisses her she says “No.”, followed swiftly by many Yeses when the movie cuts to Cain’s bed. Cain wants her to stay for the night, but her father, Dean Halsey, will be upset if she doesn’t “come home tonight”. When she leaves Cain follows her, covered in a blanket and claiming “no jury in the world would convict me”. Enjoy Cain’s goofiness while he can still emotionally afford to be so. His girlfriend opens the door and West is behind it, who wants the apartment and nothing else. He takes a tour and is impressed with the basement, which is not a good sign and Megan notices this with a territoriality that makes me wonder how much of Cain she has laid claim to. West has a wad of cash, however, that is more persuasive to Cain than a girlfriend that he just spent a wad on. The next scene has Dr. Hill demonstrating to a class how to scalp a cadaver, which he compares to a large orange because Dr. Hill does not have much of an imagination although this will change when he thinks of Megan. He takes a bone-saw and not without a little relish detaches the skull in order to reveal the brain. He also takes this opportunity – a bad one – to give an impromptu but blessedly short lecture on his theory that the brain can only survive six-to-twelve minutes after death, which is according to West both plagiarized and out of date. West doesn’t like this and snaps his pencil in half, as if to say he will not be taking notes because they would be outdated. Dr. Hill launches into an inspired spiel on the afterlife that causes West to break another pencil with a fierce look. This leads to Dr. Hill and West exchanging insults that West brought on himself. He sought out Dr. Hill although he already knew, from his own admission to Cain, that Dr. Hill can teach him nothing because Dr. Hill is derivative of Dr. Gruber, whom West murdered and Dr. Hill can plagiarize no more. Later Dean Halsey and Dr. Hill’s celebrate his new laser over wine. Cain picks Megan up for a study date, which Dr. Hill tries to relocate the Dean’s. This is rejected because Cain and the daughter have no intentions of studying, and won’t have a good opportunity to do that anyway with West in the house. Dr. Hill ends this scene with a rather eerie toast – plagiarized from God-knows-where – staring intently at Megan while rhapsodizing over her beauty that the wine has perhaps doubled. Megan attempts to study until, irritated by Cain’s advances, she lets loose her doubts and misgivings about West. Although what West does is really none of her business at this point, it’s easy to understand her displaced anger at Dr. Hill. She notices that Rufus – Cain’s cat – is not to be seen or heard, so they search for him by making hissing sounds. The camera follows Megan around while Cain wanders off. Then Megan commits a serious breach of propriety and common sense and goes inside West’s room. She finds Rufus in West’s mini-fridge, obviously dead, which raises many questions as to how and why Rufus died that West, soon on the scene, will undoubtedly answer unasked in the most unpleasant way possible. Cain comes in the room after West, who is the angriest he’s yet been. Cain wants to know what happened to Rufus: West claims Rufus was dead when he found him, which is reasonable, but Megan claims he killed Rufus, which isn’t, because it seems absurd that West would kill Rufus and then hide him in a mini-fridge only to watch, until the proverbial cows come home, Cain and Megan search everywhere for him meowing and hissing like idiots. West claims that Rufus suffocated, which implies that either West watched Rufus die and did nothing to save him, or did an autopsy on Rufus that Cain might resent. Rufus, according to West, knocked over a trash can and got his head stuck in a jar, which could have suffocated Rufus but this raises the question of what was in the jar that Rufus might have ingested before deciding to put his head in it. Megan continues to accuse West of killing Rufus, and she is becoming a nuisance because she appears to be the only one upset enough to look for a guilty party in the Rufus death-investigation. Cain finds a bottle of green fluid in West’s refrigerator that he finds more interesting than the late Rufus, wants to know what it is, and then gets blackmailed by West, who will reveal Cain’s affair with Megan if Cain doesn’t shut up. Things were not, I gather, pleasant in the Cain abode before; they are certainly not pleasant now. West does not want anyone in his room, keeps dead cats he may have strangled in his mini-fridge, and will resort to blackmail over a strange green fluid. That night a shriek wakes Cain up, followed by other mysterious noises in the basement. Cain arms himself with a baseball bat and investigates. He breaks down the door to the basement, then tumbles down the stairs and finds West with a bad cat prop on his back he cannot get off. West eventually gets the cat off and grabs a crochet mallet. The cat flies at Cain, knocking him on his back and irritating him enough to slam the cat against the wall so hard that brain matter sticks to the wall before falling off on the floor. After an unspecified amount of time, which included scooping Rufus off the floor and putting him on the table, West explains that he has “conquered death” with his green serum, only it works violently on higher specimens. I wonder what lower specimens West experimented on – fleas, ticks, or roaches – and how he evaluated whether or not they were violent. Cain does not believe West and thinks that West drugged Rufus so he would appear dead, all so West can give himself miraculous airs when he reanimates Rufus for a purpose I’m not sure the cart of these accusations can find a horse to put before. West injects Rufus with his serum and Rufus comes back to life just as Megan comes into the basement. Because Megan is the only character so far to display any concern for Rufus – indeed he might never have been in the movie if she hadn’t noticed that he wasn’t – and despite however insincere that concern may be and whatever foul motives it might disguise, this scene should answer at least a few of the questions I have about her as a character. Does she really care about Rufus, as Rufus? Does she suspect West of killing Rufus, or does she secretly think that Rufus killed himself, who might have almost accidently suffocated himself many times before and simply picked the wrong babysitter’s watch to explore a mason jar? None of this is explained, however, because Cain leads Megan upstairs to console her, leaving a curious explanation – twice dead cat, Frankenstein roommate – up to my imagination. Cain, who faces the Hobson’s choice of siding with his girlfriend, who wants him to evict West, and West, who will blackmail Cain with that girlfriend if he does. He solves the situation by telling Halsey about West himself. Halsey does not believe Cain. Because Cain has already played his hand and crawfished on West, he might as well have brought Megan along with him for backup. Cain mentions that Megan saw some of this too, which naturally draws Halsey’s attention elsewhere. Halsey doesn’t like his daughter’s involvement in this and demands that Cain give him “a written apology for this entire affair”, which is ambiguous as to which precise affair, Cain’s or West’s, he is referring to. He goes on about the experiments, however, lamenting their effect on Cain’s schoolwork and threating criminal charges if any lab equipment was used. He rescinds Cain’s student loan, and then kicks West out of school altogether. Cain is in a very bad position. He can’t afford to go to school, may end up losing his girlfriend, and has to worry about a maniacal med-student with a corpse-reanimating serum he ratted out and virtually kicked out of school. In the next scene him strolls a cadaver into the morgue while the security guard plays Solitaire. The cadaver turns out the be West, who inspects the cadavers for a possible test subject. The presence of some of the cadavers in a morgue is strange: one died from a gunshot wound to the head and another from malpractice, which makes me think the hospital would have tighter security for corpses involved in potential homicides that Cain and West could have committed. West is intent on using his reagent for a brief, conscious reaction, right there in the morgue. Cain injects the reagent into a man of excellent health who died of heart failure. Why is Cain at the morgue with West? Has he told West anything that has happened to him? If he had, I don’t think West would be rooting around in the morgue for a fresh cadaver to experiment on. Meanwhile Halsey shows up with Megan to complete the setup for a delightful mess. Megan looks for Cain while Halsey demands to see Doctor Riley so he can tell Riley to fire Cain and ban him from the hospital. Meanwhile Cain and West wait for the reagent to work. The dose isn’t working, so West injects it again, but Cain wants to leave. Halsey should have at least told Cain he would be fired and banned. Eventually the cadaver rises from the gurney screaming and burping up some post-post-mortem purge from an apparent binge on whatever he was eating that gave him heart disease. He throws other cadavers around in a disoriented fit. Halsey enters the morgue at this time, and he hears the crashing from behind the door. The corpse is rough-housing with West and Cain when Halsey attempts to open the door. The corpse smashes the door down on Halsey and jumps on it with childish delight. Halsey isn’t dead yet, however, so the cadaver picks him up. Halsey sticks his fingers in its mouth – why, I will never know – which it promptly bites off and spits out, which I can understand. It then lifts Halsey up with both arms and throws him across the room and into the wall. When the cadaver picks Halsey up again, he is no longer screaming and has gone limp, so I suppose he is dead, but I would need a toe-tag to verify how. While Cain yells at it to stop, West produces a bone-saw and saws a hole through its chest as if he was a cookie-cutter shark. There is no way that the police could reconstruct this crime scene with any sense of professionalism. West immediately begins corrupting the crime scene by dragging Halsey over to the center of the room closer to Cain. He thinks the cadaver listened to him at some point amid the chaos, which Cain denies, saying the cadaver was basically an animal. West concludes that the cadaver wasn’t fresh enough. The semi-fresh cadaver, however, did not leave this mortal coil without leaving an even fresher one behind. West argues Cain into using the serum on Halsey. West gives Halsey less of a dose than the he gave the rampaging cadaver, yet was wise enough to restrain him as well. Halsey revives after West shouts “I’ll show you!”. Meanwhile Megan gets off an elevator and the camera backs a great distance away, a distance I hope she doesn’t traverse in an uneventful pursuit of it. The movie cuts back to West, however, who – despite the established distance – can hear Megan coming and damns her for a bitch. Her voice recalls Cain from a stupor, and he calls to her in return, and this recalls Halsey to a murderous recollection that he still hasn’t gotten that apology letter from Cain. Megan walks into the morgue, where Halsey is strangling both Cain and West, one with each hand. She screams at him, causing him to drop them and hop off the gurney. The security guard arrives, gun drawn and inquisitive. West is quick with explanations and half-truths. He claims that as he was visiting Cain Halsey entered and began ranting irrationally, which Megan contradicts by saying Halsey was “just angry”. Halsey would have been more than “just angry”, however, had he caught Cain and West reanimating corpses, which he certainly would have if the corpse they reanimated hadn’t killed him. West blames the murder of the reanimated cadaver on Halsey, which I must say is a rather brilliant ploy: reanimating a murder victim who was killed by a reanimated murderer, whom you reanimated, in order to blame the murder of the reanimated corpse, whom you also murdered, on the murder victim you reanimated. As the security guard calls the police, Cain hits the ground and has a spasm. West covers him with a blanket and tells him not to worry. Cut to Halsey in a straight-jacket and a padded cell, back in a rage. It is also a padded cell, mind you, that has an observation window just for Megan to watch and wonder if the instant-insane gene that apparently sprung on Halsey might one-day spring on her. Dr. Hill arrives and tells her it’s a one-way mirror, which he can only truly know if he has been in it. The megalomaniacal Dr. Hill wants Megan to sign a release so he can perform “exploratory surgery” on Halsey, and Megan asks if that is “absolutely necessary”. Megan signs the release, which can probably end no worse off than a lobotomized father, which is a better option than he is now and, probably, than he was before. After the release is signed, Hill moves in on Megan. He backs her into the glass that separates them from Halsey, which he promptly head-butts and then looks around confusedly for a culprit. Megan comes home to find Cain already there waiting for her. Cain, in an even dumber move than anything he has previously done, is going to explain to Megan what happened in the morgue. He stalls at first until Megan slaps him, which is sort of the equivalent to head-butting the dash of a car that won’t start. He tells her that Halsey is dead. Megan of course does not believe this, picking and choosing who is dead and who isn’t with the sovereignty of God. West is meanwhile keeping himself busy looking through a microscope when he is interrupted by Hill. Hill has come to blackmail West out of his reagent, threatening to have him locked up for murdering Halsey. West gives in and gives Hill his notebook. Cain and Megan break into Hill’s office, which turns out to be, bizarrely enough, where he’s keeping Halsey, but perhaps I am ignorant and perhaps it is normal for a doctor to keep a padlocked cell with a one-way mirror in his office. West gives Hill a demonstration of the reagent by putting it on a slide of Dead-Rufus tissue. This fascinates Hill long enough for West to slink away, grab a shovel, and while Hill stands up to give himself a soliloquy on his own future fame, cut than fame short by knocking him to the ground and then decapitating him with the shovel blade. Hill should have been more careful blackmailing a man with a reanimating reagent he can use to reanimate anyone he kills in any foul way he pleases. West puts Hill’s head on ice and then injects it because he has “never done whole parts” and now is the perfect time to try. There can be no advantage in owning a talking head that will only blackmail him, as were its original intentions. He also injects the torso. Finally, Hill revives after West taps him with a pencil – of all things. Hill lisps and calls West a bastard, then his torso sneaks up on West and knocks him out by slamming his head on the table. West is as unsuspicious as Hill, and the only reason Hill came out on top was because he lost to begin with. Meanwhile, Cain goes through Hill’s filing cabinet while Megan stares forlornly at her father huddled in the corner of his cell. She opens a closet and goes inside just as Cain finds a folder with old newspaper clippings about Megan being voted the “sweetheart” of some beauty competition, undoubtedly porn of some ungodly sort to the megalomaniacal Dr. Hill, which is made creepier by the fact that he filed it in alphabetical order. He also has a lock of her hair and some snapshots, which I don’t even want to think about how he came to possess. Meanwhile West wakes up. I suppose killing him would have been difficult to coordinate between Hill’s head in the ice pan and his torso. Hill is nowhere to be found, and because the refrigerator door is wide open it is safe to assume he took the reagent with him. Cain arrives to wrap all the plot points together so the movie can focus on a lone Megan, somewhere undoubtedly unsafe, and a reanimated, Megan-porn-stashing Dr. Hill on the loose with all the reagent in the world. West fills Cain in on the recent developments, while West reveals that he had some emergency-reagent upstairs. Cain starts to shakes West until West says that Hill wanted Cain to disappear, which Cain blindly accepts although he has been an active part in most of West’s fibbing until now. Cain however puts two unrelated things together and says that Hill lobotomized Halsey so he couldn’t talk, which is stupid because if Halsey could talk West would be in jail and all Hill would have to do is break into Cain’s apartment, who would be with West in jail, and steal all the reagent he wanted. Hill has by now managed to get to his office, where he injects himself with more reagent. This only opens his eyes wider and makes his breathing slightly louder, so I suppose West’s reagent has an unknown narcotic affect that might explain most of West’s behavior throughout the movie. The torso lifts his head and walks over to Halsey in the padded cell. Hill can somehow talk to Halsey through the glass, whom Hill can control because of the lobotomy. Cut to the security guard reading a porn magazine as Hill’s torso tries to get inside the morgue. The security guard is easily fooled, and since he’s had his fill of looking at porn, decides it’s break time, and I’m sure it is seeing as he takes the porn with him. Cain goes to Megan’s house to warn her about Dr. Hill. As Cain winds himself into an exposition as to why he’s there I begin to wonder if he even told her about the file. She should know about that. Megan tells Cain he should go away and transfer to another school, which sounds a lot like a break up that has come out of nowhere when it should have been coming from at least one of several places long before. The breakup seems as if it is about to become a reconciliation, which is however broken up by the one person who would desire the breakup most as the door is broken down by Halsey. He swiftly dispatches Cain by slamming him against the wall and leaving a blood splatter reminiscent of the one left by Rufus and the one that killed himself. Then he attacks Megan. Hill is also up to no good at the morgue, using his laser-drill on other cadavers before he reanimates them. Halsey knocks on the door and arrives with an unconscious Megan in his arms. Hill makes Halsey rip her clothes off after he plumps her on a gurney. He then has his torso buckle her down for perhaps the most famous scene in the movie: the decapitated-head-giving-head scene. Meanwhile West wakes up Cain and they go to the hospital. Megan wakes up from Hill’s caresses and screams. Hill tells Megan some things that have been on his mind for a while as Halsey jolts every now and then as if someone is trying to turn him over liked a stalled engine. West interrupts Hill and gives him a lecture about “trysting with a bubble-headed co-ed”, which, to be frank, is dead accurate. The security guard, by the way, is enjoying the favors of Miss July much longer than I have ever have. The showdown between West and Hill begins much like other showdowns. Hill claims that it is convenient for West to show up and West claims he has a pre-existing plan, which Hill claims that he also has, but is probably either plagiarized or outdated. Hill has reanimated all the cadavers in the morgue, somehow, seeing as West didn’t do that and purposely selected one from which he got very limited results. These are some rather mutilated bodies, but one captures Cain quickly. West attempts to inject Hill, but is thrown to the ground and subdued by the cadavers. It turns out that Hill’s lobotomy gives him control of the cadavers. Megan overpowers the lobotomized Halsey with memories or a faint recollection of love – take you pick – who saves West from being lobotomized as he takes on Hill’s torso while the other cadavers have the delirium tremens. They eventually get back to attacking Megan and Cain (that security guard is a fucking satyr when he comes to porn) until the security guard finally arrives as Halsey throws Hill’s torso out of the morgue. Halsey picks up Hill’s head and head-butts it, then squeezes it so hard the cadavers feel his pain. West sneaks up and injects Hill’s torso with two vials of his reagent, planning on an overdose that he called a theory but is really only his hazy recollection of Dr. Gruber’s head exploding from the beginning. Halsey crushes Hill’s head and splatters it for a fourth bloodstain on a wall. It is not a little funny that the security guard decides to flee after seeing it. West’s overdose theory has only resulted in Hill’s intestines coming alive and trying to strangle him, then his body cavity collapses while his intestines continue to wrap around West like an anaconda. A nude woman knocks over some chemicals, then tries to attack Cain and Megan again, is stopped by Halsey, who is in turn torn to pieces by the other cadavers. One of the more intrepid cadavers electrocutes himself with a fuse box. Cain and Meg flee, taking West’s notes with them as West is strangled by the intestines. They make it to the elevator, but a cadaver tries to get on and strangle Megan at the same time. Cain gets out of the elevator (the cadaver holds the door open for him nicely) and gets an axe for a fire alarm. He chops its arm off, which still continues to strangle Megan until Cain pulls it off. Cain tries to bring Megan back to life with conventional medical techniques, which don’t work because it’s been established that he’s not good at this. He fails again. He kisses her and cries a bit, and it occurs to me during this sentimental moment that no one asked him why he’s covered in blood. Did they assume that he might have killed Megan and then rapidly changed his mind? The movie ends with the shot fading to black; all, that is, but the glow-in-the-dark reagent, which Cain injects Megan with at the last moment. And then Megan screams. |